The Misunderstanding between the Selfish Gene and Gaia
The Gaia Theory gives us another good frame of reference for talking about biology. That means another first principle. Any time you talk about biology, you’re talking about individual genes replicating themselves in stable reactions on the molecular scale, and simultaneously, you’re also talking about zillions of genes interacting in a stable chemical reaction on the planetary scale. And again, you can talk about the Gaia Theory in terms of chemical reactions, or if it’s easier, in terms of food chains and lifecycles of plants and animals, and you can shift back and forth between chemistry and biology as necessary.
This is where Dr. Dawkins’ disagreement with Dr. Lovelock takes a couple of ironic twists.
By Dr. Dawkins’ own Selfish Gene Theory, evolution is a chemical reaction. Life is a stable chemical reaction. Evolution happens and life continues because each gene in an environment competes against all the other genes in the environment, including all the alternate versions of that gene (which are called alleles). According to the Selfish Gene Theory, a gene’s environment consists of all the other genes in the environment, including all the other genes in the same organism and all the alleles of that gene.
Whatever genes are best adapted to surviving in their environments, which includes surviving among all the other genes in the environment, get the most stable chemical reactions. Those genes make the most copies of themselves, while the genes that don’t survive as well in the environment don’t get as stable of chemical reactions and die out eventually. The Selfish Gene Theory is simply natural selection at the molecular level.
That’s exactly what Dr. Lovelock said. The global environment is a stable chemical reaction, made up of all the genes in the environment. The genes of each living thing make each living thing do all it can to try to keep its own genes alive. But ultimately, the global environment doesn’t work the way it does because of what any individual living thing wants or doesn’t want. The global environment works the way it does for the same reason each individual living thing works: because all the genes in the environment have settled into a stable chemical reaction.
People have tried to define life in a lot of ways. Dr. Dawkins’ definition of life is the most fundamental, because it defines life as a stable chemical reaction. Once Dr. Lovelock defined the global environment as a stable chemical reaction, by Dr. Dawkins’ own definition, he proved that, in a sense at least, the global environment is a life form.
In a sense, salt crystals are a life form also, because they are a stable chemical reaction. We don’t consider them to be alive because life is a much more complicated chemical reaction than the formation of salt crystals.
In the same way, the chemical reaction of the global environment is a much more complicated chemical reaction than the chemical reaction of life. To call the global environment a form of life is really an understatement, in the same way that calling people salt crystals would be an understatement. So really, the global environment is only a form of life in the sense that we don’t have a better word for it. We don’t have a better word for it because it’s the biggest stable chemical reaction anyone has ever discovered.
Since Dr. Lovelock was the one who discovered that stable chemical reaction, he was the one who gave it a name. His name for it is Gaia.
Now we come to the second ironic twist in the Dawkins-Lovelock dispute. Dr. Lovelock is one of the greatest environmental scientists in the world, but he’s no expert at human behavior. Whether he meant to do this or not, by calling the global environment Gaia, he raised a battle flag. He named the global environment Gaia in order to make the existence of the super-life-form personally meaningful to people, as opposed to giving it some obscure scientific name that most people would think meant it was just an abstract idea someone had that didn’t really mean anything. But because of the way people perceive the word Gaia, as far as most people can tell, he’s proved that the Pagans were right and the Christians were wrong. And various other groups of people were either right or wrong.
The word Gaia used as a name for the global environment inevitably is going to make all the people who have already been fighting to save the environment fight a lot harder. But it’s also going to make all the people who have been fighting against those people fight a lot harder, just to try to prove they were right in what they believed, and the other people were wrong. Now the showdown over what to do about the global environment is going to become even more of a showdown. But more of a showdown is exactly what we need, because what people have been doing isn’t nearly enough.
Dr. Lovelock was in his 40s when he discovered the stable chemical reaction of the global environment and named it Gaia. Dr. Dawkins was in his 30s when he discovered the stable chemical reaction of life and called it the Selfish Gene. Dr. Dawkins is a zoologist. He’s no expert at human behavior either. At least Dr. Lovelock had an extra decade of earned wisdom to put into his choice.
Now the easiest way to understand Gaia is to understand the Selfish Gene. But most of the people who love the idea of Gaia hate the idea of the Selfish Gene, and most people who love the idea of the Selfish Gene hate the idea of Gaia. Now selfish people use the Selfish Gene to prove they’re right for thinking the way they think, and people who care more about the environment refuse to learn enough about the Selfish Gene to understand how the global environment works.
None of this has anything to do with the chemical reactions these words actually refer to. Ultimately, they’re the same chemical reaction taking place on two different scales. You can’t have one without the other.
Now here we are, with the global environmental crisis about to spiral completely out of control, and the people who discovered two of the most important pieces of information for understanding why it’s happening and how it can be stopped have driven a gigantic wedge between their discoveries just by other people’s emotional reactions to their choices of names.
Really, any word you use to refer to the fact that everything is connected to everything else works just as well as any other, provided you’re willing to learn the chemistry behind it. Om, Tao, Life, 42, whatever. Take your pick.