Cybernetics and the Gaia Hypothesis: A conversation with Bruce Clarke

Bruce Clarke discusses the cybernetics of the Gaia hypothesis developed by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis.
Born in 1919, trained in chemistry, biomedicine, and engineering, the British scientist James Lovelock, inventor of the Gaia hypothesis, began his professional career in the 1940s. His systems thinking was formed in the first wave of cybernetic concepts-homeostasis, self-organization, negative feedback, self-regulation-as these were closely allied to discourses of energy and entropy connecting thermodynamics via information theory to physical definitions of living systems. For Lovelock, Erwin Schrödinger’s What is Life? was instrumental in forming his conception of a living planet as operating far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Cybernetics, as drawn from the physiological concept of homeostasis, then filled in his initial conception of the Gaian system.
Lovelock’s foremost collaborator on the Gaia hypothesis, the American microbiologist and evolutionary thinker Lynn Margulis, born in 1938, one generation younger than Lovelock and starting her academic career in the 1960s, was trained in genetics and cellular systems rather than thermodynamics and classical cybernetics. However, she absorbed Lovelock’s lessons on these topics and then, stepping outside of the standard biology of her moment, she strongly endorsed Maturana and Varela’s concept of biological autopoiesis. By the 1980s she would meld Lovelock’s first-order Gaia concept to her own second-order formulation of “autopoietic Gaia.”
In this talk, literature and science scholar Bruce Clarke will draw from the scientific writings of Lovelock and Margulis as well as from his forthcoming edition of their correspondence to document and discuss their cultivation of the Gaia hypothesis as a dedicated application of cybernetic systems thinking.

[@huddyboy9465]

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[@user-ee5ts4lm1l]

It should be noted that Margulis covered the spectrum of ideas from the revolutionary to the conspiratorial(HIV). This statement by her that Gaia also looks at us, is in my view contentious and suggests a complexity of Gaian consciousness for which we have no evidence. Lacking evidence we can use an analogy. Do you as a multicellular organism look at the micro organisms that populate your biosphere/logy? For the most part we do not, unless, there are symptoms of disease or infection that threatens the organism, but this is usually do to a foreign invader causing an infection. Humanity is not a foreign invader. Also, Earth as Gaia, if it is a superorganism, has an environment with which it lives within, aka, the solar system. And the solar system has an environment it exists within and it is called a Galaxy. Both of these systems we have only known about for a little over a century. If Earth's environment is no externality, that we are within it, then we also have to consider that the solar system is not an external environment to Gaia. Much of the anti human hand wringing that wishes to blame humanity for changes in earth's environment deliberately do not take the solar system into account, and that is because the IPCC has a political agenda rooted in eugenics. 'Read the IPCC mandate, its purpose is to focus on the human causes of climate change. If it was a scientific endeavor it would not have limited the causes to just that of humanity. And there are reasons why many scientists associated with the IPCC have left. Mostly it has to do with the political interpretation of their science.

[@lsdc1]

Cancer may be considered not as a result of a foreign invader, but as a result of dysregulation of native components of the system I.e. cells start to grow without the typical regulation of their context, leading to proliferation. It’s self somehow becoming non-self in that it no longer respects previous boundaries and protocols. Perhaps this is a more fitting perspective ?