Book review – The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet

10-minute read
keywords: earth sciences, history of science, philosophy

This is the final part of my four-part review series on the Gaia hypothesis (see also part 1, part 2, and part 3), James Lovelock’s notion that the Earth is a giant self-regulating system that maintains conditions suitable for life on the planet. I selected this book as a counterpart to the hard-science analysis of Tyrrell’s On Gaia (also published in 2013) to take a step back and read about the wider reception of Lovelock’s ideas. As it turns out, professor of philosophy Michael Ruse additionally delves into the historical and philosophical precursors to the notion of Earth as a living planet. An intellectually rigorous if sometimes challenging book, The Gaia Hypothesis gives a very satisfying overview of why Lovelock got the reception he did and, for me, marks Ruse as a notable writer to keep an eye on.

The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet, written by Michael Ruse, published by the University of Chicago Press in October 2013 (hardback, 251 pages)

The Gaia Hypothesis is part of Chicago’s science•culture series which contains books examining the intersection of the two and is the second book in this series that I review. Ruse opens the book with an introduction to the conception of the Gaia hypothesis, the cast of characters, and the basic premise of Lovelock’s ideas. Scientists initially did not take it seriously. When it became clear that Gaia was not going away, they rained down both scorn and well-deserved critique on it. The general public, on the other hand, lapped it up. Many people in Europe and the USA were abandoning traditional religion while a countercultural revolution was in full swing. “Earth as an organism was just the vision, just the metaphor, for which many individuals and groups were searching” (p. 37). Ruse sees a paradox here. How is it that scientists rejected a fellow scientist-inventor, while a predominantly progressive counterculture embraced the ideas of a man funded by the military and the industry?

To resolve this paradox, Ruse provides a historical analysis in chapters 3 to 6 that form the core of this book. It was also the section that I found challenging in places, but that will be because I have no background in classical philosophy and metaphysics. Given this, I am stepping onto some very thin ice here, and I apologise in advance to all philosophers reading this if I am about to butcher some of your favourite concepts. That said, here is my understanding of the relevant points being made.

Ruse starts with classic Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle and their ideas on the nature of reality. They introduced different forms of teleology, which is the explanation of phenomena by arguing why—for what purpose or to what end—things happen in the world, rather than explaining what is causing them. Aristotle in particular had no hesitation in saying that the universe was striving towards the perfection of whatever godlike being had designed it. Furthermore, no distinction was made between body and soul. Next to the soul animating the body (hylomorphism), of relevance to the Gaia hypothesis is that this animatedness extended to all matter, something Ruse refers to as “world soul thinking” or hylozoism. This notion waxed and waned over the centuries and an important hallmark of the Scientific Revolution from the 16th century onwards was a gradual banishing of final causes. We moved towards a—to us—more familiar understanding in terms of mechanical metaphors, reductionism, and of matter as inert and without purpose. In particular, Ruse details the rise of mechanistic thinking and the expulsion of final causes in the two disciplines relevant to Gaia: geology and evolutionary biology.

“How is it that scientists rejected a fellow scientist-inventor, while a predominantly progressive counterculture embraced the ideas of a man funded by the military and the industry?”

Nevertheless, Plato’s philosophy and the notion of a world soul persisted. Seventeenth-century machine metaphors did not erase all other ways of thinking and it was not as if, moving forward, “everyone saw the physical world as nothing but blind matter in endless motion” (p. 57). Ruse traces a line through the German Romantic movement and American transcendentalism to the 19th-century rise of organicism, a school of thought in biology that erupted from intellectual hotbeds such as the universities of Harvard and Chicago. As defined here by Ruse, it stands in contrast to mechanism and argues that whole entities such as organisms are emergent properties that cannot be explained by considering their parts. “The organicists see an integrative aspect in nature that operates outside of or beyond selection. […] There is something wholesome about nature that the hard-line Darwinian misses” (p. 118). Interestingly, just last month Harvard University Press published The New Biology, co-authored by Ruse, in which he continues his thinking about mechanism and organicism. In the wider world, meanwhile, hylozoism lived on in a range of ideas from deep ecology and ecofeminism to more esoteric thinking that readily mixes religion and pseudoscience such as anthroposophy and New Age paganism.

