The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth Book

I found this book to be a very mixed bag for me. In places funny, in others extremely dry and confusing. Some chapters flow beautifully, while others one has to drag oneself through. Overall, I guess one could think of planet earth as the entity he describes, and if looking at the our planet in this way would help some people to act, vote, talk, behave differently, I am all for it. But otherwise, what's the point?

I also wonder about the sources he used, the scientists whose work he references. Some of them I could find no mention of them in all of Google search other than in other works of Lovelock. That lack in addition to no bibliography to speak of (eight 'references', three of them Lovelock's) makes me suspicious of his scientific method, to say the least.

However, to Lovelock's credit, I did learn a lot reading/slogging through his book: oxygen, other than in precise measures, is toxic; "homeostasis is a colligative property of life"; the number of bombardments by small planets the earth has suffered; how Earth's origin is connected with a supernova exploding; the effects of radioactive decay on the earth's core; the Archean period; the number of nuclear reactors that ran for millions of years during the Proteronzoic era; why warming a near-frozen animal from the outside kills it; that a certain amount of acid rain occurs naturally; among other things.

Something I still don't get: thermodynamics, especially its second law;

And finally something I still don't agree with: "As for what seems to be the greatest concern, nuclear radiation, fearful though it is to individual humans is to Gaia a minor affair." (xvi – a minor affair it might be, but it still would be a sin to inflict this particular 'minor' event upon her.)

Quotes that caught my eye
Scientists are also constrained by the tribal rules of the discipline to which they belong. A physicist would find it hard to do chemistry and a biologist would find physics well-nigh impossible to do. (xiii – I would say it is not only, or even mostly, the tribal rules that causes this separation of the disciplines, but rather the vast knowledge in each, requiring more than a lifetime to acquire fully. The age of the Renaissance man is over, at least until our life spans is hugely increased.)

Of all the prizes that come from surviving more than fifty years the best is the freedom to be eccentric. (3 – Oh, we absolutely agree here, Lovelock!)

The all-too-common deafness of English speakers to any other language kept from our common knowledge the everyday science of the Russian-speaking world. (11 – so true, at least as much today as it was then.)

The arbitrariness of even a chronological division is underlined by the persistence of the Archean boita; their world has never ended, but lives on in our guts. Those bacteria have been with Gaia for nearly four thousand million years, and they still live all over the Earth in muds, sediments, and intestines—wherever they can keep away from that deadly poison, oxygen....In Gaia we are just another species, neither the owners nor the stewards of this planet. Our future depends much more upon a right relationship with Gaia than with the never-ending drama of human interest. (14)

This is why we all know intuitively what life is. It is edible, lovable, or lethal. (16)

Life is social. It exists in communities and collectives. There is a useful word in physics to describe the properties of collections: colligative. It is needed because there is no way to express or measure the temperature or the pressure of a single molecule. Temperature and pressure, say the physicists, are the colligative properties of a sensible collection of molecules. All collections of living things show properties unexpected from a knowledge of a single one of them. We, and some other animals, keep a constant temperature whatever the temperature of our surroundings. This fact could never have been deduced from the observations of a single cell from a human being....called it homeostasis or the wisdom of the body. Homeostasis is a colligative property of life. (18)

Specifically, the Gaia hypothesis said that the temperature, oxidation state, acidity, and certain aspects of the rocks and waters are at any time kept constant, and that this homeostasis is maintained by active feedback processes operated automatically and unconsciously by the biota. ...Life and its environment are so closely coupled that evolution concerns Gaia, not the organisms or the environment taken separately. (19)

Ideas are in continuous use as currency in the exchanges between scientists and, like money, can be used to buy many different things. (24)

Information, in thermodynamic terms, is a measure of the absence of ignorance.... The less the ignorance, the lower the entropy. (25)

Good criticism is like bathing in an ice-cold sea. The sudden chill of immersion in what seems at first a hostile medium soon stirs the blood and sharpens the senses. (31 – Hahahaha, I still dislike both, especially cold water.)

