The Gaia Hypotheses: science or pseudoscience?

[image: Gaea, by Anselm Feuerbach (1875), Wikipedia]

I have been rather skeptical of the so-called Gaia Hypothesis, the notion that planet Earth is one large, self-regulating organism, as opposed to the environment in which a number of ecosystems have evolved. The notion was first proposed by independent scientist James Lovelock in the 1970s, and co-developed by the controversial biologist Lynn Margulis, famous for having proposed that some cellular organelles…