Medea escapes Jason on a chariot led by fire-breathing dragons (painting by Charles-Andre van Loo, 1759)
In Greek mythology Medea, the enchantress and princess of Colchis, killed her two sons out of revenge for her lover deserting her. She also lends her name to paleontologist Peter Ward’s hypothesis, which argues that life has self-destructive tendencies. This hypothesis challenges and contradicts the Gaia Theory (named after another goddess, the Greek goddess of the Earth), which posits that organisms can and do adapt their environment “to suit themselves”. Ward argues that organisms have triggered repeated mass extinctions; hardly behaviour of self-interest, contests Ward. Or is it?
Perhaps it is a matter of definition. For instance, what is “self” and therefore “self-interest”. Where does “self” end and “other” begin? Bring in fractals, autopoiesis, synchronicity, self-organization, and altruism and it all begins to blur. Bring in notions of cellular “intelligence” and concepts of “external mind” and morphic resonance and our traditional precepts of ‘self’ and ‘self-interest’ lose themselves within the greater complexity of “stable chaos.” Stable chaos is a term I coined in my novel Darwin’s Paradox to describe the apparent chaotic behavior of nature and the universe that is, in fact, stable—but humans cannot perceive mainly because of scale and our lack of perspective.
For his thesis that organisms trigger repeated mass extinctions, Ward gives the example of the Permian extinction, which led to the demise of over 90 percent of all the species some 250 million years ago. According to Ward, the “Great Dying” was caused by sulphur-generating marine bacteria that poisoned the sea and land. Bad bacteria… Others suggest this was caused by other cataclysmic events.
In any case, Lee Kump, professor of geosciences at Pennsylvania State University, reminds us that the primary organs of the Earth system—photosynthesis, respiration, and associated greenhouse gas production and destruction—remained intact and continued uninterrupted. Animal life eventually recovered and achieved levels of diversity and complexity that far surpassed what existed before, says Kump. In other words, the cataclysm of the “Great Dying” (or was it a great purge of Biblical proportions?) provided an “opportunity” for life to regenerate, establish and diversify. This is a pattern that is not unique in nature and is somewhat reminiscent of Buzz Holling’s “creative-destruction” model in highly functional and resilient ecological systems. It is only scale that separates the colonization of a valley devastated—but nourished—by a forest fire and a mass-extinction of global proportions. Fractal Ecology, a term that I coined in my speculative novel Darwin’s Paradox, is the science of ecology that examines the fractal relationship and inter-communication of biological levels in a self-organized pattern, from molecules to cell to ecosystem and beyond. Scale is the lens for perceiving our fractal landscapes and how they are interconnected and interact and loop into one another.
When in the early 1970s James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis hypothesized that living organisms actively modified their environment to keep the Earth habitable, they were following in the footsteps of James Hutton (the father of modern geology) who in 1785 imagined the planet as a kind of metaphoric “super-organism”. As a result of their discussions about the role of micro-organisms as links to life and the Earth, Lovelock’s and Margulis’s Gaia Hypothesis ironically hinged yet again on sulphur and its essential role in living things. The concept of “feedback mechanisms” lies at the heart of Gaia Theory. Changes in external conditions trigger responses that counteract the changes. Living organisms regulate global environmental change through behavior that creates a dynamic “equilibrium” of sorts. This is similar to the homeostatic behavior of organisms at the cellular and tissue level. Think “fractal” and scale. In fact, biochemists have applied Gaia-like rationale to the study of human biochemistry such as its impressive ability to regulate glucose production to demand.
Planet Earth (photo by NASA)
The hypothesis attracted hostile criticism from the traditional scientific community. They claimed that it contravened Darwinian evolution, required organisms to “know” and have “purpose” and “simply loathed its associated New Age overtones,” wrote Robert Matthews in the Futurist. Richard Dawkins, one of the community’s chief objectors, criticized the theory on the grounds that it demanded global altruism among organisms—a feature that contravenes Darwinian natural selection, according to those same scientists. It is interesting to note that Dawkins had similarly dismissed Margulis’s theory of endosymbiosis (that cells evolve through cooperation, which challenged the neo-Darwinist concept of Natural Selection and Dawkin’s concept of the “selfish-gene”), only to retract his criticism when the theory was proven fact.
Indeed, the case for or against altruism has not yet begun to be made. I find it rather hubristic of the Dawkin’s camp to summarily dismiss altruism in an evolutionary model (based on their interpretation of what Darwin posited two hundred years ago) when so many examples of successful altruistic behaviour in species occur.
It is uncanny and almost eerie how closely the metaphoric tales of the Bible and mythical poems associated with it (e.g., Blake’s Paradise Lost and Dante’s A Divine Comedy) resonate with the Earth’s major and cataclysmic events: floods that “cleansed” the planet, the fire and the brimstone…
Evidence for climate self-regulation can be seen in the stable climate of the last four billion years despite an ever-increasing solar luminosity, asserts Kump, and despite the biological hiccups such as the “Great Dying”.
With climate change irrefutably a function of human activity, are we proof of Ward’s theory?
With climate change and catastrophe upon us as we burn up the copious fossil fuel laid in the earth during the Carboniferous Era, the Anthropocene is here. How will Gaia or Medea respond? Recall what Medea did and why …
Poplars by the river after a first snow (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)
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Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press(Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.
