THE GAIA (OR SYSTEMS) THEORY AND ECONOMICS

"The basic dynamic of evolution is not adaptation. It is creativity. Every living thing organism has the potential for creativity, for surprising and transcending itself. Evolution is so much more than adaptation to the environment because what is the environment if not a living system which evolves and creatively adapts itself. Each adapts to the other. They co-evolve."
from film Mindwalk

"Everything is connected."
Lenin

Many people accept social darwinism. Those who are poor are blamed because of their "inadequacies". The powerful in the America system find it easy to think that there is nothing wrong with that. They say that those who fail to prosper have themselves to blame. These beliefs are so deep-rooted it's hard to see a change. What if the Gaia theory of biological evolution through coevolution were to gain wide acceptance, would it change the way we see treat each other?

I was first introduced to the Gaia theory in my Government class last year. Many economists understand that this wasn't purely a biological breakthrough.

The Gaia theory proposed by British scientist, James Lovelock, almost 30 years ago. The hypothesis proposes that all living things and the chemical and physical environment in which they live, work together like parts of one vast organism. His theory is based on experiments he conducted in which bacteria began to merge with one another in cooperative unions.

"What one bacterium could not do on its own it achieved with the aid of another. They divided up the labors of life, each partner specializing in different tasks. Over time, the bacteria that had entered into mutual alliances lost their ability to survive on their own." Eventually, these cohabiting bacteria evoloved into a dramatically new type of two-part being- the eukaryote, an advanced cell that carries within itself a powerhouse of an organ called a nucleus, a specialized vessel for genes. The emergence of eukaryote was a leap in evolutionary complexity far greater thatn any has occured since. All the plants and animals we know today developed this way.

"Life and it's environments," Lovelock explains, "constitutes a single entity, which regulates physical conditions in order to keep the environment at a comfortable state for the organisms themselves." In other words, teamwork between the physical and the life it bears is responsible for the richly diverse living earth.

From article "Life According to Gaia" by Jane Bosveld
OMNI Magazine 1991