Month: December 2020

How Mira Nair Made Her Own “Suitable Boy”

Posted on by Azra Raza

Isaac Chotiner in The New Yorker:

This month marks the American release of the director Mira Nair’s six-part television adaptation of “A Suitable Boy,” Vikram Seth’s beloved, kaleidoscopic novel of early post-Partition India, from 1993. (It began streaming on Acorn TV on December 7th.) The book, which, at more than thirteen hundred pages, is longer than “War and Peace,” tells the story of a young woman, Lata, and her search for a husband, while also featuring a remarkable cast of characters, largely from four interwoven families. The novel also touches on land reform, cricket, and religious tension, in playful, inventive language and sometimes with laugh-out-loud humor. Seth reportedly has been working on a sequel for more than a decade, the rumors of which have thrilled his fans.

Nair, who was born in 1957 in the Indian state of Odisha (then called Orissa), and has been based in New York for about four decades, was an obvious choice for the adaptation. In 1988, she directed “Salaam Bombay!,” a critically acclaimed account of life in the slums of Mumbai. She followed it up with an early Denzel Washington drama, “Mississippi Masala,” about an Indian from Uganda in the American South. Since then, Nair has made ten feature films, including “Monsoon Wedding,” from 2001, and has become known as one of the preëminent interpreters of the Indian-immigrant experience. Nair has also adapted classic novels, including “Vanity Fair,” and several pieces of modern literature, such as Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Namesake” and Mohsin Hamid’s “The Reluctant Fundamentalist.” In a Profile of Nair, in 2002, John Lahr wrote, “Nair’s films negotiate disparate ethnic geographies with the same kind of sly civility she practices in life. Her approach is sometimes oblique: she doesn’t make political films, but she does make her films politically. Her gift, to which ‘Monsoon Wedding’ attests, is to make diversity irresistible.”

Nair and I recently spoke over Zoom, while she was completing work on the last episode of the series. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed her career as a filmmaker, the challenges of adapting an epic novel, and how rising intolerance in India, led by the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, affected her work on “A Suitable Boy.” After our interview, it was reported that members of the B.J.P. called for an investigation of Netflix, the series’ Indian distributor, claiming that the depiction of a kiss between a Muslim man and Hindu woman intentionally affronts religious sentiments, which in India is a criminal offense. Netflix has made no public comment, and Nair declined to address the complaint.

More here.

Could COVID delirium bring on dementia?

Posted on by Azra Raza

Carrie Arnold in Nature:

In her job as a physician at the Boston Medical Center in Massachusetts, Sondra Crosby treated some of the first people in her region to get COVID-19. So when she began feeling sick in April, Crosby wasn’t surprised to learn that she, too, had been infected. At first, her symptoms felt like those of a bad cold, but by the next day, she was too sick to get out of bed. She struggled to eat and depended on her husband to bring her sports drinks and fever-reducing medicine. Then she lost track of time completely.

For five days, Crosby lay in a confused haze, unable to remember the simplest things, such as how to turn on her phone or what her address was. She began hallucinating, seeing lizards on her walls and smelling a repugnant reptilian odour. Only later did Crosby realize that she had had delirium, the formal medical term for her abrupt, severe disorientation. “I didn’t really start processing it until later when I started to come out of it,” she says. “I didn’t have the presence of mind to think that I was anything more than just sick and dehydrated.”

Physicians treating people hospitalized with COVID-19 report that a large number experience delirium, and that the condition disproportionately affects older adults. An April 2020 study in Strasbourg, France, found that 65% of people who were severely ill with coronavirus had acute confusion — a symptom of delirium1. Data presented last month at the annual meeting of the American College of Chest Physicians by scientists at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, showed that 55% of the 2,000 people they tracked who were treated for COVID-19 in intensive-care units (ICUs) around the world had developed delirium. These numbers are much higher than doctors are used to: usually, about one-third of people who are critically ill develop delirium, according to a 2015 meta-analysis2 (see ‘How common is delirium?’).

More here.

Tuesday Poem

Posted on by Jim Culleny

Woman Unborn

I am not born as yet,
five minutes before my birth.
I can still go back
into my unbirth.
Now it’s ten minutes before,
now, it’s one hour before birth.
I go back,
I run
into my minus life.

