Commentary

GAIA AND EMERGENCE

A Response to Kirchner and Volk

JAMES E. LOVELOCK
Coombe Mill, St. Giles on the Heath, Launceston, PL15 9RY, U.K.

Richard Feynman, arguably the greatest physicist of the last half-century said:
Anyone who claims to understand quantum theory probably does not. The same,
although for different reasons, is true of Earth System Science, or Gaia theory,
as I prefer to call it. Quantum theory is incomprehensible because the universe
itself is far stranger than the human mind can contemplate. Earth System Science
is difficult to understand because we are not used to thinking about the Earth as a
whole system. We often forget that almost all of the science of the 19th and 20th
centuries was reductionist. The triumphs of evolutionary biology and of molecular
biology revealed the nature of our genes. Those of physics let us see almost to the
edge of the universe and know the intricate details of the inner parts of atoms. All
this has come from reduction, the patient professional dissection of nature into its
component parts. System science, or holistic science as it is sometimes called, did
have its successes in physiology and led to the understanding of the way our minds
and bodies work. But these achievements were dwarfed by the great success of
reductionism until science grew almost unaware that there was anything else. The
Nobel Laureate biologist, Jacques Monod, even called system scientists stupid. We
had become so used to thinking in terms of cause and effect that we no longer
seemed to realize that the whole could be more than the sum of its parts.
The most recent example of the misunderstanding of systems science was the
Amsterdam Declaration. It was issued by a large conference on global change, held
last summer in the Netherlands. The declaration had as its first bullet point: The
Earth System behaves as a single, self-regulating system comprised of physical,
chemical, biological and human components.
My friends sent copies of this declaration to me saying: At last it seems that
Gaia theory is accepted. It is true that the declaration represents a considerable advance in the conventional wisdom of Earth and Life science, and it would be good
to think that these two sciences had merged to form a single evolutionary science
of the Earth. But if you look more closely at the declaration you will see that it
fails to say what the Earth System regulates or at what level. Gaia theory clearly
states that the Earth self regulates its climate and chemistry so as to keep itself
Climatic Change 57: 13, 2003.
2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

COMMENTARY

habitable and it is this that is the sticking point for many, if not most, scientists.
Such a conclusion could never have come from reductionist thinking, and that is
why the arguments with biologists and others over Gaia have been so acrimonious
for so long. The fact that reductionist science cannot offer a rational explanation
of quantum phenomena like entanglement, nor of whole systems phenomena such
as emergence, does not mean that these phenomena do not exist. Their existence
confirms the limitations of the Cartesian view of the universe.
It is worth looking back to the 1970s and before and recalling how separated
and reductionist were the Earth and Life sciences. The geologists, Frank Press and
Raymond Siever, wrote in 1974:
Life depends on the environments in which it evolved and to which it has
adapted.
And the evolutionary biologist, John Maynard Smith, said in his book, The Theory
of Evolution:
The study of evolution is concerned with how, during the long history of life
on this planet, different animals and plants have become adapted to different
conditions, and to different ways of life in those conditions.
These eminent representatives of the Earth and Life sciences secure in their disciplines ignored the fact that organisms massively alter their environment as well as
adapting to it, and they did not see the evolution of the organisms and the evolution
of their environment as a single coupled process. True enough, the biogeochemists
Redfield, Vernadsky and Hutchinson had become aware that something was wrong
with the conventional wisdom and had already shown that organisms were more
than mere passengers on the planet. Geochemists were aware that organisms in
the soil accelerated rock weathering and even that weathering was faster in hot
climates, but no one, apart from a few early followers of Gaia theory, thought that
these observations were consistent with the idea of a global system able to regulate
climate and chemistry so as to keep the Earth habitable.
In spite of being incomplete, the Amsterdam Declaration is important because
it spells out what many scientists now think that Earth System science is about.
They see it as a way to bring Earth and Life sciences up to date. The declaration is
worthy but it does not go far enough. It allows geology and biology to continue as
separated reductionist sciences whilst merely acknowledging that they are part of
something larger called Earth System Science. I have sympathy for the professional
scientists who have spent their lives in painstaking research into the intricate details
of Earth or Life science. And I know that it is unrealistic to expect them to welcome
a theory like Gaia, which not only asks them to join together as if married but also
take a vow to believe in the phenomena of emergence. What may be more practical
is to ask them to follow the lead set by climatologists. It is in this field that Gaia
theory has flourished and been of greatest practical use. Perhaps climatologists are
more open-minded because they are at the sharp end of public affairs and bear the
greatest responsibility in their predictions of global change.

COMMENTARY

It may take time to establish a whole Earth System Science but I do think that
evolutionary biologists should cease modeling the evolution of the species as if
their material environment was just something to be adapted to. And I do think
that Earth scientists should stop including living organisms in their models as if
they were another compartment like the sediments or the ocean. Emergence is a
difficult concept to grasp as Kirchners and Volks criticisms reveal, and I would
say to them, leave your Cartesian scruples aside for a moment. Consider, you do
not need to know the details of a friends biochemistry to know them as a person
and in a similar way you can envisage Gaia without knowing the recondite details of its geochemistry. We humans have the ability to recognize whole systems
instinctively, and this ability makes the Earth understandable outside science and
it can make Earth System science more comprehensible to scientists. No one has
put this better than Mary Midgley, the philosopher, did in her book, Science and
Poetry.

References
The Amsterdam Declaration on Global Change: 2001, http://www.sciconf.igbp.kva.se/fr.html. Issued at Challenges of a Changing Earth: Global Change Open Science Conference, a joint
meeting of: the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), the International Human
Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP), the World Climate Research
Programme (WRCP) and the international biodiversity programme (DIVERSITAS), Amsterdam,
The Netherlands, 1013 July 2001.
Hutchinson, G. E.: 1954, Biochemistry of the Terrestrial Atmosphere, in Kuiper (ed.), The Solar
System (Chapter 8), University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Kirchner, J. W.: 2002, The Gaia Hypothesis: Fact, Theory, and Wishful Thinking, Clim. Change
52, 391408.
Maynard Smith, J.: 1958, The Theory of Evolution, Penguin Books, London.
Midgley, M.: 2000, Science and Poetry, Routledge, London.
Press, F. and Siever, R.: 1974, Earth, W. H. Freeman, San Francisco.
Redfield, A. C.: 1958, The Biological Control of Chemical Factors in the Environment, Amer.
Scientist 46, 205221.
Vernadsky, V. I.: 1945, The Biosphere and the Noosphere, Amer. Scientist 33, 112.
Volk, T.: 2002, Toward a Future for Gaia Theory, Clim. Change 52, 423430.
(Received 15 May 2002; in revised form 28 June 2002)

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