Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
The evidence for Gaia did not convince the Doolittles of this world—as we noted earlier,
they wanted to be shown how natural selection acting on locally selfish individuals
could give rise to self-regulation at the planetary level. Lovelock knew that he had to
produce a mathematical model of a biosphere tightly coupled through feedback to its
non-living environment that would demonstrate the spontaneous emergence of self-reg-
ulation. This presented a considerable scientific challenge. It would clearly be impos-
sible to model the interactions of up to 30 million species on our planet amongst them-
selves and with the rocks, atmosphere and oceans—the complexity was simply too vast
to contemplate. Lovelock knew that he had to reduce Gaia to a basic template that could
represent feedbacks in the real world without being so simple that it lost all connection
with reality. He pondered this conundrum for about a year, without making any progress.
Perhaps, he thought, the critics were right after all; perhaps the existence of Gaia could
never be convincingly demonstrated with scientific rigour. Perhaps Gaia was destined to
remain forever in the realms of poetry and philosophy. If so, the idea of a living Earth
might never have filled the need that our science-driven culture has created for an in-
tegration with nature which satisfies our reason, as much as our intuition, sensing and
feeling. As Lovelock cogitated, there may have been more at stake than the survival of
an abstruse and remote scientific concept of interest only to experts in their ivory towers.
Perhaps it is not too melodramatic to propose that, as Lovelock grappled with this prob-
lem, the future of our own culture, and of Gaia as we know her, hung in the balance.
Feedback
One of the key concepts for developing a rational understanding of Gaia is the notion of
feedback, which was formally developed as the science of cybernetics by Norbert Wein-
er and others in the 1940s and 50s, but which in fact goes back much further back to
inventions such as James Watt's steam governor, the regulators used to control the speed
of windmills and the float valves used to regulate the speed of Greek and Roman water
clocks. The very word 'feedback' is redolent of the notion that nature is nothing more
than a deterministic set of complex interacting parts, so I prefer to breathe a sense of
animism into the notion by thinking of feedback loops as
circles of participation
—as
manifestations of the ways in which the deep, awesome sentience of nature organises
itself into meaningful relationships that bring either constancy or change. But to aban-
don the terminology of cybernetics in favour of more participatory language could be
difficult for readers steeped in the language of science. Thus, I continue to use the term
'feedback loops', but will ask you to remember that they are merely reason's way of de-
picting the mysterious, animate
tai chi
of life, the incessant dance of existence.
