Customer Reviews

The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive? (Science Essentials (Princeton Hardcover))

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Peter Ward attempts to debunk the Gaia Hypothesis by countering it with one of his own: the Medea Hypothesis. According to Ward's interpretation, the Gaia Hypothesis essentially says that life makes the Earth more habitable for life. Ward's Medea Hypothesis says that life makes the Earth less habitable for life. Having read the book, I don't think his hypothesis is any more compelling than [his version of] the Gaia Hypothesis. There are many examples historically where life of one sort or another has altered the environment in such a way as to make survival either easier or harder for other life forms. One example of both is the evolution of photosynthesis, which is what put oxygen into the atmosphere. Oxygen was deadly to some species, but then, it allowed the evolution of others, including higher animals. It seems unnecessary to posit that life is universally Gaian or Medean, in Ward's senses of the terms. Either theory runs the risk of associating intentionality with processes that can be explained without resorting to that. While naive dependency on the truth of the Gaia Hypothesis may lead some to a complacent attitude about the biosphere's ability to alter itself to adapt successfully to changing circumstances, replacing that theory with one that depends on the same type of thinking but is instead dystopian doesn't seem any better.

One of the most important threads in the book depends on the discovery that as the Sun increases its energy output over the next half billion years or more, more carbon will be removed from the atmosphere than released into it, to the point that eventually photosynthetic plants will not be able to survive. Yet this science is not well explained in the book, leaving the reader to wonder how well established it really is. This is Ward's main example of life being Medean, and life on Earth being in its senescence, having only half a billion years or so left. Since this is a physical effect caused by the Sun, I don't know why it says anything about life's inherent tendencies at all, but nonetheless, I wonder how much is really known for sure about how the atmosphere will develop as the Sun's output increases. And how do we know, really, what life-forms might possibly evolve that could take advantage of such changed conditions and thrive in them? Half a billion years is a long time.

I think it is also a little short-sighted to assume that over the next half billion years, should the human race survive even a small fraction of that, that we will not master biological engineering, nanotechnology, etc., to the point that we may have a large hand in designing our own evolutionary successors, who may be able to survive in environments that current life forms would be unable to live in. Much of this may happen in the next century or two let alone hundreds of millions, or even thousands, of years.

As other reviewers have also noted, the book is badly in need of an editor, or at least a proof-reader! Also, this is the first book I recall seeing where the same graphs are repeated as many as three times.

Nevertheless, it was mostly fun to read and definitely a worthwhile subject to think about.

The subtitle for "The Medea Hypothesis" is "Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive?" Peter Ward's answer is yes. Medea, the trophy wife of Jason the Greek Argonaut, who murdered her own children in order to revenge herself on her cheating husband, is indeed the operating paradigm for planet Earth, not Gaia the loving Earth goddess.

The main thrust of the book is to falsify the Gaia Hypothesis posed by James Lovelock that life makes conditions better for itself and that life is self-regulating. The first eight chapters are wholly devoted to the falsification of this benevolent idea. Using the very latest research on mass extinctions in particular, Peter Ward's attempts to falsify the Gaia Hypothesis are satisfying and would, I think, put a dour smile on the lips of Schopenhauer were he alive today and if Ayn Rand were alive today, she would have to weep. (Rand's concept of a benevolent universe wouldn't be rationally supportable through the science Peter Ward uncovers here.) Only one of the six mass extinctions on this planet was due to an extraterrestrial cause (asteroid). Planet earth poisons and/or deadens itself periodically through high and low temperatures. Life contains within it its own ability to destroy itself; life, indeed, is in conflict with itself and is self-destructive, and life includes man himself or herself. Peter Ward demonstrates quite clearly, for example, how life increases to the point where it uses up all resources, whether phytoplankton or humanity. (Ronald Wright in "A Short History of Progress" thematizes this self-same idea historically.)

Chapter 9, only two pages long, summarizes Peter Ward's four chief points on the matter.

Chapters 10 and 11, the last two chapters of this short book, wax both philosophic environmentally and futuristic technologically. Both are weak offerings in that Peter Ward is no philosopher at all and with regard to the future, he cannot posit any engineering solution to life on this planet as we know it. We're simply and hopelessly stuck, science-fiction notions about colonizing space notwithstanding.

