The Gaia Principle

The concepts of Gaia are actually fairly old. Okay, some of them are ancient. However, for the last several years, I just assumed the Gaia Principle was part of the New Age Movement (from the mid-1900s) that fuses spirituality and metaphysical properties with psychology, but after checking on it tonight, it seems that some guy named James Lovelock (a British scientist) was the one that officially smacked this label on planet Earth. Well, it was actually named after the Greek Goddess of Earth.

Anyway, the Gaia Principle (also called the Gaia Hypothesis or Gaia Theory) is the notion that the Earth is a living entity, instead of just some place where life magically spawns from. Some people go as far as saying that Earth is a sentient being with divine consciousness. I think it is a cool concept, but that is not what the Gaia Principle turned out to be after the scientific community got their mitts on it. I've read bits and pieces of Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, and I can honestly say that I don't know what in the hell it is trying to say. Just when it starts to sound a tiny bit spiritual and metaphysical, it quickly switches to evolution, Darwin, and how Earth has no purpose, aim or goal. Yeah, that really makes a lot of sense if you are saying that this planet is a living entity... LOL!

Personally, I like the mythological version and the New Age beliefs concerning this planet and/or Gaia, and not Wikipedia's demented page that is found here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis 

That Wikipedia link represents what I like to call the "superfluity of verbiage," and it's a complete mess when concerning Gaia concepts. They did have a section on there that involved criticism of this particular principle. A quick excerpt of that is as follows: "The Gaia hypothesis continues to be skeptically received by the scientific community. Arguments both for and against it were laid out in the journal Climatic Change in 2002 & 2003. A significant argument raised against it are the many examples where life has had a detrimental or destabilizing effect on the environment rather than acting to regulate it. Several recent books have criticized the Gaia Principle, expressing views ranging from "Suspended uncomfortably between tainted metaphor, fact, and false science" to "the Gaia hypothesis lacks unambiguous observational support and has significant theoretical difficulties" to "The Gaia hypothesis is supported neither by evolutionary theory nor by the empirical evidence of the geological record" and so on.

Well, after reading a bunch of that crap, I think I'll just go back to calling it Mother Nature (or Mother Earth) like I always have... Ha-ha!

Semi-related Post: Anthropic Principle or a mere Tautology?

Image Credit: Is in the Public Domain because it was solely created by NASA.

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