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.
