Gaia's evil twin: Is life its own worst enemy?

New Scientist ^ | June 17, 2009 | Peter Ward

[P.O.E.]

THE twin Viking landers that defied the odds to land on Mars in 1976 and 1977 had one primary goal: to find life. To the disappointment of nearly all concerned, the data they sent back was a sharp dash of cold water. The Martian surface was harsh and antibiotic and there was no sign of life.

To two NASA scientists, James Lovelock and Dian Hitchcock, this came as no surprise - in fact, they would have been amazed to see any evidence of life on Mars. A decade before Viking, Lovelock and Hitchcock, both atmospheric scientists, had used observations of the Martian atmosphere to deduce that there could be no life on the planet.

From their research arose one of the most influential, ground-breaking scientific ideas of the 20th century - the Gaia hypothesis, named after the ancient Greek goddess of the Earth, a nurturing "mother" of life. But is it correct? New scientific findings suggest that the nature of life on Earth is not at all like Gaia. If we were to choose a mythical mother figure to characterise the biosphere, it would more accurately be Medea, the murderous wife of Jason of the Argonauts. She was a sorceress, a princess - and a killer of her own children.

[P.O.E.]

This topic was already covered in a related post, but this contains source material.

This article also contains an interactive graphic timeline of Medean events

To be fair, I found this article from the appropriately named And Now the Screaming Starts

[Pietro]

I hate to be a Luddite, but uh, boy, is that a crock of bovine residue.

I would give more credence to Mayan mythology than to this article or its Medea/Gaia duality. Gosh, we only have 500 million (or was that billion) more years to live.

[Thommas]

As one reads through this "scientific" article, its many and varied hypotheses, or guesses, quickly raise more questions than provide purported answers. All life extinguished by megaglaciation, except for those oxygen intolerant photo-synthesizers who had the good sense to evolve into oxygen tolerant species? But of course..

That evolution brain/mechanism thingy brilliantly "creates" the perfect survival device at just the right time, in just the right organism and with just the right inheritable mutation. One would come to think that this evolution theory is prescient, omniscient and all powerful..

[Pietro]

What upsets me most about such grand "prophesies" is the assumption that conditions on this earth move in straight projections; which of course they never do.

For example, if a lack of CO2, ironically, will be our doom, then a period of above average volcanic activity will reverse this peril.