A crucial aspect of Gaia is that it is multi-disciplinary. We have already seen how Lovelock sought the help of a mathematician, Watson, in working out Daisyworld.
Around the same time he was having “long and intense discussions” with the US biologist Lynn Margulis. These discussions proved to be crucial. Coming up with a simulation of an imaginary planet dominated by a single species was one thing, developing a theory which took into account the evolution of Life from single-celled forms to the great diversity we know today, quite another.
For her part, Margulis was fascinated by the single-celled life-forms that dominated the Earth billions of years ago, and which still live on in environments lacking in oxygen, such as in our guts, and buried within mud and bog. The two of them examined how they’d radically altered the composition of the Earth’s early atmosphere.
He found in her someone who, like him, was not afraid of controversy. She had homed in on a pivotal point in evolution when a new type of cell appeared, a far more complex one that contained not only a nucleus but other structures known as organelles, which enabled the cell to produce its own energy. She was convinced by a neglected hypothesis known as endosymbiosis, which provided an explanation as to how the new cells had evolved. According to this, one “prokaryotic” form had absorbed/ingested another, smaller, one; it was this ingested cell that gave rise to the nucleus and organelles we see in modern cells today (“eurkaryotes”), including the ones in our own bodies. They are the cells that occur in all multi-celled life and without them complex life as we know it today could not have happened.
With Margulis the Gaia hypothesis was greatly enriched, enabling Lovelock to name his second book “The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of our Living Earth.” Between them, they created an Origin Story for Life on Earth .– and this, in my opinion, is the greatest legacy of Gaia, as you will see in later posts. “The Gaia Story” is not only the story of how Gaia as a theory and a philosophy has grown over the past 50 years, it also about the Origin Story of how Life evolved on Earth from its beginnings nearly 4 Billion years ago.
Image of prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells by macrovector on Freepik.
bioregioning 