GAIA Hypothesis
James Lovelock formulated the Gaia hypothesis in the 1960s resulting from his work for NASA concerned with detecting life on Mars. The hypothesis proposes that living and non-living parts of the Earth form a complex interacting system that can be thought of as a single organism. He named it after the Greek goddess Gaia at the suggestion of novelist William Golding. The hypothesis also postulates that the biosphere has a regulatory effect on the Earth's environment that acts to sustain life.
The GAIA hypothesis was largely popularized widely by
Lynn Margulis, who transformed and fundamentally framed current understanding of the evolution of cells with nuclei by proposing it to have been the result of biosymbiotic mergers of bacteria (prokaryotes. 3.5 million years ago) with later eukaryotes (2.7 million years ago).
Where standard Darwinian evolution holds that evolution proceeds because of random mutations of DNA, Margulis identified evolution by combination of existing species, prokaryotic cells moving to live inside eukaryotes, bringing their ATP energy-generating machinery with them. Margulis' original paper in 1967 that cell organelles such as mitochondria and chloroplasts were once independent bacteria was largely ignored for another decade. The paper was "rejected by about fifteen scientific journals," she recalled.
Margulis met with Lovelock in the early 1970's. He explained his hypothesis to her, and very soon they began an intense collaborative effort on Gaia.
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