I walk through my unbirth as in a tunnel
with bizarre perspectives.
Ten years before,
a hundred and fifty years before,
I walk, my steps thump,
a fantastic journey through epochs
in which there was no me.

How long is my minus life,
nonexistence so much resembles immortality.

Here is Romanticism, where I could have been a spinster,
Here is the Renaissance, where I would have been
an ugly and unloved wife of an evil husband,
The Middle Ages, where I would have carried water in a tavern.

I walk still further,
what an echo,
my steps thump
through my minus life,
through the reverse of life.
I reach Adam and Eve,
nothing is seen anymore, it’s dark.
Now my nonexistence dies already
with the trite death of mathematical fiction.
As trite as the death of my existence would have been
had I been really born.

by Anna Swir
from Talking to My Body,1996
Copper Canyon Press

translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan.

Fuck It, I’m Staying Here

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

Sunset America New York Statue - Free photo on PixabayMy Jewish maternal grandparents came to America just ahead of WWII. Nearly all of my grandmother’s extended family were wiped out in the Holocaust. Much of my grandfather’s extended family had previously emigrated to Palestine.

My maternal family history illustrates why many modern American Jews continue to view Israel as their ultimate safety net. After two millennia of vicious anti-Judaism, many Jews believe they can eventually be run out of any country, even Untied States. American Jews’ sometimes uncritical support for Israel is underpinned by a wistful glance and a knowing nod; if it does happen here, we can escape to there.

Even though I am only half-Jewish, my familial immigration history is more recent than most American Jews.  Their ancestors typically arrived here a full generation or two earlier than mine, and most of them did not lose a slew of close family members in the Holocaust like my grandmother did.

But unlike most American Jews, I can counter the fear of “It can happen here” with a sense of American belonging that stems from deeply rooted Southern WASP family history. Depending on which of my paternal branches you follow, we’ve been here upwards of about three centuries.

Or so they tell me.

Exactly how long ago the Reinhardts, Lowrances, Younts, Dunkles, and Hollers I’m descended from first arrived here is besides the point. In fact, not having an exact date actually helps; it was long enough ago that no one really knows. And that feeds into the one common thread binding deeply-rooted white Protestant Americans, despite their many differences in class, education, geographic region, and religious denomination. It’s the unassailable sense that you belong here because you’re from here. That you’re not really the sons and daughters of immigrants. Rather, you’re descended from the people who took this land from Native Americans, and who fought to gain independence from the British. That you’re part of the group who really “earned” it. America’s your inheritance. You own it.

This is also the core of Trumpism: believing you have a better claim to being here than other people do. Read more »

The End of the World as We Know It

Posted on by Leanne Ogasawara

by Leanne Ogasawara

Ministry of the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson (October 2020)

1.

The year is 2025.

Frank, who is an American aid worker living in northern India, is alarmed to wake up one morning to an outside temperature of 103° F with 35% humidity. Things go from bad to worse, when the power grid goes down, and there is no air conditioning. As temperatures climb to 108° F with 60% humidity, people begin dying. They are being cooked to death.

Known as a wet-bulb temperature event, a sustained combination of high temperature plus high humidity exceeding wet-bulb temperature 35 °C (95 °F) will likely cause death, even in a healthy person sitting in the shade with plenty of water to drink.

When things become unbearable, Frank takes refuge with many others in a shallow lake. But the water is too warm –and by morning, everyone in the lake but Frank is dead. He has no idea why he survived –but life will never be the same.

The shock surrounding the event, which saw millions die in Uttar Pradesh, led to the formation of the Ministry for the Future. Part of the United Nation’s Convention on Climate Change, it was founded under Article 14 of the Paris Agreement with an office set up in Zürich.

The people of India are rightly furious. They point out that the Europeans sucked their resources dry for hundreds of years, and by the time they shook free of their colonialist yoke and tried to develop, they were being told by wealthy Europeans that, “Sorry, you are too late to the party. Rising CO2 and all that.” Indian leadership argues that they use far less coal-generated electricity to bring their people out of poverty than the Americans do to live what in America is considered a normal life.

Compare the average electrical energy consumption per capita 12,071 kWh in the US to 1,181 kWh in India.

Located in a part of the world that will bear the initial brunt of the crises, India had expected that other members of the Paris Convention would come to their aid.

Drones were seen overhead so the Indian people knew the situation was being monitored, but at the end of the day, they appeared to be left to die.

