Submitted by amondyyl t3_y0ails in philosophy
Gaia may be an interesting idea to make people think about how connected everything is on the planet but it is at best poetry or a literary device not a theory. The Earth isn't a living organism and it doesn't evolve in the sense that organisms evolve with natural selection. For that to be true the Earth would have to be competing with other living planets for resources, it would need to generate other planet organisms, there would need to be random mutations in the planets generated by the Earth that would be selected for, etc. None of this is my idea it is all in an essay Richard Dawkins wrote a long time ago debunking the Gaia hypothesis.
I realize what I discussed above is the version of the Gaia Hypothesis that the author of the article rejects but I wanted to get that out of the way first and then address the actual article. My problem is that if that isn't what the Gaia hypothesis is, it isn't clear what it actually is. I read the article and it seems that he's claiming it's a new way of thinking about life and that distinctions such as cell are artificial because the cells (at least in an animal body) are all dependent on each other. Which is all true (more or less) but it is hardly new. There are all sorts of theories that look at the organism not at the individual cells that make up its body but in terms of higher level organs comprised of millions of cells working together. The brain is probably the most interesting example. Neurologists don't just study individual neurons but layers and columns in the brain that do things like edge detection (in the visual cortex).
I say more or less because you can take individual cells from a body and keep them alive outside the body. So it can make sense to talk about an individual cell in the body or even to go smaller and talk about the mRNA in a cell and how it helps make copies of that cell. I found nothing of any scientific value in the article. I agree with the sentiment but I disagree with calling something that is a literary device a theory. If it's a theory it makes falsifiable predictions better than other theories of standard biology and I couldn't find any such predictions.
Actual biology is beautiful and mind blowing. The fact that in every cell you have a complete blueprint for the entire organism (the DNA in each cell) is incredible and also there are amazing parallels between information in computer science and in biology. John Maynard Smith wrote a fascinating paper on that where he talks about how Shannon's model of information (measured using the same formula as entropy, indeed information is a kind of anti-entropy, information is order and entropy is disorder). This stuff is just as poetic as the pseudoscience in this article and it actually is real not some poetic musings.
Addendum: the idea of looking at an ecosystem rather than just an individual organism is also not new. Again, there is actual science on this and again I recommend John Maynard Smith as a good place to start. Smith wrote a wonderful little book called Evolution and the Theory of Games. He shows that evolution isn't just about competition as is often incorrectly assumed. He uses mathematical game theory to model various types of both competition and collaboration. For example, Smith's game theory models explain (in a falsifiable testable way) why conspecifics who compete (e.g., for mates) seldom fight to the death or even to the point where they injure each other. Again, I find real science more beautiful and poetic than pseudoscience.
Thanks for the tip about the Shannon paper by J M Smith. His Theory of Evolution was already in my reading list. I have to say that I am a bit sceptical if most of his ideas are actually falsifiable in a testable way, but maybe you know better. Evolutionary theorist tend sometimes to make big statements that actually can't be proven, especially when discussing social and moral evolution of humans (think about the criticism by Gould etc.).
I think pseudoscience about Latour is a bit harsh, you can also call it philosophy (this is a philosophy sub). In general, I share your sentiment that science itself is much more interesting than sociology of science. I also think that Latour would be first to admit this.
I'm not a biologist so you make a good point, I can't give specific examples of how Smith's ideas are falsifiable. However, I do know that when I read other books by anthropologists who analyze Late Pleistocene human behavior (e.g., Christopher Boehm) or books on game theory and animal/human behavior they always cite Smith's work and I've read other things on information in biology that cites Smith's paper. In both cases that's why I read them because I kept seeing them cited so often.
As for philosophy and pseudoscience. I guess I am harsh because I see much (not all) of modern philosophy as pseudoscience. I have a thread in another group meant for longer discussions (I think it is /askphilosophy) where I raised this issue and tried to explain my ideas but I gave up because it seemed no one was really understanding what I was trying to say. Either because what I said wasn't clear or because it challenges some of the assumptions that many modern philosophers take for granted and don't want to give up. I would like to think it's the latter but of course I would think that.
I would be interested in seeing this thread if you can find it.
I'm not that adept at Reddit but I think this will take you to it: https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/xuk9yk/comment/irsc9ui/?context=3
Gould is someone I don't have much respect for. The thing that he's most well known for (Punctuated Equilibrium) is a kind of theory that I call "either trivial or wrong". I.e., the way Gould describes exactly what he means by Punctuated Equilibrium isn't very clear. If you interpret it one way (that mutations happen more often during certain times in history, i.e., those where there is massive climate change or other changes to the environment) then it is obviously true but trivial. Everyone already knew that when Gould published his work. If you take the more extreme interpretation, that adaptations ONLY occur during such periods then it is a new theory but is clearly wrong. I think many people don't realize this because the way Gould writes isn't very clear so he can provide evidence that supports the trivial version of his theory and pretend that it supports the more extreme version.
