{"id":104421,"date":"2020-03-28T19:43:37","date_gmt":"2020-03-29T02:43:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/03\/the-earth-as-a-superorganism-further-thoughts"},"modified":"2020-03-28T19:43:37","modified_gmt":"2020-03-29T02:43:37","slug":"the-earth-as-a-superorganism-further-thoughts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/03\/the-earth-as-a-superorganism-further-thoughts","title":{"rendered":"The Earth as a Superorganism \u2014 Further Thoughts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/the-earth-as-a-superorganism-further-thoughts2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>:0000<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>\n<strong class=\"\">This article follows on from several others on this theme that I wrote some time ago, for details of which see footnote.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong class=\"\">The idea of the earth as a superorganism re-emerged in modern times with the work of the independent scientist James Lovelock and his <em class=\"\">Gaia <\/em>hypothesis. This was developed further by the spiritually oriented writer Peter Russell in <em class=\"\">The Awakening Earth<\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong class=\"\">When Lovelock published the first edition, where he described the Earth as a kind of self-regulating, living organism, he was attacked by biologists who said that this could not have emerged through a process of natural selection, thus contradicting Darwinian theory, the dominant biological paradigm. Even worse, \u201cone critic referred to it scathingly as a fairy story about a Greek goddess\u201d. These are statements typical of modern materialist, Enlightenment science for, as Lovelock says, \u201cthe idea of Mother Earth or, as the Greeks called her, <em class=\"\">Gaia<\/em>, has been <em class=\"\">widely held throughout history<\/em> and has been the basis of <em class=\"\">a belief that coexists with the great religions<\/em>\u201d.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>:0000 This article follows on from several others on this theme that I wrote some time ago, for details of which see footnote. The idea of the earth as a superorganism re-emerged in modern times with the work of the independent scientist James Lovelock and his Gaia hypothesis. This was developed further by the spiritually [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-104421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biological"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104421\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}