Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T06:21:57.528Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Gaia Hypothesis - Fact or Fancy?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2009

J.C.A. Craik
J.C.A. Craik
Affiliation:
Grendon, Barcaldine, Oban, Argyll, PA37 1SG
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Many large-scale properties of the biosphere are affected or determined by the activities of living organisms and are maintained at remarkably constant values over long periods. For example, the oxygen content of the atmosphere appears to have been maintained near its present value for hundreds of millions of years, despite the rapid flux of oxygen between production by plants and consumption by animals and decomposing microorganisms. (In this article, I shall use 'biosphere' to denote the whole of the concentric shell of the planet Earth which holds life, and 'biota' to mean all living organisms. Others have sometimes used 'biosphere' to mean the latter.) Lovelock was the first to show clearly how the composition of the Earth's atmosphere, unlike that of Mars or Venus, was held well away from thermodynamic equilibrium by the activities of living organisms (Lovelock, 1983). Other biospheric properties, such as temperature and oceanic pH and salinity, have similarly remained fairly constant despite the existence of large perturbing influences (Lovelock, 1979).

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom , Volume 69 , Issue 4 , November 1989 , pp. 759 - 768
Copyright
Copyright © Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom 1989

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Baross, J.A. & Deming, J.W., 1983. Growth of ‘black smoker’ bacteria at temperatures of at least 250°C. Nature, London, 303, 423–426.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brock, T.D., 1969. Microbial growth under extreme conditions. Symposia of the Society for General Microbiology, no. 19,15–41.Google Scholar
Brock, T.D., 1978. Thermophilic Microorganisms and Life at High Temperatures. New York: Springer-Verlag.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brock, T.D., 1985. Life at high temperatures. Science, New York, 230, 132–138.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brock, T.D. & Madigan, M.T., 1988. Biology of Microorganisms, 5th ed.Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.Google Scholar
Dispirito, A.A. & Tuovinen, O.H., 1982. Uranous ion oxidation and carbon dioxide fixation by Thiobacillus ferrooxidans. Archives of Microbiology, 133, 28–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ehrlich, H.L., 1978. How microbes cope with heavy metals, arsenic and antimony in their environment. In Microbial Life in Extreme Environments (ed. Kushner, D. J.), pp. 380–408. London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Ehrlich, H.L., 1980. Inorganic energy sources for chemolithotrophic and mixotrophic bacteria. Geomicrobiology Journal, 1, 65–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eichler, J., 1976. Handbook of Strata-bound and Stratiform Ore Deposits, vol. 7 (ed. Wolf, K. H.), pp. 157–201. Amsterdam: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Henderson, L.J., 1913. The Fitness of the Environment. New York: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Holm, N.G., 1987. Possible biological origin of banded iron-formations from hydrothermal solutions. Origins of Life, 17, 229–250.Google Scholar
Horowitz, N.H.Cameron, R.E. & Hubbard, J.S., 1972. Microbiology of the dry valleys of Antarctica. Science, New York,176, 242–245.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
James, H.L. & Trendall, A.F., 1982. Banded iron formation: distribution in time and paleoenviron-mental significance. In Mineral Deposits and the Evolution of the Biosphere (ed. Holland, H.D. and Schidlowski, M.) pp. 199–218. Berlin: Springer-Verlag. [Report of Dahlem Workshop, 1980].CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kushner, D.J., 1964. Microbial resistance to harsh and destructive environmental conditions. In Experimental Chemotherapy, vol. 2 (ed. Schnitzer, R.J. and Hawking, F.), pp. 113–168. London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Kushner, D.J. (ed.), 1978. Microbial Life in Extreme Environments. London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Kushner, D.J., 1980. Extreme environments. In Contemporary Microbial Ecology (ed. Ell-wood, D. C.), pp. 29–54. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Lewis, A.J. & Miller, J.D.A., 1977. Stannous and cuprous ion oxidation by Thiobacillus ferrooxidans. Canadian Journal of Microbiology, 23, 319–324.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lovelock, J.E., 1979. Gaia: a New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Lovelock, J.E., 1983. Gaia as seen through the atmosphere. In Biomineralization and Biological Metal Accumulation (ed. Westbroek, P. and de Jong, E.W.), pp. 15–25. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lovelock, J.E., 1988. The Ages of Gaia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Margulis, L. & Lovelock, J.E., 1974. Biological modulation of the Earth's atmosphere. Icarus, 21, 471–489.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morgan, P. & Dow, C.S., 1985. Environmental control of cell-type expression in prosthecate bacteria. In Bacteria in their Natural Environments (ed. Fletcher, M. and Floodgate, G.D.), pp. 131–169. London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Müller, S.C., Plesser, T. & Hess, B., 1985. Two-dimensional spectrophotometry with high spatial and temporal resolution by digital video techniques and powerful computers. Analytical Biochemistry, 146, 125–133.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Munns, R.G., Stanley, R.J. & Densmore, C.D., 1967. Hydrographic observations of the Red Sea brines. Nature, London, 214, 1215–1217.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nicolis, G., 1977. Dissipative structures and biological order. Advances in Biological and Medical Physics, 16, 99–113.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Oparin, A.I., 1961. Life: its Nature, Origin and Development. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd.Google Scholar
Postgate, J., 1988. Gaia gets too big for her boots. New Scientist, 118, 60.Google Scholar
Prigogine, I., Nicolis, G. & Babloyantz, A., 1972. Thermodynamics of evolution. Physics Today, 25, 23–28 and 38–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schidlowski, M., 1988. A 3,800-million-year isotopic record of life from carbon in sedimentary rocks. Nature, London, 333, 313–318.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schopf, J.W. (ed.), 1983. Earth's Earliest Biosphere. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Stetter, K.O., 1982. Ultrathin mycelia-forming organisms from submarine volcanic areas having an optimum growth temperature of 105°C. Nature, London, 300, 258–260.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stetter, K.O., 1986. Diversity of extremely thermophilic archaebacteria. In Thermophiles (ed. Brock, T.D.), pp. 39–74. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Tansey, M.R. & Brock, T.D., 1978. Microbial life at high temperatures: ecological aspects. In Microbial Life in Extreme Environments (ed. Kushner, D.J.), pp. 159–216. London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Tilbury, R.H., 1980. Xerotolerant yeasts at high sugar concentrations. In Microbial Growth and Survival in Extremes of Environment (ed. Gould, G.W. and Corry, J.E.L.), pp. 103–128. London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Tindall, B.J., Mills, A.A. & Grant, W.D., 1980. An alkalophilic red halophilic bacterium with a low magnesium requirement from a Kenyan soda lake. Journal of General Microbiology, 116, 257–260.Google Scholar
Trent, J.D., Chastain, R.A. & Yayamos, A.A., 1984. Possible artefactual basis for apparent bacterial growth at 250°C. Nature, London, 307, 737–739.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trudinger, P.A., Swaine, D.J. & Skyring, G. W., 1979. Biogeochemical cycling of elements - general considerations. In Biogeochemical Cycling of Mineral-Forming Elements (ed. Trudinger, P.A. and Swaine, D.J.), pp. 1–27. Amsterdam: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Vallentyne, J.R., 1963. Environmental biophysics and microbial ubiquity. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 108, 342–252.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Walker, J.C.G., 1980. Atmospheric constraints on the evolution of metabolism. Origins of Life, 10, 93–104.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Zhabotinskii, A.M., 1964. Periodic course of oxidation of malonic acid in solution (investigation of the kinetics of the reaction of Belousov). Biofizika, 9, 306–311.Google Scholar