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    The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet
    The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet
    The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet
    Ebook347 pages5 hours

    The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet

    By Michael Ruse

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    “The book is full of empathetic, insightful, and often very funny portraits of Margulis, Lovelock, and a community of other figures associated with Gaia.” —Carla Nappi, New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

    In 1965 English scientist James Lovelock had a flash of insight: the Earth is not just teeming with life; the Earth, in some sense, is life. He mulled this revolutionary idea over for several years, first with his close friend the novelist William Golding, and then in an extensive collaboration with the American scientist Lynn Margulis. In the early 1970s, he finally went public with the Gaia hypothesis, the idea that everything happens for an end: the good of planet Earth. Lovelock and Margulis were scorned by professional scientists, but the general public enthusiastically embraced Lovelock and his hypothesis.

    In The Gaia Hypothesis, philosopher Michael Ruse, with his characteristic clarity and wit, uses Gaia and its history, its supporters and detractors, to illuminate the nature of science itself. Gaia emerged in the 1960s, a decade when authority was questioned and status and dignity stood for nothing, but its story is much older. Ruse traces Gaia’s connection to Plato and a long history of goal-directed and holistic—or organicist—thinking and explains why Lovelock and Margulis’s peers rejected it as pseudoscience. But Ruse also shows why the project was a success. He argues that Lovelock and Margulis should be commended for giving philosophy firm scientific basis and for provoking important scientific discussion about the world as a whole, its homeostasis or—in this age of global environmental uncertainty—its lack thereof.

    “[Ruse’s] treatment is thought-provoking and original, as you would expect from this perceptive, irrepressible philosopher of biology.” —New Scientist
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateSep 25, 2013
    ISBN9780226060392
    The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet
    Author

    Michael Ruse

    Michael Ruse was formerly the Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy and the Director of the History and Philosophy of Science Program at Florida State University. He is a philosopher and historian of science, mainly evolutionary theory, and has been much involved in fighting Creationism. The author or editor of over fifty books, he is the founding editor of the journal Biology and Philosophy. A sometime Guggenheim Fellow and Gifford Lecturer, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, he is the recipient of four honorary degrees and other honors.

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      The Gaia Hypothesis - Michael Ruse

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