From their world of microscopes, how could the 'selfish' interests of living cells be expressed at the distance of a planet? For these competent and dedicated biologist, positing the regulation of the atmosphere by microbial life seemed as absurd as expecting the legislation of some human government to affect the orbit of Jupiter. (32)

To many scientists Gaia was a teleological concept, one that required foresight and planning by the biota. [They asked]...How could organisms keep oxygen at 21 percent and the mean temperature at 20 degrees C? (33 -- to which I ask, how does it happen now? Why do bacteria, trees etc, have to have a conference to decide such things? It works because it works? Do your cells in your body conference to keep you at 98.6? I don't think so!)

But most would disagree that the biota in any way control the composition of the atmosphere of any of the important variables, such as global temperature and oxygen concentration, which depend on the atmosphere. (34; I still don't see the problem. What if instead of 'control' we used the word 'influence' or 'effect'?)

We have been hit by close to thirty small planets, up to 10 miles in diameter and traveling as fast as sixty times the speed of sound. These impacts release about a thousand times as much energy as would be released if all the nuclear powers exploded all the present weapon stocks. Such events do more than make 200-mile craters, they can destroy up to 90 percent of all living organisms from the microscopic to the macroscopic. 'The impacts make the Earth ring like a bell, and the reverberations of the event resonate, metaphorically, throughout the systems of the Earth for maybe a million years or more. (43-44)

But disentangling the record is rather like trying to find traces of the identity of a terrorist from the rubble of the building his bomb destroyed. (45)

No models drawn from theoretical ecology can account in mathematical terms for the manifest stability of these vast natural system. (51; I wonder, almost 30 years later, if this is still true, with the computers we have now.)

This statement doesn't ring true to me either:
When these kinds of studies are made, a wide variety of mathematical models suggest that a as a system becomes more complex, in the sense of more species and a more rich structure of interdependence, it becomes more dynamically fragile...Thus, as a mathematical generality, increasing complexity makes for dynamical fragility rather than robustness.
An important general conclusion is that large and unprecedented perturbations imposed by man are likely to be more traumatic for complex ecosystems than for simple ones. (51; and those perturbations not imposed by man, i.e., natural ones?)

Daisyworld does not have any clearly established goal like a set point; it just settles down, like a cat, to a comfortable position and resists attempts to dislodge it. (61)

Just imagine how large a signal would be needed to transmit information about the beginning of the Universe 15 eons ago. This may be why the Big Bang theory that the Universe began by the explosion of a primeval particle in inevitable....
All that now lingers is the faint rumble of the cosmic microwave background radiation. But all other theories of the origin are without evidence. (67)

Even exploding an H-bomb would make your point only for a few hundred miles. (67; uh, I don't think so. In 1962 Starfish Prime was exploded and caused an electromagnetic pulse which cause damage in Hawaii, 898 miles away. Hmmm, I suppose '9' could be consider 'few' but not in my book.)

How can we be so sure that the Earth's origin was connected with the explosion of a supernova? We are sure because, even today, the Earth is radioactive, and also because the Earth is made of elements like iron and silicon and oxygen that cannot be made in the normal processes of stellar evolution. (68)

Powering a star by fusing iron to make uranium is like trying to burn ice in a furnace. (69 – I love this analogy!)