Another reason I don't care much for Gould is that I think he behaved in a very unprofessional manner in his criticism of E.O. Wilson and Sociobiology. He equated Sociobiology with all sorts of ideologies that is has nothing to do with. It got to the point where Wilson (who politically is far to the left) couldn't give presentations on college campuses without being disrupted by people calling him a fascist and much of that was based on Gould's unfair and incorrect criticism of Wilson's work. For more detail on this I recommend reading the first chapter in Cosmides and Tooby's excellent book on Evolutionary Psychology: The Adapted Mind. There is a PDF of that chapter here: The Psychological Foundations of Culture. It's worth reading for other reasons as well, it is an excellent introduction and overview to the relatively new field of Evolutionary Psychology (which IMO is mostly Sociobiology rebranded with a more acceptable name).
BTW, I'm not a fan of Wilson's latest work on Group Selection but I still think he was brilliant and a pioneer and was treated very unfairly by Gould. That was a complete tangent because you mentioned Gould, I'll reply to your main point in another comment.
> None of this is my idea it is all in an essay Richard Dawkins wrote a long time ago debunking the Gaia hypothesis.
Is "debunk" synonymous with "scientifically disproven"?
> I agree with the sentiment but I disagree with calling something that is a literary device a theory. If it's a theory it makes falsifiable predictions better than other theories of standard biology and I couldn't find any such predictions.
Are you perhaps accidentally conflating a theory with a scientific theory?
> This stuff is just as poetic as the pseudoscience in this article and it actually is real not some poetic musings.
Is this to say that the content of the article is necessarily incorrect (according to sound epistemology), in part or in whole?
> Again, I find real science more beautiful and poetic than pseudoscience.
Personally, I find internet armchair science and philosophy to be the most beautiful of all.
>Is "debunk" synonymous with "scientifically disproven"?
No. To be disproven a theory needs to be coherent and falsifiable. For example, the Ptolemaic model of the solar system was coherent and made predictions that were pretty accurate but as we could measure more precisely it was clear the Copernican model was more accurate. Debunk means that the theory isn't even coherent or falsifiable. Dawkins debunked the idea that the Earth could be considered a living organism the way a nematode or human are. He showed quite clearly that by many criteria this simply isn't true.
>Are you perhaps accidentally conflating a theory with a scientific theory?
I discussed this in another forum. I see the scientific method as something that can encompass all disciplines. For me science consists of a series of methods: experiments, peer review, analysis, math,... Not every discipline uses every method but one can study any topic that seeks objective truth scientifically. What's more I maintain that science is the only method that has shown it can lead to objective truth.
Having said that, not everything is science. One can write essays that are meant to inspire people or motivate them to contemplate certain aspects of the universe or their life. But when people use the word theory for me the only thing that can justify using that word is science. So if Gaia is a literary device meant to encourage people to think about how the entire planet is one biosphere and that small changes can ripple and affect us all then I'm fine with it. But when you call it a theory you are saying it can make predictions and explain things in a way that is also falsifiable. So yes for me theory and scientific theory are the same thing but I don't consider it conflating. I think that some academics (e.g., Postmodernism is notorious for this) like to call things theories when if you examine them closely they are just polysyllabic jargon for fairly straight forward ideas (e.g., that we live in a sexist, racist society, that colonialism was unjust, etc.).
>> Is "debunk" synonymous with "scientifically disproven"?
> No. To be disproven a theory needs to be coherent and falsifiable.
Ok, so we now know that Dawkins did not scientifically disprove it, which means it remains within the realm of plausibility.
> Dawkins debunked the idea that the Earth could be considered a living organism the way a nematode or human are. He showed quite clearly that by many criteria this simply isn't true.
Isn't true scientifically/literally, or isn't true colloquially/perceptually? Or something else?
>> Are you perhaps accidentally conflating a theory with a scientific theory?
> I discussed this in another forum. I see the scientific method as something that can encompass all disciplines. For me science consists of a series of methods: experiments, peer review, analysis, math,... Not every discipline uses every method but one can study any topic that seeks objective truth scientifically.
You didn't answer the question.
> What's more I maintain that science is the only method that has shown it can lead to objective truth.
We are all welcome to our own opinions, but not our own facts.
Do you have any substantial evidence that this is actually true?
> Having said that, not everything is science
Just everything (literally) that leads to objective truth though, right?
> But when people use the word theory for me the only thing that can justify using that word is science.
Can you explain your reasoning, including citations of prominent people?
> But when you call it a theory you are saying it can make predictions and explain things in a way that is also falsifiable.
Are you perhaps accidentally conflating a theory with a scientific theory?
> So yes for me theory and scientific theory are the same thing but I don't consider it conflating.
What is the precise meaning of "to me" in this context?
> I think that some academics (e.g., Postmodernism is notorious for this) like to call things theories when if you examine them closely they are just polysyllabic jargon for fairly straight forward ideas (e.g., that we live in a sexist, racist society, that colonialism was unjust, etc.).
The two words I bolded - do you mean these literally, or is there an implicit "to me" in play?
>Ok, so we now know that Dawkins did not scientifically disprove it, which means it remains within the realm of plausibility.
