The Gaia Hypothesis: About one billion years after it's formation, our planet was occupied by a meta-life form which launched an explosion of richly relating diversities we call life forms, transforming the surface of the planet into its own complex dynamical substance.All the life forms of the planet are part of Gaia- sharing the same DNA, not only the coding language, but also much of the basic genome across all species. In a way analogous to the myriad different cell colonies which make up our organs and bodies, the life forms of earth in their diversity co-evolve and contribute interactively to produce and sustain the optimal conditions for the growth and prosperity not so much of themselves, but of the larger whole, Gaia. That the very makeup of the atmosphere, seas, and even the terrestrial crust is the result of radical interventions carried out by Gaia through the evolving diversity of living creatures, including, ultimately, ourselves.
-from the Mkzdk review of The Ages of Gaia
"Those who claim that life is a highly improbable event, possibly unique, have not looked closely enough at the chemical realities underlying the origin of life. Life is either a reproducible, almost commonplace manifestation of matter, given certain conditions, or a miracle. Too many steps are involved to allow for something in between.
"If I am right, there are about as many living planets in the universe as there are planets capable of generating and sustaining life. Even a conservative estimate puts this number in the trillions. Unless this estimate is totally off the mark, we may take it that trillions of foci of past, present, or future life exist. Trillions of biospheres coast through space on trillions of planets, channeling matter and energy into the creative fluxes of evolution. In whatever direction we turn our eyes when we look into the sky, there is life out there, somewhere. This fact completely alters the cosmological picture. The Earth is not a freak speck around a freak star in a feak galaxy, lost in an immense "unfeeling" whirlpool of stars and galaxies hurtling in time and space ever since the Big Bang. The Earth is part, together with trillions of other Earth-like bodies, of a cosmic cloud of "vital dust" that exists because the universe is what it is. Avoiding any mention of design, we may, in a purely factual sense, state that the universe is constructed in such a way that this multitude of life-bearing planets was bound to arise.
"Among the billions of stars that make up each galaxy, many are bound to be circled by planets, a few of which, at least, are bound to be of the right size and in the right spatial orientation with respect to their sun (perhaps a large moon may be needed as well, to cause tides) to offer a cradle for life. The universe is not the inert cosmos of the physicists, with a little life added for good measure. The universe is life, with the necessary infrastructure around; it consists foremost of trillions of biospheres generated and sustained by the rest of the universe.
"If the universe is not meaningless, what is its meaning? For me, this meaning is to be found in the structure of the universe, which happens to be such as to produce thought by way of life and mind. Thought, in turn, is a faculty whereby the universe can reflect upon itself, discover its own structure, and apprehend such immanent entities as truth, beauty, goodness, and love. Such is the meaning of the universe, as I see it."
-Christian De Duve, Vital Dust
Brian Goodwin, biologist, editor with The Journal of Theoretical Biology :
"The "new" biology is biology in the form of an exact science of complex systems concerned with dynamics and emergent order. Then everything in biology changes. Instead of the metaphors of conflict, competition, selfish genes, climbing peaks in fitness landscapes, what you get is evolution as a dance. It has no goal.( . . . ) It's a dance through morphospace, the space of the forms of organisms.
"The metaphors I use are related to emergence and creativity and the concept of a creative cosmos. Evolution is an aspect of this creativity. Alfred North Whitehead was a wonderful philosopher of process and creativity. The central metaphor I feel is emerging in the new biology is all connected with creativity. You see in genetic reductionism Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness, par excellence. Genes are not themselves creative but function within the context of the organism, which is.
" Whitehead's phrase for evolution is "the creative advance into novelty." This dance is a never-ending dance that goes nowhere but is simply expressing itself. In the postmodern age, we can let progress go and talk about process as a creative dance. That's what evolution is about. Evolution has no point, no meaning, and no direction. It's just itself.
"Darwinism stresses conflict and competition; that doesn't square with the evidence. A lot of organisms that survive are in no sense superior to those that have gone extinct. It's not a question of being "better than"; it's simply a matter of finding a place where you can be yourself. That's what evolution is about. That's why you can see it as a dance. It's not going anywhere, it's simply exploring a space of possibilities."
Brian Goodwin, Biologist, quoted in The Third Culture, by John Brockman
Lee Smolin, Quoted in John Brockman's The Third Culture:
"( . . . ) Biologists seem to be endlessly arguing about the scale on which natural selection operates.Does it operate on the ecosystem, on the species, on the individual, on the gene? The one key lesson about self-organized systems that physicists have learned is that they are what we call critical systems, which are systems in which significant correlations are evolving on every possible scale. So the answer, I imagine, is that evolution must be taking place simultaneously on a large variety of scales. Of course the information is coded on one scale- that of the gene. But it's expressed over every scale from the individual cell to the biosphere as a whole. Thus the probability that a gene will be reproduced is influenced by it's effect on every scale, which means that it can act on every scale.
"Of course it would be good to have a general theory of self-organized systems which could serve as the starting point for such a discussion- and, indeed, for developing a general understanding of the biological world and it's evolution. This has been a dream of physicists for a long time. It's certainly been a dream of mine and of many other people. I think that just recently we can say we're beginning to uncover some concepts, such as self-organized criticality, which could play a role in such a theory."
Lee Smolin, Quoted in John Brockman's The Third Culture
Rupert Sheldrake, A New Science of Life:
"Although a creative agency capable of giving rise to new forms and new patterns of behavior in the course of evolution would necessarily transcend individual organisms, it need not transcend all nature. It could, for instance, be immanent within life as a whole . . . Or it could be immanent within the planet as a whole, or the solar system,or the entire universe.There could indeed be a hierarchy of immanent creativities at all these levels.
"( . . . )Such creative agencies could give rise to new morphogenetic and motor fields by a kind of causation very similar to the 'conscious causation' considered above. In fact, if such creative agencies are admitted at all, then it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that they must in some sense be conscious selves.
"If such a hierarchy of conscious selves is immanent within nature, then it is conceivable that under certain conditions human beings might become directly aware that they were embraced or included within them. And in fact the experience of an inner unity with life, or the earth, or the universe, has often been described, to the extent that it is expressible." -Rupert Sheldrake, A New Science of Life
Rupert Sheldrake Website
Alexander Spirov's Morphogenesis Site (Russia)
Elisabet Sahtouris' EarthDance Online