HOLISTIC SCIENCE

A Tapestry of Essays
by
Robin Wilding

8 Order at a Global Level

“Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth, catching
the breath, is that it is alive.” Lewis Thomas.

Gaia and Global self-regulation

On the top floor of a building at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena, a
seminal idea was born in the mind of James Lovelock. NASA was at that time planning to
send a spacecraft, Viking 1 to see if life could be detected on Mars. Lovelock had invented a
method of detecting trace amounts of gas, and so he had been invited to join the team of
scientists whose task it was to design equipment which would detect any forms of life on
these neighbouring planets. In his book " Gaia, A Living Planet" Lovelock describes the
moment of insight. The results of the atmospheric analysis by light absorption spectrometry
of Mars and Venus had just come in. They were very disappointing. The atmosphere of
Venus was loaded with sulphuric acid and the surface temperature was about 400 degrees.
Mars was not much better with masses of carbon dioxide. Carl Sagan was still optimistic. He
really wanted to find life on Mars. For Lovelock, suddenly these two planets, Venus and
Mars, seemed normal. Earth was an abnormal planet. In comparison to the other two, the
earth is burning, oxidising ... the oxygen must be going to sinks, and being replaced because
the atmosphere is constant. Oxygen was thought to come from photolysis (splitting up of
water by light in the upper atmosphere), methane from outgassing . He recalls saying out
aloud something like “There is no life on Mars and Venus. The Earth's atmosphere is not just
life supporting it is controlled by life. Life on Earth is self regulating”. No one took much
notice. Carl Saga thought Lovelock was wrong, but he did later say.. if you are right, it might
explain how the earth has stayed so cool for the last 4 million years. Lovelock did not really
expect his colleagues to make the leap he had. For some time he had doubted the current

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explanations for the high oxygen and low carbon dioxide levels of the atmosphere. He
wanted to confirm that what he was suggesting was possible and therefore welcomed meeting
Lynn Margulis who was interested in the mass effect of bacterial fermentation and algal
photosynthesis on the earth’ atmosphere. She had independently come to the conclusion that
oxygen was not the only gas produced by life. Together they worked at the possible
connections between the activity of the microbiota, and the maintenance of a global
atmosphere far from equilibrium. The scientific community was not impressed, particularly
with the mystical connotation of an Earth Goddess. It was not until Lovelock and Watson
produced a mathematical model in which plants regulated the earth’s temperature, that the
hypothesis took on the respectability of a theory (though there are many who would still deny
it that status). Lovelock comments that you cannot explain biological complex systems
without using mathematics, although of course there is mystery in the world around us and
there always will be. Western science has no place for the spirit and that which cannot be
seen.
The idea of a layer of life on earth which might interact with non living element of the
earth, had emerged in the Soviet Union some years previously . Unknown to Lovelock at the
time, Vernadsky had proposed that life on earth and the non living matter which it was
intimately connected, formed a layer around the earth which he called the biosphere. He may
have been influenced by his uncle Korlenko who declared "the earth is an organism"
However this is of historical interest and did not help to bridge the conceptual gulf
between the conventional Western view of life and its separate, given, non-participating
environment. The view, widely held today, is that the environment of organisms, is a given
factor over which they have no control. They exploit what they can and avoid what is not
useful or toxic. If the environment changes, they adapt to it or die.. Lovelock was saying
something deeply shocking to biologists, that organisms regulated their environment, so as to
sustain life on a global level.

Towards a global level of self-regulation

We have noted the apparent order that emerges from collections of multi species
aggregates of microorganisms. The evolutionary process which might have allowed this

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collective order to emerge is possible to imagine, as within the lifetime of the organism the
collective behaviour and environmental regulator genes are preserved. We can see two
important aspects of living organisms in the microcosm which will help bridge the step
upscale to the biosphere. The first is that there is a level of order emergent in very large
aggregates of dissimilar organism which is not a function of their structure or individual
function, though their individuality allows for a shift in identity from the part (eg. Planktonic
bacteria, protozoa) to a whole (biofilm, slime mould) when conditions are stressful.
The second aspect of order in the microcosm which may lead towards an understanding
or global order, is that organisms, as Maturana and Varela suggest, allow for the
transformation of each other and maintenance of the perpetuating cycles of order, on an
unlimited time scale. It is the order in organisation rather than the order in structure that
persists. The order in organisation is not a time dependent phenomenon. It can be as,
Margulis argues, writ large, to which could be added, at every possible time scale, from
seconds to eons.