Sorry, I guess I wasn't clear. Dawkins showed that the Gaia theory is, to use a phrase that people sometimes use to criticize String Theory, "not even wrong". I.e., it demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what the concept living organism means in Biology. It isn't a coherent theory so you can't scientifically disprove it the way you could disprove a coherent (but wrong) scientific theory.
> it demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what the concept living organism means in Biology
Can you give one example that demonstrates this?
> It isn't a coherent theory so you can't scientifically disprove it the way you could disprove a coherent (but wrong) scientific theory.
If a theory cannot be scientifically proven or disproven, does that mean that it is necessarily incorrect?
As I said in my original post, an organism has to reproduce. There are other factors but that one by itself is sufficient. Every organism from single celled life to plants to humans reproduces. The Earth doesn't generate baby Earths that go out into the solar system and compete for resources with the offspring of other planets.
Regarding your second question if a theory can't be objectively proven or disproven (i.e., it isn't falsifiable) then it isn't what I consider a theory. It may be a metaphor or a literary device or something else but it isn't a theory. Note: this doesn't mean there has to be technology that we have at the current time that can falsify the theory. A good example is Einstein's theory of relativity. When he first created it the theory made predictions (e.g., that light from the sun would bend around Mercury) that couldn't be tested. Einstein and the world were lucky that technology became precise enough to measure the miniscule effects of a gravitational object on light shortly after Einstein published his work and experiments validated that Einstein's theories were correct.
Freudianism is another example of something that doesn't qualify as a theory because it isn't falsifiable. Kuhn and Popper first pointed this out using the Freudian example of Phobias and Reaction Formation. If the hypothesis is that a patient has a fear of intimacy and they are a virgin (demonstrate phobic behavior) that shows the hypothesis is correct according to Freudian theory. But if they go out and have sex with anything that moves that is reaction formation and also confirms the hypothesis. The hypothesis can't be proven wrong and hence the theory isn't scientific. That doesn't mean Freud wasn't brilliant, nor that he didn't make some important discoveries. The concept of the unconscious and that it could play a major role in human behavior was a major leap in psychology and virtually everyone accepts it now. But virtually no one doing experimental psychology takes Freudian theory seriously since Kuhn and Popper (many people in clinical psychology and the humanities unfortunately haven't embraced the scientific method). And yes, I think even the humanities can be done scientifically. I gave examples of one of my favorite bible scholars: Bart Ehrman (I forget if it was here or in another thread where I used Ehrman as an example) as someone who IMO clearly takes a scientific approach to his work. That also illustrates what I mean by science: not just the natural sciences and for something to be scientific doesn't mean it has to use every technique of science. Ehrman doesn't do experiments but he does rely on data, creates hypotheses, and tests them against the known facts.
And the only method that I'm aware of with a track record for testing objective truth is science. So if the Gaia concept inspires people or makes them think in new ways that's fine and I'm all for it. Just don't distort it by claiming it is a theory because it isn't... unless you want to distort the concept of theory to something that is essentially subjective to each individual. And if you want to do that I can't say it's wrong. There is no right or wrong when it comes to every day discourse. Lewis Carrol recognized that (Humpty Dumpty's speech) as did Wittgenstein and Chomsky. Natural language is context dependent and you can use theory in everyday speech anyway you want. But if you want to have serious discussions that are rigorous it seems to me that a definition of theory that most intellectuals would agree with is that it is falsifiable and is objective and that makes it science.
One last thing: I realize some people will quibble with the word "objective" and point out that no individual is completely objective. And I agree with that. That is why I think it is so important to distinguish science from pseudoscience. Because we all have biases we need processes that have demonstrated over time that they enable us to see beyond them and lead to objective truth. We'll never completely get there. But it is the striving via the use of practices such as peer review, rigorous definitions, and experiments that enable us to make progress toward it.
> As I said in my original post, an organism has to reproduce. There are other factors but that one by itself is sufficient. Every organism from single celled life to plants to humans reproduces. The Earth doesn't generate baby Earths that go out into the solar system and compete for resources with the offspring of other planets.
organism: a whole with interdependent parts, likened to a living being. - "the upper strata of the American social organism"
>>> It isn't a coherent theory so you can't scientifically disprove it the way you could disprove a coherent (but wrong) scientific theory.
>> If a theory cannot be scientifically proven or disproven, does that mean that it is necessarily incorrect?
> Regarding your second question if a theory can't be objectively proven or disproven (i.e., it isn't falsifiable) then it isn't what I consider a theory.
theory:
a supposition or a system of ideas intended to explain something, especially one based on general principles independent of the thing to be explained.
a set of principles on which the practice of an activity is based.
an idea used to account for a situation or justify a course of action.
The question was: If a theory cannot be scientifically proven or disproven, does that mean that it is necessarily incorrect?
> And the only method that I'm aware of with a track record for testing objective truth is science.
Were pre-historic/pre-scientific peoples (neanderthals, etc) unable to tell if someone was dead, as just one example?
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