Gaia hypothesis, known as the Gaia theory, Gaia paradigm, or the Gaia principle, proposes that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet.
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Topics related to the Gaia hypothesis include how the biosphere and the evolution of organisms affect the stability of global temperature, salinity of seawater, atmospheric oxygen levels, the maintenance of a hydrosphere of liquid water and other environmental variables that affect the habitability of Earth.
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Gaia hypothesis was initially criticized for being teleological and against the principles of natural selection, but later refinements aligned the Gaia hypothesis with ideas from fields such as Earth system science, biogeochemistry and systems ecology.
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Lovelock gave evidence of this in his second book, Ages of Gaia hypothesis, showing the evolution from the world of the early thermo-acido-philic and methanogenic bacteria towards the oxygen-enriched atmosphere today that supports more complex life.
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Since barriers existed throughout the twentieth century between Russia and the rest of the world, it is only relatively recently that the early Russian scientists who introduced concepts overlapping the Gaia hypothesis paradigm have become better known to the Western scientific community.
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Gaia hypothesis paradigm was an influence on the deep ecology movement.
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Gaia hypothesis posits that the Earth is a self-regulating complex system involving the biosphere, the atmosphere, the hydrospheres and the pedosphere, tightly coupled as an evolving system.
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The hypothesis contends that this system as a whole, called Gaia, seeks a physical and chemical environment optimal for contemporary life.
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The originality of the Gaia hypothesis relies on the assessment that such homeostatic balance is actively pursued with the goal of keeping the optimal conditions for life, even when terrestrial or external events menace them.
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CLAW hypothesis, inspired by the Gaia hypothesis, proposes a feedback loop that operates between ocean ecosystems and the Earth's climate.
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The Gaia hypothesis specifically proposes that particular phytoplankton that produce dimethyl sulfide are responsive to variations in climate forcing, and that these responses lead to a negative feedback loop that acts to stabilise the temperature of the Earth's atmosphere.
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The mythical Gaia hypothesis was the primal Greek goddess personifying the Earth, the Greek version of "Mother Nature", or the Earth Mother.
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Lovelock called it first the Earth feedback Gaia hypothesis, and it was a way to explain the fact that combinations of chemicals including oxygen and methane persist in stable concentrations in the atmosphere of the Earth.
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However, she objected to the widespread personification of Gaia hypothesis and stressed that Gaia hypothesis is "not an organism", but "an emergent property of interaction among organisms".
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The Gaia hypothesis has since been supported by a number of scientific experiments and provided a number of useful predictions.
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Strong Gaia hypothesis, Kirchner claimed, was untestable and therefore not scientific.
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Lovelock and other Gaia-supporting scientists did attempt to disprove the claim that the hypothesis is not scientific because it is impossible to test it by controlled experiment.
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For example, against the charge that Gaia hypothesis was teleological, Lovelock and Andrew Watson offered the Daisyworld Model as evidence against most of these criticisms.
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Lovelock was careful to present a version of the Gaia hypothesis that had no claim that Gaia intentionally or consciously maintained the complex balance in her environment that life needed to survive.
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Fourth international conference on the Gaia hypothesis, sponsored by the Northern Virginia Regional Park Authority and others, was held in October 2006 at the Arlington, VA campus of George Mason University.
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Lynn Margulis, Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and long-time advocate of the Gaia hypothesis, was a keynote speaker.
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Doolittle argued that nothing in the genome of individual organisms could provide the feedback mechanisms proposed by Lovelock, and therefore the Gaia hypothesis proposed no plausible mechanism and was unscientific.
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Gaia hypothesis's wrote that the composition of the Earth's atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere are regulated around "set points" as in homeostasis, but those set points change with time.
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Evolutionary biologist W D Hamilton called the concept of Gaia Copernican, adding that it would take another Newton to explain how Gaian self-regulation takes place through Darwinian natural selection.
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Gaia hypothesis continues to be broadly skeptically received by the scientific community.
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