And so, they decide to take matters into their own hands. Read more »

Monday Poem

Posted on by Jim Culleny

Until

I’ve not roamed the four corners of the earth
but I have roamed the four corners of the earth
I contain as much love and callousness as any human does

I love and harm as sure as the passionate sun does,
which inflames dawn clouds in iconic peace and beauty
which inflames sunset clouds in ironic blaze and beauty
in billowing portraits of the One

and which the brutal sea behind its placid sun-struck
sometimes mask of absent wind and freeze does
when a seaborne mist of amethyst and gentle swells comes
with southern breeze and warm calm but with sense to know
we drift up to a brink . until

(as everything from dust to stars does)

Jim
12/1/20

Olga’s Book

Posted on by Rafaël Newman

by Rafaël Newman

All my life I’ve been fascinated by the systems of mutual connections and influences of which we are generally unaware, but which we discover by chance, as surprising coincidences or convergences of fate, all those bridges, nuts, bolts, welded joints and connectors… —Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel Lecture, December 7, 2019

Olga Tokarczuk (center) and her English translators, Antonia Lloyd-Jones (left) and Jennifer Croft (right)

When I was quite young I had a dream, or fantasy, of a Purple Book: a richly satisfying, totally illuminating, all-encompassing volume that would replace all others and provide endless comfort and sustenance. There were to be numerous candidates for this status in my subsequent “real life”, including novels like Watership Down, Ulysses, Bouvard et Pécuchet and Austerlitz, as well as books of towering historical survey or “grand theory” such as Mary Beard’s SPQR, Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, and Tony Judt’s Postwar. The Purple Book remained for a long time a symbol of an elusive fulfilment, now and then briefly glimpsed, always fleeting; until the more pressing cares and more vivid, if still ephemeral, satisfactions of adult life drove it into retreat.

That such total understanding and ultimate satisfaction should have been represented in my imaginary by a printed object has a fairly straightforward aetiology, given the academic culture into which I was born. The purpleness of that dream book, for its part, was multiply motivated: by my youthful apprehension of the color’s sacerdotal significance; by a naïve, pre-adolescent suspicion of its intoxicating powers of erotic evocation (I had once heard the father of a grade-school colleague refer to crème de cassis as the “sexiest” liqueur he had ever tasted); and, perhaps most profoundly because least patently, by its subterranean association with Jewishness, that most elusive, and thus most attractive, element of my own personal cultural makeup, which would remain a tantalizing chimera during much of my youth and young adulthood. For not only was the velvet bag enclosing my Polish Jewish grandfather’s prized Crown Royal rye whisky, famously manufactured by the Bronfmans, Canada’s preeminent Jewish dynasty, a dusky papal hue; not only was the membership of the notorious Purple Gang, which had been among the mobsters smuggling the Bronfmans’ products into Prohibition-era America, and which rated a name-check in Elvis Presley’s “Jailhouse Rock”, predominantly Jewish; but the very description of the Jews as “the People of the Book” lends itself, by oneiric transposition (people/purple), to a connection with the color. (Extra weight may have been granted the association by my Jewish father’s invention, in my infancy, of a game he called “the Purple Terror”, which involved propping me up against the back of the sofa and then allowing me to collapse, riotously, into the cushions, thence to be “rescued” by my deliciously horrified mother: a ludic enactment of the illusory promise of upright paternal support giving way to a vertiginous subsidence into the amorphic maternal.) Read more »

Drug Development and the Cost of Failure

Posted on by Richard Passov

by R. Passov

This will be one of the most important compounds of our generation. —Jeff Kindler, former CEO, Pfizer, commenting on Torcetrapib

Failure of a drug in development, especially in a late stage clinical trial, is shocking. Torcetrapib, for example, failed at the very end of its phase III trial. So many resources had been expended to get that far in development. Everything spent was lost. All that remained was a big data pile worth virtually nothing, along with pilot plants that were built to supply the drug to thousands of patients across years of clinical trials.

The high cost of failure is why big rewards are offered to underwrite the risk of drug development. But because the costs of failure are so high, you have to be careful not to over-reward success. This is can happen rather too easily when the odds of success are relatively immutable with respect to the amount of money spent in search of success. And when the prize money continues to grow.