I was interested to learn how the author might understand the following conflict: science shows carbon dioxide will decrease in the long run, across the next billion years (and there are graphs in the book to illustrate this fact) and yet global warming (an increase in carbon dioxide) will destroy the planet as we know it. Peter Ward, however, doesn't concern himself with any scientific proofs about global warming. He merely asserts that global warming is a fact and those who aren't convinced of it are either intellectually deficient or politically biased. He never addresses the dichotomy between these two scientific positions, positions he himself poses within the book.

In terms of style, structure and language for this book, it requires a dictionary first of all and then some patience. The talented layperson has a fighting chance of understanding this text with the help of a good dictionary for vocabulary, but a biologist or an earth science professor will definitely have an even easier time of it altogether. It's helpful (but not wholly necessary) if you know, for example, what is a C3 docot from a C4 monocot in terms of vegetation. It's definitely worthwhile to grab that dictionary and look up what are eukaryotes and prokaryotes as well, not to mention such scientific terms as eutrophication, adiabatic, anoxic, albedo, biomass, and hypocapnia.

The sentences one encounters in this book are also full of parenthenticals, most of which appear in the middle of the sentence, interrupting the main thought with nearly irrelevant details, parentheticals that could have been added instead at the very end of the sentence in order to keep cognitive integration focused and steady. When I read on page 78, Chapter 5, that the bacteria in the Canfield ocean "could care less" about nitrogen, knowing the phrase ought to be "couldn't care less" and laughing at the fact that this scientist was suddenly and inexplicably anthropomorphizing bacteria, I knew I clearly wasn't in the hands of a master of nonfiction prose.

My sense of order for this book is that it wasn't written in a steady, logical development or logical progression, nor was it even written with an overall design or plan in mind, but consisted in a (somewhat repetitive) series of efforts, essays, perhaps, and/or technical "pushes" in certain directions in order to do away with various levels of the Gaia Hypothesis. On the whole, I thought this disappointing book needed to be rewritten and edited in which case it probably would have been published only as a pamphlet or a long magazine article.

Ok I am a big fan of Peter Ward, and I read everything of his. But this book is very different than the others that are decorating the paleontology section of my bookshelf. Most of his books are Saganesque - they celebrate science and I always feel like I'm on an adventure in the life of the mind when I read his stuff.

This book is a polemic, much more so even than Rare Earth was. It is a direct attack on a certain modern myth - the Gaea hypothesis - that has been embraced by the international environmental movement. Evaluating this book therefore transcends simple science appreciation, and enters a very different realm - the world of power politics. While I don't think Peter Ward knows a tremendous amount about that world, certainly he is aware of his myth making role - hence the playful title.

Bobby Seale once told me that the functional definition of power was "the ability to define reality in such a way as to make it act in desired manner". If you accept this political truth, than it is more important to evaluate whether the Gaea hypothesis affects reality in a way you want, than it is to address its accuracy.

And this makes the topic very tricky.

Ward handles it with real skill however - and while this is a somewhat less accessible work than some others it is a lot of fun to read. It started a three day argument with my girlfriend that had us both scouring the internet for information to bolster our arguments. I recommend it - but it requires work on the part of us non-paleontologists...and it ain't pretty

This polemic brings to the fore some provocative counterpoints to Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis. However I got the feeling that I was looking at a hurried view of two sides of the same coin, not a new Paradigm.

The Medean point of view says that most mass extinctions were caused by the excesses of life itself, think "ecological overshoot and collapse" on a global scale. The Gaian point of view looks at the broad sweep of evolution on earth and says that earlier life forms helped create the conditions for subsequent life forms to thrive.

The most striking graph in the book shows a 500 million year decline in carbon dioxide to the present. This is when solar output has been increasing, so a greenhouse earth would be frying if high levels of CO2 had persisted. But when modern plant life took hold, increased weathering of continental rocks took more and more CO2 out of the atmosphere. This made the planet habitable for the likes of us - oops - this is the Gaia Hypothesis!

So to get to the Medea Hypothesis, Ward just extrapolates the decline of CO2 to the point where the higher plants cannot survive, ignoring a billion years of Gaia. Nor does Ward indicate just how speculative this extrapolation is, as predictions in hot fields of research are frequently overturned or modified. For example, will feedback mechanisms kick in to reverse the decline in carbon dioxide, which certainly happened during each previous snowball earth or ice age?