Global self-regulation
Some insight into the extent to which life has altered the earth, is offered by tracing the
early interactions between the family of minerals and gases which have become an essential
part of life, and their regulation by and for life, from the time of the archaean earth to the
present.
The young Archaean Earth, more than 3 billion years (3 eons) ago would have cooler
than it is today, warmed gently by a younger sun radiating 25% less heat than it does today.
The would have been a pale red in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide, ammonia, sulphur
dioxide and methane, all outgassings from the frequent volcanic activity. The sea would have
been brown, reflecting the red sky, just as out green sea today reflects the blue sky. The
brown colour would have ben due to silt washed of newly exposed rock, like an African river
in flood. The sea would have been acidic due to dissolved atmospheric gases.
The sun is warming up all the time. If earth had been just another planet, without life, it
would today have an average temperature of about 40 degrees centigrade, instead of the
current 15. It would have lost its water at this temperature and be heating up rapidly, much

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like Venus did. There was something different about the Earth, that this did not happen, and
one theory suggests that this was due to its size and distance from the sun. It was not so small
and far away as Mars, which lost its inner heat rapidly due to its higher surface volume ratio,
and is now -45 degrees and dry. Venus on the other hand was just a bit large to lose its heat
by radiation and too close to the Sun to cool down. The surface temperature is now around
400 degrees centigrade, and just as dry as Mars. The Earth however was just the right size, for
life to get started. This theory, of being just the right size, is aptly named after Goldilocks.
In hot sulphur springs, bacteria live today, in a lifestyle which is possibly unchanged
since the periods of red skies and brown seas. These bacteria are able to use hydrogen
sulphide as a source of hydrogen and by capturing sunlight convert carbon dioxide into a
hydrocarbon, water and sulphur. A later version of photosynthesis enabled cyanobacteria to
crack the hydrogen out of water, releasing oxygen into the atmosphere. Very gradually the
oxygen level of the atmosphere would have increased. Much of the oxygen would have
disappeared in a reducing environment of rocks exposing iron, sulphur, hydrogen, and other
minerals . Most of the carbon dioxide drawn down by photosynthesis would have been
locked up in organic molecules which found their way into sediments. The carbon buried by
sedimentation of the bodies of blue green algae provided the oldest fossil fuel deposits. As we
burn fossil fuels, we are putting back the carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which took
millions of years to remove. Some carbon compounds produced by the cyanobacteria would
have been pulled apart by bacteria producing methane as a by-product. There was not
enough oxygen to support much aerobic respiration. But the methane would have gone back
into the atmosphere, and performed as a super greenhouse gas, thereby regulating
temperature as increasing amounts of carbon dioxide were drawn down by photosynthesis.
An increasing level of oxygen in the atmosphere of the Archaean earth is reflected in the
beds of banded ironstone in which brown, ferric iron alternates with bands of lighter ferrous
iron. At 2 billion years ago there was enough oxygen to form continuous beds of brown
ironstone which today form the cliffs along the coast of Devon.
A crucial feature of the Archaean earth was its water. Without the unique "keystone" qualities
of water as a solvent and matrix for chemical reactions, life cannot exist. Yet without life, it is
likely that the Earth wold have lost is water during the Archaean. One of the sinks for oxygen

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is hydrogen. If hydrogen were not oxidised it would have escaped the earth's weak
gravitational field and the earth would have become hydrogen depleted and dry. For every
oxygen atom made available by photosynthesis, two hydrogen atoms are trapped as water
and four are bound to the carbon compound formed during photosynthesis. The absence of
water (and atmospheric hydrogen) on Venus and Mars may be because life was not
sustainable on those planets, a consequence of the Goldilocks effect.
One of the mythologies about the early atmosphere was the powerful sterilising affect
of ultraviolet life in the absence of ozone. Lovelock points out that bacteria in films (their
preferred habitat) are quite resistant to ultra violet light, and therefore challenges the idea that
the biota of the archaean earth were fragile in a hostile earth. (As a sterilising technique in
food preparation and hospitals, UV light it is effective only against airborne bacteria.)
Towards the end of the Archaean period, a development of great consequence occurred
which remains central to all multicellular organism today. This was the symbiotic relationship
between plastids, mitochondria, and spirochaetes into a single large bacterial host. This
cooperation between different organisms is a recurring theme in the subsequent record of life
on earth. It is a shadow theme, to the more popular idea of competition for survival, captured
in Tennyson’s metaphor “nature red in tooth and claw”. It is notable that competition for
survival, if it is such a potent strategy, has lead to the extinction of 99% of all species that ever
lived. However cooperative ventures have left patterns of organisation, like the eucaryote cell,
that they are so still with us all. The products of life are its own organisation. The structures
within, whether ammonites or dinosaurs, are more ephemeral; they come and go.
The new eukaryote (nucleated) protoctists where both photosynthesising food
producers, and movers, strictly speaking neither plant nor animal. They gave rise to plants,
fungi, and animals. Some of the varieties of algae developed calcific shells around them.
Coccolithosphores, such as Emeliana huxlei, get their calcium form calcium carbonate
washed into the sea from rock weathering. The atmospheric carbon dioxide forms a weak
carbonic acid which leaches out metallic salts in freshly exposed rock, particularly granites
and basalt which are rich in silica and oxygen.