When you have these circumstances the incentives to take risks grow to the point where the amount of risk taken is excessive leading to repeated failures and wastage. How does this happen? When, given success, there is too much pricing power; too much power such that the profits the industry generates fall into the realm of what economists term ‘rent’ vs true profits that result from increasing overall social welfare. (See Garthwaite.) Read more »

Modern Myths Of Human Power

Posted on by Usha Alexander

by Usha Alexander

[This is the sixth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. All the articles in this series can be read here.]

“The American way of life is not up for negotiation.” —George HW Bush to the assembled international diplomats at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, 1992

“Much talk. Talking will win you nothing. All the same, the woman goes with me to the house of Hades.” —Thanatos to Apollo in a scene from Alcestis by Euripides, 5th Century, BCE

***

In Classical Greek mythology, Thanatos was Death. As a minor god who got little press in the surviving tales, he appears in the play, Alcestis, as something of a functionary, dutifully gathering those whose time had come and spiriting them to the underworld. Not that he doesn’t find some satisfaction in his work, but he wields his power neither masterfully nor hungrily. The touch of Thanatos did not bring on death from war or violence—those deaths were the domain of other deities—but an ordinary death, as experienced by most. In ancient times, Thanatos was often depicted as a winged youth, as a babe in the arms of his mother, Nyx, goddess of Night, or with his twin, Hypnos, Sleep. Thanatos was not a villain. But he was ruthlessly inevitable.

In the 21st Century Marvel film franchise, Thanatos has been reinvented as Thanos. In this reimagining, Thanos still wields death, but he sees his job in larger terms: he wants to bring peace to the universe, which is engulfed in strife. “Too many mouths. Not enough to go around,” he explains, referring to the overpopulation of the Marvel Universe. Thanos’s solution is to reduce the number of living things through a painless existential cleanse that will magically drift across the universe, gently annihilating half of everybody. He understands himself as the only being possessed of both will and power enough to act upon the need of the hour—to turn every other being into dust, thus restoring balance and enabling peace among the untold trillions who will survive. His desire to erase half of all the living isn’t personal, nor is it inspired by cruelty, venality, or a lust for power. Like his Greek inspiration, Thanos is pragmatic, goal-oriented, and transactional. Though he’s depicted with the stature of a supervillain, in command of limitless legions of grotesque warriors, he’s motivated by a sense of duty: the universe is out of balance and must be set right. “I am inevitable,” he quietly declares. Read more »

From Pain To Possibility: Critical Education And The Struggle to Save Democracy

Posted on by Eric Weiner

by Eric J. Weiner

Ours, like the moments after the Civil War and Reconstruction and after the civil rights movement, requires a different kind of thinking, a different kind of resiliency, or else we succumb to madness or resignation. —Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

Those convictions and motives, upon which the Nazi regime drew, no longer belong to a past that one can count by the intervening years: they have returned with the radical wing of the AfD – up to and including its phraseology – to the democratic everyday. —Jürgen Habermas: Germany’s Second Chance

Not since the Civil War and Reconstruction has the citizenry in the United States been so divided. In our current historical conjuncture, the division can be characterized as a fight between Trumpism and “the Resistance.” As a political bloc and in its current formation, the Resistance is comprised of too many fractured groups to have a coherent ideological agenda. The one thing that these disparate groups can agree on is their fury and disdain for Trumpism and the people who support its white-nationalistic, xenophobic, misogynistic, anti-democratic, neoliberal agenda. It’s clear what and who they are fighting against but less clear what they are collectively fighting for. In contrast to the Resistance, Trumpism is a fully realized neofascist ideology with a cult-like following that won’t go away with Trump. It is a principled system that directs and solidifies a disparate constituency with differential attachments yet not at the expense of ideological cohesion and coherence. As this battle rages on in the United States, the democratic experiment teeters on the brink of failure. The election of Joe Biden to the presidency does not end the threat that neofascism represents to democracy in the United States. But it might provide an opportunity to systematically formalize critical educational strategies that can help re-enculturate a divided citizenry into a radically democratic habitus.