And if Ward is right about the expected death of higher life forms, he has missed out on an intriguing possibility. Maybe instead of burning most of the earth's accessible fossil fuels over the course of two or three centuries, humanity should extract them at a very slow rate and burn them over hundreds of millions of years. Instead of a catastrophic, but short lived, global warming episode, we'd become the agents of Gaia, keeping sufficient CO2 in the atmosphere to keep plant life, and us, going.

Actually Ward does suggest "heating limestone" as speculative way to accomplish the same thing, so I conclude that Ward really wants to be a Gaian. He's really just trying to wean us from an oversimplified Gaian philosophy that if we just go back to nature, she will take care of us. Here he is dead right. We can't really go back to nature, with 5 to 10 billion people on the planet, and even if we dramatically reduce our numbers and carbon footprints, nature can do very nasty things, like mass extinctions, totally on its own.

In most respects Ward actually thinks like an environmentalist: When you play with nature in a big way, you're playing with fire. Where he differs from some environmentalists, is in saying that if you're going to effect the planet, then do so in an intelligent, engineered way.

Where Ward has missed out big time, is in the resource arena. No mention of Peak Oil or how such resource limits will hit hard long before rising sea levels drown coastal cities. Peter Ward would be well advised to take a more thorough look at the workings modern civilization and to look for the common ground that will be needed to take any intelligent action.

The Medea hypothesis is an intriguing idea, but unfortunately Peter Ward doesn't present his supporting evidence in a clear, logical manner. As noted by others, the text is embarrassingly written, with significant errors and redundancy. With judicious editing, the content of the book could have made an important, lengthy article, preferably in a peer-reviewed journal since much of the terminology is only accessible to fellow scientists. On the other hand, given that the author chose to publish his hypothesis in a book directed at a general audience may say something about the ability of his arguments to stand up to professional scrutiny.

Sloppily written, very poorly reasoned and argued, repetitive to a fault, and uncourageous when it comes to stating his convictions ("I'm going to tell you how things are. They may be this way and they may be that way, but I probably tend to think that they might be this way but I might be wrong but I doubt it."). Ward can't decide who his audience is--is this a book for the college freshman, for the everyman or for his peers?--and intermittently writes to all of them and the work sorely suffers for it's poverty of order and cohesion and it's failure to focus on and appreciate it's audience. What's more, he discusses life with a distinctly animal-centric bias, fails to examine the significance of coadaptative processes and contemporaneous biofeedback loops, and imposes a "death = bad!" morality on the whole of nature that is humanocentric, woefully short-sighted, lazy, and just plain retarded. The whole of living nature IS biocidal as he contends, but his articulation of the contention misses the point of the actuality: Everything that breathes and eats feeds on the wastes and death of something else. That feedlot cow had to die before it became my Big Mac, not to mention all the corn and wheat that had to croak for my Big Mac's special sauce and bun, and a whole lot of photosynthetic organisms had to fart out oxygen before I could take the next breath. The biocidality of life is self-evident, and it is not revolutionary for him to say so. Everything that lives will die, and everything that lives lives because it feeds on death. And, yes, whether you're a Christer Apocalypsiphile or a astrophysicist giving the sun a billion or two more years before it heats up too much to support live on the planet, the eventual course of life on earth is, inevitably death. Life's not forever. We get that. Big Whoop. We didn't need your book to point that out to us.

That's not to mention his unsophisticated reading of Darwinian evolution, his utter failure to discuss the significance of episodic changes (which he calls "Medea events") as they impact evolutionary continuums, and his insecure anti-Gaian bias that leads him to make more attacks on the various Gaian theorists than actually do much constructive to support his own theory, and his overall laziness in concluding that theory ("More research is necessary." Right--because you couldn't find enough peer reviewed work to support it, couldn't make enough sense of what you did find to pull it together sensibly, and you weren't committed enough to your theory to do any research yourself.) He discusses CO2 in the environment without discussing contemporary human contributions to that. He chides environmentalists for advocating that all human being change their behavior to preserve the planet, but then concludes the work by suggesting that the only way humans are going to survive the "Medea effect" is for us to change our behavior and thus engineer the planet to ensure our survivability.

I actually don't understand the point of this book. The hypothesis itself is poorly reasoned, he doesn't articulate it clearly and with courage, and the examples he gives to support it and refute Gaians are insufficient to either task. And he repeats himself and ultimately contradicts his criticisms of environmentalists. So, what's the point here, exactly? Are Gaians really so threateningly wrong that they're interfering with the happy miracles of capitalism in Christendom? And why did the Princeton press feel this book was ready for publication?

