Lovelock's Gaia, A Conceptual Criticism

While there is much to admire in the concept of Gaia, and here I reserve my remarks to James Lovelock's seminal conception, this admiration ought to be critical.  Lovelock defined Gaia in cybernetic terms:

"a complex entity involving the Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil;  the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet."

Yes, by general rule the processes undergone by the objects of these various sciences (organisms, weather patterns, ocean currents) are so ordered as to maintain the systems of which they are a part, but  the type of system maintenance (its operations and constraints) explained in the theory of cybernetics (with its particular method of searching for optimality) leaves many conceptual shortcomings and difficulties.  For example, how are we to discriminate between processes of order and organization in the cybernetic model?  Cybernetic theory was developed with the conceptual tools and aims of mechanistic sciences.  Is it's model complex enough to deal with open systems at far from equlilibrium conditions (such as organisms), those dynamical systems constantly open to flows of matter and energy?  

Cybernetics' concept of seeking optimal conditions of the systems it treats is feedback.  Feedback shows how systems are self-regulating, a  cybernetic system directs its own behavior in response to perturbations in its environment, yet the cybernetic model of causality is too simply circular, not yet dynamic.  

 The mechanistic origin of cybernetical theory is our clue to the conceptual difficulties of circular causation.  Cybernetic systems presuppose structural arrangements (mechanistic) in the sense that their regulative behavior is determined by static structural conditions.  While cybernetic systems are open to information (inputs and outputs), they are not open to material or structural change. Thus, cybernetic models refer mainly to secondary regulations of the system, while the primary regulations of systems remain in a sense internal and unaffected by these regulations.  Yet what happens when we come to consider the structural arrangements of systems as themselves results of dynamical processes rather than as preestablished?

Returning to Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, premised on cybernetics, the question becomes one of whether Lovelock treats all the wonderful phenomena he speaks of in reductive fashion.  Cybernetic systems have been shown to be rather special types of more general systems, open and dynamical in structure and function. Cybernetics may not be an adequate model for thinking living systems, and they ways in which living systems interact with their environments, even if one wanted to examine the problem in informational terms alone.  How can the cybernetic model deal with the complexities of systems whose components are dissolved in catabolic processes or replaced in anabolic ones?  With system differentiations in organization, such as those progressive differentiations seen in growth rates and development?