Variation 28 from Gaian Variations by Nathan Currier

28. Lovelock’s Variation: Adapting Darwin

Evidence shows the earth’s crust, oceans, and air to be either directly the product of living things or else massively modified by their presence. Consider how the oxygen and nitrogen of the air come directly from plants and microorganisms, and how the chalk and limestone rocks are the shells of living things once floating in the sea. Life has not adapted to an inert world determined by the dead hand of chemistry and physics. We live in a world that has been built by our ancestors, ancient and modern, and which is continuously maintained by all things alive today. Organisms are adapting in a world whose material state is determined by the activities of their neighbors. On a planetary scale, the coupling between life and its environment is so tight that the tautologous notion of adaptation is squeezed from existence.

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