Gaia
GAIA theory was first proposed by the English scientist James Lovelock in 1979 to explain how and why, as life appeared on the planet and grew abundant, its evolution and the earth's evolution merged into a single dynamic system he called Gaia. Lovelock was aware that this was the Greek name for a primordial cosmic goddess who was also a primal earth deity. He used the name and has continued to use it, in spite of criticism from some scientists, because of its metaphoric power. It conveys, he says, the idea of a superorganism composed of all life tightly coupled with the air, the oceans, and the surface rocks. By the end of the 1980s there existed sufficient evidence, models, and mechanisms to develop the theory further through transdisciplinary scientific research in cooperative projects between those working in such apparently disparate fields as practical ecology, ocean science, evolutionary biology, biochemistry, geology, and climatology.
Continuing this research, Lovelock and others have shown that Gaia self-regulates at a global scale through life-environment interactions, and that as a result the earth has remained in a habitable state over billions of years. The theory suggests that its habitability results from three intrinsic properties and one extrinsic property of living organisms.
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