But the outer layers of the star cannot escape the pull of gravitation and, when the fuel runs out, it collapses. It is then that the heavy elements are synthesized. Some proportion of them is violently ejected as the outer and still unburnt layers of the star explode. (69)

It is the heat generated by the decay of these radioactive elements that keeps the Earth's interior hot and drives the movements of the crust. (70)

The Archean, when the environment was full of molecules that donated electrons (that is, reducing agents), did not so much as end as become encapsulated as a separate region that exist whenever oxygen is absent. The submission of the anoxic ecosystems to domination by the oxic was somewhat like the Norman conquest with the Archean Saxons driven to a subservient underground position—the lower classes—from which, it is often said, they have never escaped. (100)

The difference between the Archean air and the Proterozoic air was not a simple matter of the presence of absence of oxygen, it was in the net tendency. In the Proterozoic, a discarded bicycle left in shallow water would have rusted away to form insoluble ferric oxide which settled on the sea floor; in the Archean, it would have slowly dissolved as water-soluble ferrous iron, and left no trace. (101)

They [salt-tolerant bacteria] are limited to their remote and rare niche, and depend upon the rest of life to keep the Earth comfortable for them. They are like those eccentrics of our own society whose survival depends upon the sustenance that we can spare but who could barely survive alone. (108)

...the vast mass of the oceans, some ten thousand times larger [than the atmosphere] (109 – So hard to imagine)

Before these lagoons can form, barriers are needed at their seaward boundary. Could this activity be part of the tightly coupled evolution of life and the rocks, or is it just the result of chance? (110 – uh, chance?)

At first the reef building would have only a local effect, but over time the sheer mass of the limestone would begin to affect the plastic crust of the Earth's surface, depressing it and so extending the size of the lagoon. (111)

Is all this a grand, unplanned civil engineering enterprise by Gaia? The steps, from the individual lowering of calcium ions within the cells of a living organism to the movement of the plates, are all those that tend to improve the environment for the organisms responsible. (113)

The results of warfare, however, are rarely genocide; instead war can lead to a peaceful coexistence mutually beneficial to the victim and the aggressor. (114 – What!?!)

Quite literally, it [water] is frozen out; and the upper atmosphere contains only a few parts per million of water vapor. The present rate of escape of hydrogen to space is limited by the dryness of the upper air and is only 300,000 tons a year. This is equivalent to just under 3 million tons of water, and would leave behind an excess of 2.5 million tons of oxygen. It sounds a lot, but a loss of water of that rate would have removed less than one percent of the oceans in the age of the Earth. (116)

For the Cambrian there are just catalogs of species and rocks. They give some insight into the life of the Earth, but only in the abbreviated way that a telephone book does about the private lives and the economy of a town. (127)

From the beginning the producers, the photosynthesizers, have had a love-hate relationship with the consumers. Producers do not care to be eaten, but the presence of the consumers is essential for their health and that of the larger organism they constitute. When plants and animals appeared, the fine details of this constructive aggression became visible. The plants were seen to possess poisons, spines, and stings; and the animals and microorganisms were obliged to develop mew techniques for grazing. A balance is always struck because, without the consumers, the survival of the plants and algae would be threatened. There is only a few years' supply of carbon dioxide in the air. The removal of consumers from the scene would be disastrous for plants, and within a short time span. Not only would there be too little carbon dioxide for photosynthesis, but there would be major climate changes as the gases of the atmosphere and the albedo of the Earth responded to the demise of the plants. Not least, the intricate recycling of nutrients and gardening of the soil would cease. On a human scale the coexistence of consumers and producers could be compared with the long peace that has reigned between the hostile yet mutually dependent superpowers. (128)

A smaller animal, the mouse , can survive the complete saturation of its blood with carbon monoxide. It survives the poison because enough oxygen can diffuse to its tissues from the skin and from the surface of the lungs. (129)

We are so accustomed to think of oxygen as life-saving and essential that we ignore its potent toxicity. (129)

However it happened, the reactions of this free oxygen with other elements such as carbon and sulfur would release acids into the air, and these would increase the weathering of crustal rocks so that more nutrients were released, leading to a greater abundance of living organisms. The positive feedback on the growth of oxygen would continue until the disadvantages of its presence overcame the benefits. Rather like the growth of car populations in come cities, it continues until movement is choked by its presence. (131)