I know using the term neofascism to describe something other than formal state systems of uberviolence is provocative and controversial. Yet, according to Brad Evans, Chair in Political Violence & Aesthetics at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom and Henry Giroux, McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest & The Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy, there are fourteen political principles of neofascism that articulate with our current historical conjuncture even as they acknowledge that the lived reality of this new form of fascism that is germinating in the United States is substantively different from its 20th century European and South American versions.[1] If we ignore how these political principles of neofascism are undermining the democratic habitus, we are engaging in a form of “historical amnesia” and might miss, as a consequence, an opportunity to develop anti-neofascist/pro-democracy educational projects that can help reverse the rise of its popularity in the United States. Read more »

A Tale of Three Transitions: Part 1, Buchanan to Lincoln

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

November 6, 1860. Perhaps the worst day in James Buchanan’s political life. His fears, his sympathies and antipathies, the judgment of the public upon an entire career, all converge into a horrible realty. Abraham Lincoln, of the “Black Republican Party,” has been elected President of the United States.  

Into Buchanan’s hands falls the most treacherous transition any President has had to navigate. The country is about to split apart. For months, Southerners in Congress, in their State Houses, in newspapers ranging from the large-circulation influential dailies to small-town broadsheets, had been warning everyone who cared to listen that they would not abide an election result they felt was an existential threat to their Peculiar Institution. Lincoln, despite what we now consider to be his notably conservative approach to slavery, was that threat. 

The task is made more excruciating because the transition, at that time, was longer—not the January 20th date we expect, but March 4th. Four long months until Lincoln’s Inauguration. Thirteen months between the end of the regular session of the outgoing Congress and the first scheduled session of the incoming one, unless the President calls for a Special Session. Each day, the speeches become more radical, the threats blunter. Committees are formed in many states to consider secession. By December 20, South Carolina leaves the Union. It is followed in short order by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and, on February 1, 1861, Texas. The Upper South (Tennessee, North Carolina, and all-important Virginia) holds back, as does Arkansas. Unionist sentiment is strong enough to keep them from bolting, but the cost of their loyalty is that nothing aggressive be done by Washington to bring back the seceding states. In reality, that means an acceptance of secession for those that cannot be wooed back. 

Buchanan is not the man for the job. Read more »

On the Road: The Georgia Runoffs

Posted on by Bill Murray

by Bill Murray

This column is about travel to less understood parts of the world. In yet another travel constrained month, how about a little political tourism here in Georgia, where none of us really understands the sordid late-Trump morality play swirling around our dual Senate runoffs. We still have thirty days to go. Unlikely circumstance offered our state the fate of the Senate and we are shaky stewards.

Beware pundits bearing wisdom. All their elaborate, self-assured opinions at this early stage tell me that when the national press comes to your town with instant, penetrating analysis of, say, Flint’s municipal water supply, or that crazy Sturgis biker thing, be careful. They bring to mind Emerson’s “the louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.”

All punditry has right now is conventional wisdom. Here on the actual battlefield, candidates compete against one another, the Republican party competes against itself, dark money scurries in the shadows, QAnon jeers from the sidelines and the truth is, nobody has any idea what’s going to happen. Read more »

The Maze of Words and Music

Posted on by Philip Graham

by Philip Graham

Back in 1971, I couldn’t have predicted that the release of Joni Mitchell’s fourth album, Blue, would mark the beginning of the end of a friendship.

During my college years, Donald and I had bonded over a love of literature and a shared ambition to become, some day, actual writers. While I chose the route of fiction, Donald wrote song lyrics, taking poetry classes to hone his craft.

The great songwriter love of his life was the Joni Mitchell of her first albums, Song to a Seagull, Clouds, and Ladies of the Canyon. But then Blue dropped, and it crushed Donald. He believed the new, conversational quality of Mitchell’s lyrics betrayed her past poetic strengths. While we sat in the college coffee shop he quoted a few lines from the song “California”:

So I bought me a ticket
I caught a plane to Spain
Went to a party down a red dirt road

and then protested with real hurt in his voice, “How could she write something so ordinary?”

I didn’t mind that Mitchell had moved away from her lyrical era of “mermaids live in colonies” and “sweet well water and pickling jars.” I thought she fully lived and breathed in her new songs, became more approachable as a fellow vulnerable human. Donald remained unmoved. I suggested that at least we still had her exquisite voice, her gift for melody, and her guitar playing—what haunted tunings!

He insisted he couldn’t listen to any song, no matter how beautiful, if he didn’t first respect the lyrics. I countered that no matter how well-composed a lyric, if the melody was a clunker I wouldn’t listen twice. The beauty of the music came first. If the words reflected that beauty? Bonus. Read more »

Jacob Collier, a 21st Century Mozart?