An important piece in the puzzle is Lovelock himself. Ruse provides a piercing if fair character study in the last two chapters. He is fair by pointing out that Lovelock demonstrated “outstanding talents in his field” (p. 179) and his work with NASA showed “he did not break with traditional science; he simply did it better than anyone else” (p. 180). Ruse judges him to be “basically a very conventional scientist [who] was rightly elected to the Royal Society” (p. 181). However—and I am sure you can feel a “but” coming—this is no hagiography. His points confirm my suspicions that, frankly, Lovelock increasingly became a crank later in life. His response to criticism was “partly petulant” (p. 147), his attitude one of “cocky self-assurance [and] hubris” (p. 187). He was proud to be an independent scientist who dared, and could, think outside the box, and he felt disdain for academic institutes and the “self-imposed inquisition” (p. 147) of peer review. The bigger problem that Ruse highlights, in my opinion, is that “although he had spent much time in medical research, Lovelock was not a biologist, didn’t think like one, and wasn’t about to start now” (p. 155). Furthermore, lacking knowledge of classic philosophy, he was ignorant of the history of banishing teleology from evolutionary biology. He was “not a deep thinker [but] a tinkerer, an inventor, an instrument maker—and such people do think teleologically” (p. 187). Straying far outside his area of expertise and possessed of both ignorance and innocence, he “clearly had no idea of what he was embarking upon” (p. 186). What I found revealing is that even his most fervent disciples eventually reluctantly distanced themselves somewhat from him. Tim Lenton admits that “earlier on in my career […] I was more with Jim on my use of the Gaia banner” (p. 221), while Andrew Watson thinks that “the vision of the Earth as a single organism doesn’t quite work” (p. 222). Furthermore, in their book Revolutions That Made the Earth, they preferred the more neutral term Earth system science over Gaia, as the latter “is so closely tied to Lovelock that it is in a sense defined by his views” (p. viii therein).

“An important piece in the puzzle is Lovelock himself and Ruse provides a piercing if fair character study in the last two chapters.”

And then there was the company that Lovelock kept, with Ruse focusing on two people. First, there was the Nobel Prize–winning author William Golding who suggested the term Gaia. An enthusiastic confidant to Lovelock before Lynn Margulis, he used to be deeply involved with anthroposophy and the Steiner movement and was thus receptive to Lovelock’s idea of Earth as a living being. Ruse beautifully summarizes his contribution thus: “The idea was Lovelock’s, but the facilitator was Golding” (p. 183). Second, there was Lynn Margulis, the headstrong scientist who finally had won acclaim with her hypothesis of endosymbiosis but then went off the rails by seeing symbiosis everywhere. She was on a crusade against neo-Darwinism and concocted ever-stranger ideas. Though she continued to support Lovelock’s cause throughout her life, they only co-published an initial batch of papers. After this, they gradually drifted apart as Lovelock could not get her to understand the theoretical aspects of his ideas.

How do all of the above strands help resolve the paradox of how Gaia was received? In a nutshell, public reception was positive because Gaia resonated with the spirit of the times and Lovelock was affable in his interactions, resulting in little scrutiny of either him or his ideas. The scientific reception was more hostile for several reasons. Lovelock neither could nor wanted to rid his idea of its implicit teleology. Gaia was furthermore found wanting. Having given it a fair hearing, “Gaia didn’t do what professional scientists expect of a good, new, fruitful hypothesis” (p. 202). Especially James Kirchner’s criticism—”always blunt […] never less than courteous” (p. 158)—is insightful. He called out Lovelock for his loose definitions and questioned if the idea was actually testable or was creeping into pseudoscientific territory. Predictably, Lovelock thought this criticism unfair. Gaia also entered the room when science was beleaguered by forces within and without. Ruse clarifies that this goes far beyond the debate on levels of selection that I highlighted in my review of On Gaia. Finally, the enthusiastic and uncritical public reception made scientists wary. To put it mildly, Gaia “obviously did and still does on balance appeal more to those challenging conventional norms” (p. 200). Like Tyrrell, Ruse concludes that “despite general agreement that Gaia had pushed thinking in some important directions, by around 2000 the Gaia hypothesis […] had lost momentum” (p. 220).

“What I found revealing is that even [Lovelock’s] most fervent disciples eventually reluctantly distanced themselves somewhat from him.”

Ruse tries to put a brave face on it when finishing the book: “no more talk of failure. Lovelock and Margulis were big people with a big vision. Whether science likes it or not, the vision lives on” (p. 224). To me, that belies the critical and piercing analysis in this book. The Gaia Hypothesis provides tremendous context but who is it for? The book is split between Ruse’s stomping ground of history and philosophy, and a more accessible dissection of the characters and careers of Lovelock and Margulis. I think the book is reasonably balanced, though it does lean towards the former so will appeal more to an intellectual audience. On a personal note, this book marks Ruse as a scholar of interest to me. I know of his many other books but this is the first Ruse I have read. I will certainly seek out more.

And thus we have arrived at the end of the Gaia quartet. Reading Lovelock’s books raised many red flags, even if I could appreciate the grandeur of his vision. On Gaia delivered a very satisfying overview of how Gaia is not supported by the data. And The Gaia Hypothesis helped to put it all into a larger context. Having reviewed these four books, where do I now stand on the Gaia hypothesis? In The Ages of Gaia, Lovelock mentioned how Erwin Schrödinger’s 1944 book What Is Life? was at the time criticized by a prominent scientist as mostly wrong, though Lovelock still praised Schrödinger “for having set us thinking in a productive way” (p. 24 therein). Ironically, I think this perfectly summarises what I think about Gaia: mostly wrong, though stimulating much interesting new research.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.

The Gaia Hypothesis