His hypothesis may, indeed, have validity, but it's so poorly articulated and buried under such an avalanche of bias, poorly fleshed out examples, and unnecessary technical jargon that its credibility, to my mind, is utterly eroded. I have no doubt this work would've greatly benefited from an editor, and as a reader I'm insulted by the lack of respect shown me and others by the writer, publisher, and any editor who might've been involved in this work (which is why my tone in this review is so snide). I generally don't have any kind of problem with professors writing theory based on others' research, but in this instance I think Ward would've benefited greatly from doing some research of his own on this subject and perhaps publishing a few papers in peer reviewed journals and evaluating his work according to his peers' feedback--frankly, on his writing alone--before publishing this work. What's more, I found the Gaian hypotheses he rails against more fascinating and sensible, at least as he describes them and given that the evidence he provides to counter them does to little to actually counter them (and even supports it in some cases), and I plan to read the authors he derides next.

After wasting pages on an ad hominen argument that belabors the New Age movement's adoption of James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, Ward finally gets down to the serious business of trying to refute/debunk Lovelock's hypothesis.

The Gaia hypothesis, varying from weak to strong forms, involves the notion that Earth's biosphere actively regulates the chemistry and temperature of its fluid environment--the atmosphere and oceans--to keep the planet bio-friendly. Ward cites extreme fluctuations in atmospheric chemistry and temperature in Earth's past, ascertained from geological evidence, and proposes mechanisms by which the biosphere's own metabolic processes could have contributed to the extremes.

The extremes reduced Earth's overall biomass, and, so, Ward argues, the biosphere not only fails to maintain a healthy environment for itself, but positively contributes to disrupting the environment and reducing the planet's biomass. Hence, the Gaia hypothesis is disproven and Ward's Medea hypothesis, that life poisons its environment and so is inherently suicidal, is corroborated.

The argument is not convincing for a few reasons. For one thing, life always participates in anabolic (building up) and catabolic (tearing down) processes. The two feed each other, and the combined system is called metabolism. To focus on the downside is not to discredit the circuit.

Ward settles on biomass as the "bottom line" measure of the health of the biosphere. But do we assess the health of any organism solely by mass? Evolution has produced advanced technological civilization. What more could be expected from a living planet? More and more and more bacterial tonnage? Biomass per se is not an indicator of anything in particular, except biomass.

In a previous book, Ward (and co-author Donald Brownlee) suggested that glaciations serve evolution as genetic filters, weeding out the less fit. So he's familiar with the idea that die-offs can serve a constructive evolutionary purpose, even if they reduce biomass.

What Ward fails to address, and what is central to Lovelock's original idea, is the anomalous resistance of Earth's fluid environment to entropy. Why are the atmosphere and oceans not sitting stable in a state of chemical equilibrium after all these millions of years? Volcanism, mineral erosion and other geochemical processes continually stir the pot, but surely it is an oddity that the random variability never has crossed a threshold that would've sterilized Earth.

Part of Ward's problem seems to be that he fails to connect Gaia with evolution.

A fetus also pollutes its environment, and up to a point it's not a problem, because the environment not only is set up to handle the toxins, but also positively to support the developing life. Up to a point. A fetus that stays in the womb too long becomes Medean--life threatening--at which time it needs to move to a more accommodating environment.

That's the situation we're in.

Ward has no enthusiasm for space colonization, but thinks it's wiser to try to adapt to this planetary womb. Such short-sighted thinking definitely is Medean. Ward's book presents a half-baked recipe for a self-fulfilling stew.

Overall I believe the reader will find this book enlightening in terms of the evolutionary, geophysical, and solar systems interactions on the life of planet Earth. Peter Ward is not always understandable for the general public, but generally one will get the gist of his and others' Medean Hypothesis. Not a pretty sight when applied to ourselves as the current Medean Actor. The Medean Hypothesis has political implications, and has already stirred "heated" debate among politicians. Global Warming, anyone?

An interesting response to Gaia. But the book needs so much work... the key references are not included, and the graphs are unintelligible. Where was the editor?

Excellent and daring (in these turbulent times). Valuable book. My opinion on the content: the path to future, the ideas should be considered seriously.