CaSiO3 + HCO3 >> Ca(HC03)2 + H2Si O4

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 calcium carbonic soluble calcium silicic acid
silicte acid bicarbonate

In this process of rock weathering carbon is drawn out of the atmosphere and seeps
into the ground as bicarbonate salts or is washed out to sea, where the calcium and carbon
form an important mineral source for the coccolithosphores. They combine the calcium with
atmospheric carbon which eventually lands on the sea bed as a sediment of dead organisms.
This sediment will eventually turn inot chalk like the cliffs so visible around the port of Dover.

The cumulative affect of millions of years of carbon burial has been to reduce the
atmospheric carbon dioxide to its current low levels of about 0.03 % . Carbon dioxide is a
powerful greenhouse gas, that is its molecular weight is high enough to act as a barrier to
reflected solar heat from the Earth's surface. Thus marine algae, and to a lesser extent land
plants, have provided levels of atmospheric oxygen which support the entire respiring biota of
the Earth. The levels of oxygen have been surprisingly constant at about 21% for millions of
years. This stability is against the thermodynamic expectations of a powerful oxidising gas in
the presence of an inflammable gas, methane and another less reactive but plentiful
atmospheric gas, nitrogen. The level of 21% is just sufficient for adequate respiration and not
so high as to cause spontaneous combustion or to poison the metabolic processes which are
sensitive to the potentially lethal affects of free oxygen radicals.

Gaian regulation of temperature

Low cloud and ice reflect back the sun's rays keeping the earth cool. Clouds require
seeding in order to allow water vapour to condense. Phytoplankton play a crucial role in cloud
seeding as they release dimethyl sulphide into the air, which oxidises to form sulphate ions. The
precursor of dimethyl sulphide is produced by algae to retain intracellular fluid in the stronger
osmotic pressure of sea water. Its affect on cloud formation has a possible feedback mechanism
on the earth's temperature. Phytoplankton grow best where the sea is cool enough not to have
a thermocline which in warm water prevents up-welling nutrient-rich current reaching the sunlit
layers of the oceans. If the seas warmed up to more than about 8 degrees centigrade, a
thermocline develops and the growth rate of phytoplankton is reduced, and hence the amount

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of dimethyl sulphide released for cloud formation would be reduced. Fewer clouds mean lower
albedo (reflectivity) and the earth would warm up. This negative feedback loop works in reverse,
to warm the earth. The close connection between algal growth, cloud formation and earth albedo
is just one of the feedback systems which Gaia theory proposes keeps the earth's temperature at
a life -sustaining level for the last 1.5 billion years.
This hypothesis has been strengthened by the behaviour of a mathematical model called
Daisyworld, designed by Lovelock and Watson. In its most simple form, the agents are daisies
whose colour varies between black and white. The daisies have an optimum growing temperature,
not too hot and not too cold. The total albedo of the planet depends on the proportion of light
and dark daisies at any point in time, and this influences the earth’s temperature. More black
daisies warm up the earth and more white ones cool it down. The model is forced by a
progressively hotter sun. At first, the sun is cool, mimicking the Archaean period, the earth’s
temperature is below ideal and the black daisies predominate, as their dark surface captures more
heat. It is too cold for white daisies. The black daisies decrease the earth’s albedo so it warms up.
As the sun gets hotter, and the earth’s temperature is mild , there are even numbers of black and
white daisies. The sun’s temperature continues to increase until it is too hot for black daisies.
White daisies absorb less heat but they also reflect more so the sun’ forcing temperature is for
a while controlled. Eventually the sun gets too hot for the daisies to control and after an
interesting oscillation in temperature, they all die and the earth heats up. This model displays in
a graphic way how earth albedo could be affected by life and in turn maintain a suitable
temperature for life.
Other systems thought to operate in conjunction with the phytoplankton in controlling the
earth’s temperature by reducing carbon dioxide levels, are the already mentioned effect of land
micro biota and plants on rock weathering. A consequence of an increase in land temperature
therefore operates on both the dimethyl sulphide feedback loop, and the rock weathering loop
to cool the earth.
The balance between arctic tundra and boreal forest is another dynamic which regulates the
earth's temperature. The peat bogs of the tundra are too acidic for decomposing bacteria, and
so the carbon of decaying plant matter remains locked out of the atmosphere. The bog is too wet
for the roots of trees and so the land is flat and featureless. It presents a very high albedo when

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covered with snow. The peat bogs are thus giant coolers of the earth. They have a positive
feedback as the colder it gets the longer the high allbedo remains. The boreal forests do better in
relatively warmer conditions and having a low albedo tend to keep the earth warm. Thus both
tundra and boreal forest influence earth temperature.

