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Geophysiology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2011

James E. Lovelock
James E. Lovelock
Affiliation:
Department of Cybernetics, University of Reading, Reading, Berkshire RG6 2AH, U.K.
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Abstract

The geological theory of the evolution of the material environment and the biological theory of the evolution of organisms by natural selection are usually treated separately. This paper presents a new evolutionary theory, in which the evolution of the organisms, and the evolution of their material environment, are seen to be so closely coupled as to form a single, indivisible, process. This combined evolutionary system can be taken to be a domain with emergent properties unexpected from a simple addition of its component parts, rather like the eighteenth-century scientific view of the Earth as a super-organism. In homage to James Hutton, who lectured before the Royal Society of Edinburgh about the Earth as a super-organism and on the physiology of the Earth, the new topic is called geophysiology.

The difference between the geophysiological view of the Earth, where the environment and the organisms are tightly coupled, and the co-evolutionary, or biogeochemical view, where the coupling is loose leaving organisms and their environment to evolve more or less separately, is discussed. The paper includes numerical models to illustrate how a close-coupled evolutionary system could have self regulation, homeostasis, as an automatic and emergent property. The models will be compared with the real world past and present and their predictions examined.

Keywords

Earthemergent propertiesGaiahomeostasissuper-organism
Type
Evolution of the Earth's environment through time
Information
Earth and Environmental Science Transactions of The Royal Society of Edinburgh , Volume 80 , Issue 3-4: Environments and Physiology of Fossil Organisms , 1989 , pp. 169 - 175
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Society of Edinburgh 1989

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