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Scientists Debate Gaia: The Next Century

Stephen H. Schneider, James R. Miller, Eileen Crist, and Penelope J. Boston

Abstract

This is a multidisciplinary reexamination of the Gaia hypothesis, which was introduced by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis in the early 1970s. The Gaia hypothesis holds that Earth’s physical and biological processes are linked to form a complex, self-regulating system, and that life has affected this system over time. Until a few decades ago, most of the earth sciences viewed the planet through disciplinary lenses: biology, chemistry, geology, atmospheric, and ocean studies. The Gaia hypothesis, on the other hand, takes a very broad interdisciplinary approach. Its most controversial aspect sug ... More

Keywords: Gaia hypothesis, James Lovelock, Lynn Margulis, biological processes, self-regulating system, chemical environment, conditions for life, New Age philosophy, interdisciplinary scientific theory, Earth System Science

Bibliographic Information

Print publication date: 2004 Print ISBN-13: 9780262194983
Published to MIT Press Scholarship Online: August 2013 DOI:10.7551/mitpress/9780262194983.001.0001

Authors

Affiliations are at time of print publication.

Stephen H. Schneider, editor

James R. Miller, editor

Eileen Crist, editor

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Contents

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Front Matter

Title Pages

Foreword

Preface

Reflections on Gaia

James Lovelock

Gaia by Any Other Name

Lynn Margulis

I Principles and Processes

1 Clarifying Gaia

Timothy M. Lenton

2 Gaia Is Life in a Wasteworld of By-products

Tyler Volk

3 Models and Geophysiological Hypotheses

Arthur C. Petersen

4 Gaia

Eric D. Schneider

5 Gaia, Extended Organisms, and Emergent Homeostasis

J. Scott Turner

6 Homeostatic Gaia

David M. Wilkinson

II Earth History And Cycles

7 Phosphorus, a Servant Faithful to Gaia? Biosphere Remediation Rather Than Regulation

Karl B. Föllmi, Federica Tamburini, Rachel Hosein, Bas van de Schootbrugge, Kaspar Arn, and Claire Rambeau

8 Self-Regulation of Ocean Composition by the Biosphere

Lee R. Kump

9 A New Biogeochemical Earth System Model for the Phanerozoic Eon

Noam M. Bergman, Timothy Lenton, and Andrew J. Watson

10 Gaia and Glaciation

Mark A. S. McMenamin

11 Does Life Drive Disequilibrium in the Biosphere?

David W. Schwartzman, and Tyler Volk

12 Biotic Plunder

Toby Tyrrell

III Philosophy, History, and Human Dimensions of Gaia

13 Gaia: The Living Earth—2,500 Years of Precedents in atural Science and Philosophy

Bruce Scofield

14 Concerned with Trifles? A Geophysiological Reading of Charles Darwin’s Last Book

Eileen Crist

15 Gradient Reduction Theory: Thermodynamics and the Purpose of Life

Dorion Sagan, and Jessica Hope Whiteside

16 Gaia and Complexity

Lee F. Klinger

17 Gaia and Observer Self-selection

Andrew J. Watson

18 Taming Gaia: The History of the Dutch Lowlands as an Analogy to Global Change

Peter Westbroek

19 Gaia and the Human Species

Crispin Tickell

IV Quantifying Data

20 Daisyworld Homeostasis and the Earth System

S. L. Weber, and J. M. Robinson

21 Salvaging the Daisyworld Parable under the Dynamic Area Fraction Framework

K. M. Nordstrom, V. K. Gupta, and T. N. Chase

22 Food Web Complexity Enhances Ecological and Gaian Ecosystem Model

Stephan P. Harding

23 Gaia in the Machine

Keith L. Downing

24 On Causality and Ice Age Deglaciations

Alexandre Casanovas, and Vicent Gómez

25 Amazonian Biogeography as a Test for Gaia

Axel Kleidon

26 Modeling Feedbacks Between Water and Vegetation in the North African Climate System

James R. Miller, and Gary L. Russell

V Life Forms and Gaia: Microbes to Extraterrestrials

27 Extraterrestrial Gaias

Siegfried Franck, Werner von Bloh, Christine Bounama, and Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber

28 The Tinto River, an Extreme Gaian Environment

Felipe Gómez, David Fernández-Remolar, Elena González-Toril, and Ricardo Amils

29 Climate and the Amazon—a Gaian System?

Peter Bunyard

30 On the Co-evolution of Life and Its Environment

S. A. L. M. Kooijman

31 Stability and Instability in Ecological Systems: Gaia Theory and Evolutionary Biology

Francesco Santini, and Lodovico Galleni

End Matter

[UNTITLED]

Appendix Studying Gaia: The NASA Planetary Biology Internship (PBI) Program

References

Contributors

Index