Meet Gaia's evil twin

Personally speaking, I think the article from New Scientist below should come as no surprise to anyone that actually has some knowledge of nature and life's history on earth.   Nature is not the lovely Edenic place so many imagine it to be, especially many urban greenies looking at it from their inner-city apartments.   One of the reasons farmers usually tend to be unsentimental about nature is that they have to live with it all the time and see how unsentimental it really is.   I think it was Darwin himself who wryly noted that those of the "all things bright and beautiful" disposition obviously knew nothing of the life cycle of the icumenid wasps, which lay eggs in caterpillars and the like which hatch into grubs that eat their host from the inside, carefully avoiding its vital organs until the very end.   (Apparently the palaeontologist Dr Paul Willis has said that, if there was a designer of these these wasps, he must have been a 'sadistic bastard.')   But nature is full of such things that affront and confront human sensibilities.   Monty Python of course famously satirised those who viewed nature with rose coloured spectacles with their All Things Dull and Ugly song.   But nature is amazing in its absurd and super abundant diversity and adaptability. Tyrannosaurus rex was a terrifying killer, (we think, it may have been an over sized scavenger according to some), but irrespective of this it was also one of the most amazing creatures to ever walk the earth. And it was only one of countless millions of different animals, all remarkable in their own way, that have had their time on earth and then gone extinct, to be replaced by others.   Darwin's closing words of The Origin on Species remain as beautiful and profound now as when he first wrote them: There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. But one thing it is not is sentimental and we shouldn't be so about it. We should care for it for sure, but with a clear eye.     From their research arose one of the most influential, ground-breaking scientific ideas of the 20th century - the Gaia hypothesis, named after the ancient Greek goddess of the Earth, a nurturing "mother" of life. But is it correct? New scientific findings suggest that the nature of life on Earth is not at all like Gaia. If we were to choose a mythical mother figure to characterise the biosphere, it would more accurately be Medea, the murderous wife of Jason of the Argonauts. She was a sorceress, a princess - and a killer of her own children.

Posted via email from Garth's posterous