The Way the Future Blogs

One of the troubles with science is that it doesn’t offer a lot of comfort to help us get through those long winter nights when half the people you know have lost their jobs or their homes and there’s a blizzard on its way down from the Yukon. That was one of the things everyone loved about NASA scientist James Lovelock‘s Gaia hypothesis.

You remember, the one that said that, looked at in a certain way, the Earth’s biota, everything from the H1N1 swine flu virus to Lonesome George, the last surviving member of his species of Galapagoan tortoises — including you and me and the rose bushes in our back yard — could be viewed as parts of a single planet-girdling organism that was a sort of combination thermostat and everything-else-stat that worked hard to keep the planet’s environment just right for living things to live long and prosper. Since our species is one of those living things, that was the sort of scientific concept that, like a pair of fluffy bunny slippers and s shawl over the shoulders on one of those winter nights, gives the promise that things may not really be quite so bad, after all.

Gaia was a comfort, as a good Earth mother should be. I’m going to miss her. You see, she’s gone.

Along has come this biology professor from the University of Seattle, Peter Ward, and he has written a book about an anti-Gaia to whom he has given the name Medea, after one of the meanest of Greek mythological figures. (She gave her dinner guests her own children as a main course.)

Gaia shelters and protects all living things. Medea, however, treats them in a different way. She just does her best to kill them, usually as part of a mass extinction. There have been over a dozen of these since life first appeared on Earth, some 3,800,000,000 years before the present (or, as it is more conveniently written, 3.8 bya, for billion years ago.) None of the mass extinctions has been quite total — so far — but more than one has come pretty close.

The most famous mass extinction most of us have heard of was the comparatively recent but celebrated dinosaur-killer of 55 mya, but it isn’t part of the kind of extinction Ward was talking about. It was what Ward calls a non-Medea event; nothing living having hurled that giant rock at the ancient Atlantic coast. But Medean events are plentiful, going back to the first extinction event of all.

We’ve just mentioned that the first actual living creatures appeared on our planet about 3.8 bya. How long do you suppose before the first extinction event? In geological terms, not long at all. It happened around 3.7 bya. I don’t know what the creatures it slew looked like, but I know that they ate, and did their best to reproduce, and excreted methane before they died.

It was the excreting and reproducing that killed them. No animal can survive in its own excretions, and all animals have a built-in drive to reproduce — without limit.

When Earth’s first population reached the crisis point, so numerous that their numbers exceeded the capacity of the planet to dilute them, they began to die, and that was the first extinction.

 
Not all the extinctions are the result of poisoning life, with methane or anything else. “Snowball Earth” extinctions have come about because new life forms, needing warmth for their efficient new photosynthetic metabolisms, sucked so much of it out of the system that all the oceans froze miles deep, and stayed that way for some hundred million years. And of course there’s that troublesome current extinction event, the one they call “the human-induced mass extinction.”

Now, whether Professor Ward is giving us Scripture or some sort of embarrassing mistake I don’t know. His book is too new to have gone through the questioning and challenge and disagreement that are the things that make science scientific. But it seems to me that he has a good many surprising new ideas and defends them well. I think you would enjoy the book. Get it from your local library … or, if you want to do something to support that other threatened life form, the book dealer, you could always buy a copy of the book.

You’ll be helping to protect another critically endangered species that is dear to me, namely the very concept of the book itself.