James Lovelocks Gaia Theory, you must watch this.

[Doggle Avaddit]

BBC iPlayer - Beautiful Minds: James Lovelock




Fascinating program on James Lovelock - Scientist and great thinker.

Here's couple of my favourite quotes from the broadcast:

Lovelock: You see nearly all scientists these days are slaves. They are not free men or women, they have to work in institutes or Universities or government places or industry and they have to work on a specific problem. Very few of them are free to think outside the box, so to speak.
So you come along with a theory like Gaia and its so far beyond their normal experience, they are not going to be able to react to it.



John Gray: The key lesson of Lovelock's life as a scientist is that he doesn't think in terms of any pre existing concensus, but he has been able to radically shift the prevailing scientific paradigm to the point of which from having been almost reviled, it has become part of the way scientists generally now think.

[loripo]

I have saved this to watch later, thanks. Have read his books. I just hope his latest thoughts, that we are destroying Gaia from within, so to speak, don't come to be true.

[Cotham Marble]

Originally Posted by loripo

I have saved this to watch later, thanks. Have read his books. I just hope his latest thoughts, that we are destroying Gaia from within, so to speak, don't come to be true.

Gaia was never a full blown theory, and while it stands as a very appealing hypothesis it fails to the extent that it requires life to be anti entropic, something which if it were true would need its own theory of explantion. In fact it seems very unlikely that life is anti entropic - there's a useful article that demonstrates this at Gaia's evil twin: Is life its own worst enemy? - life - 17 June 2009 - New Scientist though it's not available in full online without a subscription.

CM

[loripo]

I remember that article Don't buy every issue - just those that catch my eye. Will have another look.

[Doggle Avaddit]

Originally Posted by Cotham Marble

Gaia was never a full blown theory, and while it stands as a very appealing hypothesis it fails to the extent that it requires life to be anti entropic, something which if it were true would need its own theory of explantion.

CM

I really don't see that it REQUIRES life to be anti entropic at all. He pretty much talks in plain English, and without ambiguity.
Sure, from the point of view of entropy based science, that may seem to be the case ....


Lovelock: You see nearly all scientists these days are slaves. They are not free men or women, they have to work in institutes or Universities or government places or industry and they have to work on a specific problem. Very few of them are free to think outside the box, so to speak.
So you come along with a theory like Gaia and its so far beyond their normal experience, they are not going to be able to react to it.

[animartco]

Requires life to be anti entropic. What exactly do you mean by this Cotham Marble? Surely nothing in nature ever stands still. Since it is sort of fractal based, it couldn't! But Gaia isn't about movement anyway, it's about reciprocity.

[Johnny Redgate]

I'm probably really out of date on this, having not read anything much on Gaia for many years, and I've yet to watch the programme....

I thought that the proposition was that the Earth acts as if it was a self-regulating organism. The cycles and processes that maintain the biosphere in a condition that is suitable for life (as we know it) are biologically driven and so the hypothesis predicts that all the important cycles will be biologically driven. This can be tested and I believe the original book cited an example of the iodine cycle where the complete cycle hadn't been worked out. Scientific investigations then looked for a specific biological input to the cycle and found a marine-life-based process that accounted for the discrepancies.

Anyway, as a scientific hypothesis it therefore seemed to have some validity. This is a far cry from some of the mystical nonsense that seems to have followed. I'm sure some of you can update me on how things have moved on

[animartco]

You have summed it up nicely I think. Here is one example I heard.. man invents nuclear power, man dumps his nuclear waste in ocean trenches. Eventually that waste is drawn down into the planets core where it helps to keep it active thus prolongueing life on earth! Mind you wouldn't think the core would need activating in view of recent events, but it was the core dying that probably killed life on Mars. Nuclear World. If only it was that simple.

[Johnny Redgate]

Originally Posted by animartco

You have summed it up nicely I think. Here is one example I heard.. man invents nuclear power, man dumps his nuclear waste in ocean trenches. Eventually that waste is drawn down into the planets core where it helps to keep it active thus prolongueing life on earth! Mind you wouldn't think the core would need activating in view of recent events, but it was the core dying that probably killed life on Mars. Nuclear World. If only it was that simple.

The difference between the examples we each give is that the one I quoted actually occurs and therefore supports the hypothesis. Quite where your example comes from I don't know, but I suspect it wasn't Jim Lovelock.

[Doggle Avaddit]

Funnily enough, Lovelock is of the opinion that Nuclear Power is probably our only salvation from the Global Warming disaster apparently going to happen quite soon. Embracing Science and Technology is our only hope, says he.

But anyway, that requires a separate thread, and one has in fact just recently started here on WAB. And here it is.


The Costs of Nuclear Power.