What do you think of the Gaia hypothesis?

Question

Drugged out madmen on a quest for knowledge or sound scientific theory?

I know all about the biosphere and how we all interact but does that make gaia the culmination of all living things and thus one giant living thing?

Answer 1

The Gaia hypothesis formulated James Lovelock was valid scientific speculation that explains much of the interaction between the biosphere and the atmosphere. It is well supported by observations but has not been validated in detail.

The New Age idiots stole the name for their mysticism. Few people, including scientists, bother to separate the New Age nonsense from the valid science. This taints the entire hypothesis.

Answer 2

It does no harm to promote Gaia. And maybe some good, if it gets us off our anthropomorphic egocentrism. i.e. it's OUR world to do with as we please, regardless of the consequences.  

Answer 3

I think the Gaia people often presume that more feedback processes exist in nature than is really the case. On the other hand, consider that our ideas of separateness and individuality is an illusion caused by our habit of giving to the present moment a privileged status. In fact, our world-lines, the four-space volumes we create in spacetime, are connected to those of our parents, and it is clear that we are buds on a racial tree. Our race, in turn, is branched off from a bigger branch, which came from a still bigger one, and all the life on Earth grew up from a single instance of biogenesis in Earth's oceans. Every bit of that life is connected in spacetime. And, moreover, you can look at interspecies competition as sort of a self-maintenance process, which might make the Gaians justified at least to the point of considering the biosphere of Earth to be a single 4-space organism.

Answer 4

Environmental mumbo jumbo with a touch of truth about it, but for the most part the Gaia Theory is mostly new age Pseudoscience.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_theory...

Answer 5

Earth as an organism. It is an interesting discussion, but beyond my expertise.

Answer 6

It's not a hypothesis, it's a paradigm.

As such it proves useful, like Occam's razor, it can't be taken as

truth, just an indication of which direction to look.