Book Review Essay Can a Biosphere be Selfish?: The Gaian Challenge to Darwinism 1
Charles Lineweaver2008
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Abstract
In the mid-60’s NASA was developing instruments for the Viking spacecraft to detect life on Mars. To assist in this effort, NASA consulted James Lovelock, an iconoclastic British atmospheric chemist. Lovelock wondered: Can the existence of life be recognized from knowledge of the chemical composition of a planet’s atmosphere? What would the Earth be like now, if life had never evolved on it? Would there be oxygen in the air? Would the surface temperature be hot like Venus, or cold like Mars? He came to the conclusion that a spacecraft didn’t need to be sent to Mars. All one needed was a determination of the composition of the Martian atmosphere to see if it were in chemical equilibrium. This was done, and to the accuracy of the measurements, unlike the Earth’s atmosphere, the martian atmosphere was in chemical equilibrium. He concluded that Mars was dead (see Krasnopolsky et. al. 2004 and Formisano et. al. 2004 for a possibly low-level methane exception to this conclusion). However,...
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