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Planetary cybernetics timeline

  • Skeptics include Richard Dawkins (1982) and W. Ford Doolittle (1981)
  • Dawkins: 'The Universe would have to be full of dead planets whose homeostatic regulation systems had failed, with, dotted around, a handful of successful, well-regulated planets of which Earth is one.' and '[...] we would have to postulate some kind of reproduction, whereby successful planets spawned copies of their life forms on new planets.'
  • Doolittle: 'I do not doubt that some of the feedback loops which Lovelock claims exist do exist, but I do doubt that they were created by natural selection, or that they are anything but accidental.'
  • Andrew Watson and James Lovelock describe a mathematical model, daisyworld, that uses selection to maintain habitable temperatures (1983a, 1983b)











  • Dawkins: 'oxygen production as a byproduct of plant activity' ... 'we have been selected to breathe oxygen partly because there is so much of it about'
  • Doolittle goes on to suggest that organisms manipulating their environment to maintain habitability would be like organisms (e.g. humans) somehow manipulating the physical constants of our Universe to give rise to life