ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2025
Darwinizing Gaia: conceptual approaches.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Other Earths, Gaian bottlenecks and Darwinized Gaias.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- The evolution of Gaia(s).Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- The emergence of metabolisms through Earth history and implications for biospheric evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Chance and purpose in the evolution of biospheres.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
Abstract
After briefly describing James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, I will argue that Gaia does not reproduce, or rather that it has what Peter Godfrey-Smith would call 'too many parents' to undergo natural selection according to Lewontin's Recipe. So the hypothesis did not and still does not make sense to most Darwinians. If (i)Lewontin's Recipe were extended to include differential persistence as well as differential reproduction, (ii) part/whole relationships were accepted as a form of 'reproduction', or (iii) the 'gene's-eye view' of Richard Dawkins as further extended by David Hull and us were adopted, then the Gaia hypothesis, and lesser claims about some multispecies communities, holobionts and ecosystems,
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.