The evolution of Gaia

Gaia theory proposes that organisms which change and regulate conditions suitable for
life, over geological time scales. The atmosphere, oceans and land masses of the ancient world
(3000my ago) would not have supported the life it does today. So Gaian regulation has evolved
along with life. Our Darwinian mythology for evolution embodies the narrative of adaptation and
survival of the fittest. Successful adaptation is the result of an almost infinite number of random
mutations from which a few more successful versions survive. This paradigm leads to the
dilemma, expressed by detractors of Gaian theory, such as Richard Dawkins, that there have not
been enough "failed- at- supporting- life planets" to prove that proper evolutionary process has
occurred. This is a sad reflection, of the stronghold in the Western mind, of the “win or lose” rule
for defining success. The evolution of life itself is supposed to have emerged by the same
process of natural selection from millions of unstable attempts. So many millions, and so
unlikely, that many scientists believe the odds are overwhelming against a few self replicating
molecules appearing.. If we cannot see a plausible process for the emergence of life by random
trial and error, why should we persist in using this metaphor for the emergence of order at the
global scale. However if the physical-chemistry was far from equilibrium, certainly dissipative
and non linear, the chances look more promising in looking for cellular order (life) out of Eigen’s
cycles of self catalysing enzymes. If order (life) can emerge from basins of organisation, and does
not require or benefit from a trail and error, survival-of- the- fittest process, global order may
likewise not be a random process requiring hundreds of planets for selection to make a winning
draw.
What process could link such remote events in time, as the expression of a bacterial
genome and the emergence of global regulation, that would explain how one could affect the
other? We can recall the injunction of Prigogene that the difference between the cat and the
sunflower lies not in its structure but in its organising properties. The organism is a function of

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organisational options, from which there are not an infinite number of choices. Goethe reminds
us that
“All forms are alike and none is like another
So that their chorus points the way to a hidden law”
If our focus is on organisation, rather than structure, then the scales, either of space or time
do not alter the pattern of organisation. It is possible to see in fractal patterns (which emerge at
the edge of chaos), organisation which is self similar at an infinite scale. This is suggested by the
observation that the fossil record for one organism (ammonites) follows a fractal pattern of
extinctions.
The coming into being, to avoid the loaded term “evolution”, of Gaia then does not depend
on structural adaptation, requiring there to be competition between planets, but on a pattern of
order which works right through, from the levels of the cell, to organisms, aggregates of
organisms, to ecosystems and biosphere(s).

Summary
In no part of the conventional story of evolution does life create its environment. The
environment is a fixture to which life adapts, or dies. Yet it is obvious that bacterial aggregates
in biofilms, whether on rocks around a sulphur geyser, or in the gut of a termite, control the
crucial variables such as pH, oxygen tension, diffusion rates, macro architectures and many
more feature to suit their lifestyle. The interactions are complex enough for unplanned,
uncontroled, unpredictable properties to emerge. Organisms have not adapted to a given fixed
environment but altered it and in the process become altered themselves.
A definition of life is not easy to come by. None of the conventional biological versions
captures the irreducible wholeness of the "living" and the "non-living". Our school teachers ask
pupils to focus on the differences between a frog and the rock it sits on. Not so the Eastern
teacher who wants the pupils to see both rock and frog as possessing a spirit. The Western
religions have planted dualism securely in our mythology. Is the earth alive? Is a tree alive?
Lovelock answers, yes, (to both questions), although most of it is by strict definition dead. One
could add that even a dead stricken tree was yet alive. For within and on it live worms, beetles,

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bacteria, fungi, lichen. It is certainly more nearly alive than the wooden table I sit at, which is yet
closer to life than the metal chair I sit in. Walt Whitman advises us not to be too precise or
scientific about birds and trees and flowers. The Buddhist way would advise that the more urgent
our need to grasp the more evasive our quarry becomes. The idea that the earth is a living
organism does not stretch any liberal definition of life. And the product of the living organism,
according to Maturana, is its own organisation.

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