Posted on by Bill Benzon

by Bill Benzon

A little over a week ago Jacob Collier’s version of Mel Torme’s “The Christmas Song” (“Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire”) came up on YouTube. I know the song well, and love it. As I’d seen a video or three by this Collier fellow, I decided to give it a listen.

Wow! What?

I was stunned, but also a bit skeptical. Collier was obviously a talented musician, with mad skills. But to what end? This struck me as being musical comfort food. Skillfully made – oh yes! the man has chops! – but comfortable. But then, what’s wrong with comfort? As a steady aesthetic diet, it’s inadequate. But don’t we sometimes turn to music for comfort and solace? Do we not need comfort and solace in this time of Covid, not to mention the post-election tantrums of He Who Must Not Be Named?

What else has Collier got? If it’s all like this, then Collier’s a one trick pony. But maybe he’s got more tricks up his sleeve. I decided to investigate.

Caveat: I’m going to insert a bunch of videos into this piece; one of them is very long – over three hours. Feel free to skip over material. Read more »

2020 in review, silver lining edition: ambient music!

Posted on by Dave Maier

by Dave Maier

2020 has been a wild ride, but it’s almost over, and I’m here to tell you it wasn’t all bad, as some great music came out this year – so much, in fact, that we’ll have to have two or even three podcasts this time even for the small taste which is our annual year-end review. Here’s part 1 (widget and link below).

Jonathan Fitoussi – Soleil de Minuit

We heard a great track from this guy in a recent set, and here he is again with a terrific new album of unashamedly retro space music. “Soleil de Minuit” (“Midnight Sun”), for example, performed on a Buchla modular system, electric organ, and electric bass, sends off a distinctly Michael Hoenig vibe to my ear. Keep ‘em coming, Jonathan, we love it. Read more »

Torturing Geniuses

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

Agnes Callard in The Point:

Beth, the protagonist of the TV show The Queen’s Gambit, is not someone you’d want as a friend. She takes money from her childhood mentor—the old janitor who taught her chess—and never pays him back, visits him or thanks him for launching her career. She treats the young men who help her improve—a group that eventually coalesces into a supportive entourage—in a similarly instrumental way. She is so focused on winning tournaments that she can barely spare a word of caution when her adoptive mother is falling into a fatal alcoholic spiral. When she loses, she is petulant and childish, unlike her opponents, who are graceful and kind. She is cruel and manipulative when—as an adult—she plays against a talented Russian child, softening to him only after she has beaten him.

Beth doesn’t seem to love anyone, but viewers love her anyways, admiring the sheer force of her genius. It doesn’t matter that most viewers don’t play chess. The chess scenes focus our attention on her striking, wide-set eyes, her perfect figure and her manicured fingernails, as though gawking at her body were a symbolic way of appreciating some mysterious power in her brain. We are clued in to her genius by other people saying she is “astonishing,” and by their willingness to put themselves at her service.

In my own field there are also geniuses.

More here.

The Gaia hypothesis states that our biosphere is evolving. Once sceptical, some prominent biologists are beginning to agree

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

W Ford Doolittle in Aeon:

The idea that the Earth itself is like a single evolving ‘organism’ was developed in the mid-1970s by the independent English scientist and inventor James Lovelock and the American biologist Lynn Margulis. They dubbed it the ‘Gaia hypothesis’, asserting that the biosphere is an ‘active adaptive control system able to maintain the Earth in homeostasis’. Sometimes they went pretty far with this line of reasoning: Lovelock even ventured that algal mats have evolved so as to control global temperature, while Australia’s Great Barrier Reef might be a ‘partly finished project for an evaporation lagoon’, whose purpose was to control oceanic salinity.

The notion that the Earth itself is a living system captured the imagination of New Age enthusiasts, who deified Gaia as the Earth Goddess. But it has received rough treatment at the hands of evolutionary biologists like me, and is generally scorned by most scientific Darwinists. Most of them are still negative about Gaia: viewing many Earthly features as biological products might well have been extraordinarily fruitful, generating much good science, but Earth is nothing like an evolved organism. Algal mats and coral reefs are just not ‘adaptations’ that enhance Earth’s ‘fitness’ in the same way that eyes and wings contribute to the fitness of birds. Darwinian natural selection doesn’t work that way.

I’ve got a confession though: I’ve warmed to Gaia over the years.

More here.