ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2025
Function, chance and purpose in the biosphere: a critical examination of the Darwinized Gaia hypothesis.
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 3 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
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Overlapping attempts to falsify and Darwinize the Gaia hypothesis.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Other Earths, Gaian bottlenecks and Darwinized Gaias.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- 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
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The original Gaia hypothesis purports to explain the long-term maintenance of the Earth's habitability by proposing that the biosphere has evolved homeostatic control of environmental parameters crucial to its survival. This idea was criticized for being incompatible with core Darwinian requirements for evolution by natural selection, since the biosphere is not part of a population of entities with variation, reproduction and heredity. Recently, however, some authors have defended a 'Darwinized' version of the Gaia hypothesis. Proponents of Darwinized Gaia argue that there can be natural selection for persistence alone, with no need for reproduction or competition, and that a single lineage can undergo a process of sequential selection over time. This article examines these ideas in the light of two important distinctions in evolutionary biology: adaptation versus by-product, and transformational versus variational explanation. Despite these new interesting ideas, however, the Darwinized Gaia hypothesis still cannot overcome the main objections from evolutionary biology.This article is part of the discussion meeting issue 'Chance and purpose in the evolution of biospheres'.
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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.