Earth as a meta-organism

Another degradation of humanity

In a recent Vox article, the story of an idea proposed by chemist James Lovelock and microbiologist Lynn Marguilis was told. He proposed that the earth itself was a giant living organism. This is called the Gaia Hypothesis.

In my recent post, I hinted at the blurring lines that are emerging in biology. The idea of holobionts is one of many such distinctions which are making it more and more difficult to understand what it is to be an organism. Ideas such as organelles emerging via endosymbiosis has, underneath, the philosophical implications that the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. An organism, as classically defined, is simply a meta-organism of many other symbiotic communities all working together in mutual survival.

Take this thought to the next level and you begin to understand the Gaia principle. All life on earth, from the smallest to the largest, is a part of a meta-organism called Gaia, which is the entire system of the planet. This means, philosophically, that humans are a small community of symbiotic pairs which make up the meta-organism that is the earth.

In other posts, we have spoken about humanities difficulty in understanding itself in relation to common ideas floating around during whatever era of thought it was in. What I’m proposing now is a new era of difficulty on this front—the question of whether human beings, as classically thought of, exist at all.

Human beings have traditionally been endowed with rights based on the dignity of what it means to be a human. This originated in the idea of the imago dei, or the idea of the image of God. Humans, being made in God’s image, were given the commission to rule over the creation and to tend to it. They were seen as having a special distinction from the animals of the field and birds of the air and plants of the earth. This, by proxy, gave them certain rights and privileges that were not given to the other creatures of creation.

We will spend some more time on the idea of the image of God in other posts. For now, it’s sufficient to say that humanity’s view of itself is heading toward a paradigm shift in which human beings will no longer be seen as rulers of creation but subservient to it. Humanity is being degraded into a flat hierarchical structure in which they are lower than the total order of Gaia.