This [exposure to radiation] is frightening stuff, but we can keep our cool by remembering that these carcinogenic consequences are no different from those of breathing oxygen, which is also a carcinogen. Breathing oxygen may be what sets a limit to the life span of most animals, but not breathing it is even more rapidly lethal. There is a right level of oxygen, namely 21 percent; more of less than this can be harmful. To set a level of zero for oxygen in the interests of preventing cancer would be most unwise. (168)

Let's look at his proposition: "Suppose that the biological effects of exposure to nuclear radiation are no different from those of breathing oxygen."
...This is now conventional scientific wisdom; the novel insight from Dr. Thomas was to remind us that these same destructive chemicals are being made all the time, in the absence of radiation, by small inefficiencies in the normal process of oxidative metabolism. In other words, so far as our cells are concerned, damage by nuclear radiation and damage by breathing oxygen are almost indistinguishable. (175)

...it seems likely that the life span of most animals is set by a fixed upper limit of the quantity of oxygen that their cells can use before suffering irreversible damage. Small animals such as mice have a specific rate of metabolism much greater than we do; that is why they live only a year or so even if protected from predation and disease. Oxygen kills just as nuclear radiation does, by destroying the instructions within our cells about reproduction and repair. Oxygen is thus a mutagen and a carcinogen, and breathing is sets the limit of our life span. (176)

The maladies of Gaia do not last long in terms of her life span. Anything that makes the world uncomfortable to live in tends to induce the evolution of those species that can achieve a new and more comfortable environment. It follows that, if the world is made unfit by what we do, there is the probability of a change in regime to one that will be better for life but not necessarily better for us. In the past, changes of this kind, like the jump from a glaciation to an interglacial, have tended to revolutionary punctuations rather than gradual evolutions. (178)

We want to be free to drive into the country or the wilderness without polluting it in so doing: to have our cake and eat it. Human and understandable such striving may be, but it is illogical. Our humanist concerns about the poor of the inner cities or the Third World, and our near-obscene obsession with death, suffering, and pain as if these were evil in themselves—these thoughts divert the mind from our gross and excessive domination of the natural world. Poverty and suffering are not sent; they are the consequences of what we do. Pain and death are normal and natural; we could not long survive without them. Science, it is true, assisted at the birth of technology. But when we drive our cars and listen to the radio bringing news of acid rain, we need to remind ourselves that we, personally, are the polluters. We, not some white-coated devil figure, buy the cars, drive them, and foul the air. We are therefore accountable, personally, for the destruction of the trees by photochemical smog and acid rain. We are responsible for the silent spring that Rachel Carson predicted.
There are many ways to keep in touch with Gaia. Individual humans are densely populated cellular and endosymbiont collectives, but clearly also identities. Individuals interact with Gaia in the cycling of the elements and in the control of the climate, just like a cell does in the body. You also interact individually in a spiritual manner through a sense of wonder about the natural world and from feeling a part of it. In some ways this interaction in not unlike the tight coupling between the state of the mind and the body. Another connection is through the powerful infrastructures of human communication and mass transfer. We as a species now move a greater mass of some materials around the Earth than did all the biota of Gaia before we appeared. Our chattering is so loud that it can be heard to the depths of the Universe. Always, as with other and earlier species within Gaia, the entire development arises from the activity of a few individuals. The urban nests, the agricultural ecosystems, good and bad, are all the consequences of rapid positive feedback starting from the action of an inspired individual.
….Gaia, as I see her, is no doting mother tolerant of misdemeanors, nor is she some fragile and delicate damsel in danger from brutal mankind. She is stern and tough, always keeping the world warm and
comfortable for those who obey the rules, but ruthless in her destruction of those who transgress. Her unconscious goal is a planet fit for life. If humans stand in the way of this, we shall be eliminated with as little pit as would be shown by the micro-brain of an intercontinental ballistic nuclear missile in full flight to its target.
….I have tried to show that God and Gaia, theology and science, even physics and biology are not separate but a single way of thought.