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• Title: Life Questioning Itself: By Way of an Introduction.
• Author : Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy
• Release Date : January 01, 2008
• Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 216 KB

Description

It is surely no coincidence that with the threat of a global ecological catastrophe there has been a resurgence of interest in the question 'What is life?' James Lovelock, for instance, who suggests that this catastrophe will leave only two hundred million people alive at the end of the century, has argued that the Earth is different from other planets not only because it has life, but because it is a living being, raising immediately the question what is it to be a living being. (1) He had argued that living beings have moulded the Earth to produce the conditions for life, resulting among other things in an atmosphere consisting of reactive gases that are not at chemical equilibrium. It was on this basis that he held the Earth to be a living entity, a form of life which regulates its chemistry and temperature to suit life. As a form of life it is sick. (2) It has lost its resilience due to human activity and is undergoing a transformation to remove the cause of this sickness: most of humanity. That is, it seems to act with purpose. Lovelock's claims were immediately contested. The response of mainstream biologists revealed their discomfiture at the questioning of a crucial assumption of mainstream science, that there is no real purpose in nature. As the famous proponent of sociobiology and orthodox science, Richard Dawkins, put it in The Extended Phenotype, the global ecosystem cannot be self-regulating because planets do not reproduce. (3) Teleology can only be entertained as shorthand for the forms of growth, organization or activity that have survived in the past because they facilitated survival and have been bequeathed to offspring through the Darwinian process of reproduction, variation and natural selection. As such it is better characterized as 'teleononomy' than 'teleology' or 'purpose', and is only the appearance of purpose. In response, Lovelock showed how a self-regulatory system could develop without being the outcome of natural selection, illustrating this with a model of black and white daisies surviving differentially according to whether the Earth's temperature is hotter (favouring white daisies, which would then reflect more heat) or colder (favoring black daisies, which would then absorb more heat). Lovelock, along with Lynn Margulis, continued this argument by suggesting that the Earth as a living entity has evolved through the development of increasingly complex forms of symbiosis and through ecosystems, including the global ecosystem, eliminating those organisms that foul their own nests. (4) Identifying such mechanisms provides support for Lovelock's claim that the Earth can be a self-regulating system maintaining the conditions for life without this having been the result of the Darwinian mechanism of reproduction, variation and selection. However, it is clear from the debate between Lovelock and his opponents that deeper issues are involved. The argument reveals fundamental differences over what is science, what is an explanation, and more fundamentally, what is life, what is its significance, what is the place of humanity in the evolution of life, and how should we live our lives. While Lovelock's work is not at the centre of debates on the question of what is life, his work shows how consideration of our ecological predicament raises this question and shows that our entire conception of who we are and what is our place and role in the cosmos hinges on this question. Further evidence for this comes from the work of a leading US biologist, Edward O. Wilson. Along with Dawkins, Wilson had been a major figure in the development and promulgation of sociobiology which, in its dominant form, was the pinnacle of the synthetic theory of evolution. It sought to explain living organisms as nothing but machines for reproducing DNA . That is, it effectively sought to explain life by explaining it away. The development and promulgation of sociobiology was important in the advance of neo-liberalism and neo-cons

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