Product Description

In The Medea Hypothesis, renowned paleontologist Peter Ward proposes a revolutionary and provocative vision of life's relationship with the Earth's biosphere--one that has frightening implications for our future, yet also offers hope. Using the latest discoveries from the geological record, he argues that life might be its own worst enemy. This stands in stark contrast to James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis--the idea that life sustains habitable conditions on Earth. In answer to Gaia, which draws on the idea of the "good mother" who nurtures life, Ward invokes Medea, the mythical mother who killed her own children. Could life by its very nature threaten its own existence?

According to the Medea hypothesis, it does. Ward demonstrates that all but one of the mass extinctions that have struck Earth were caused by life itself. He looks at our planet's history in a new way, revealing an Earth that is witnessing an alarming decline of diversity and biomass--a decline brought on by life's own "biocidal" tendencies. And the Medea hypothesis applies not just to our planet--its dire prognosis extends to all potential life in the universe. Yet life on Earth doesn't have to be lethal. Ward shows why, but warns that our time is running out.

Breathtaking in scope, The Medea Hypothesis is certain to arouse fierce debate and radically transform our worldview. It serves as an urgent challenge to all of us to think in new ways if we hope to save ourselves from ourselves.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #86587 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 208 pages

Review
Ward holds the Gaia Hypothesis, and the thinking behind it, responsible for encouraging a set of fairy-tale assumptions about the earth, and he'd like his new book, due out this spring, to help puncture them. He hopes not only to shake the philosophical underpinnings of environmentalism, but to reshape our understanding of our relationship with nature, and of life's ultimate sustainability on this planet and beyond.
(Drake Bennett Boston Globe )

Author and Earth Sciences professor Ward has authored numerous books for non-specialists; this latest is a critical response to James Lovelock's Gaia concept, which argues that homeostatic physical and chemical interactions work to maintain Earth's habitability. Ward argue, passionately, that the opposite is true--that living organisms decrease Earth's habitability, hastening its end by perhaps a billion years.
(PublishersWeekly.com )

The point of The Medea Hypothesis is that life, rather than helping to regulate the Earth 'System' by negative feedbacks, does all it can to consume the resources available--sowing the seeds of its own extinction.
(Dr. Henry Gee BBC Focus Magazine )

When avid science readers browse the shelves for new titles, the books that grab their attention are best described by a single adjective: thought-provoking. And no scientist/author is more provocative in his approach and innovative in his thinking than University of Washington astrobiologist Peter Ward . . . . [R]eaders looking for solace will not find it in Ward's latest effort, The Medea Hypothesis. This time Ward goes after motherhood itself--or at least the central idea of the Gaia ('good mother') hypothesis that has evolved to describe the relationship between life and the planet as a whole.
(Fred Bortz Seattle Times )

[Ward] makes his points succinctly and supports them well.
(Rebecca Wigood Vancouver Sun )

[The Medea Hypothesis] is an interesting intellectual exercise on the history of life.
(Choice )

Reading the book will widen your field of vision about life on earth, which is still there after about 4 billion years.
(Dr. Hein van Bohemen Ecological Engineering )

Ward . . . adopts the tone of a planetary mortician gruesomely interested in his subject's decease. Ward is an expert on mass extinctions, and the subject seems to have infected his general outlook. He does not come across a happy camper.
(Roger Gathman Austin American-Statesman )

Review
A provocative look at the history of our living planet. Ward offers a distinct perspective and argues strongly that the only intelligent choice is to manage ourselves and the environment. The Medea Hypothesis will cause anyone who cares about the environment to think differently.
(Thomas E. Lovejoy, president of the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment )

From the Inside Flap

"A provocative look at the history of our living planet. Ward offers a distinct perspective and argues strongly that the only intelligent choice is to manage ourselves and the environment. The Medea Hypothesis will cause anyone who cares about the environment to think differently."--Thomas E. Lovejoy, president of the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment

"This book casts the environmental debate in a completely new and important light. Ward demolishes the comfortable illusion that nature will take care of us if we just let it. To survive in the long term, the Earth needs a management team--we humans have to take up the job."--Chris McKay, NASA Ames Research Center

"The Medea Hypothesis is provocative, extremely well-written, and very convincing."--Simon A. Levin, Princeton University

"For those comforted by the notion of a benevolent Gaia working to sustain life on the planet, Ward's Medea is a nightmare, one that has recurred many times in Earth's history and is coming again soon, unless we take action to combat the self-annihilating tendency of the biosphere."--Lee R. Kump, coauthor of Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming

"Serious and well written, The Medea Hypothesis is sure to generate controversy among the experts. I read it over a weekend and could hardly put it aside until I finished it."--Francisco J. Ayala, University of California, Irvine

"This is an important and significant contribution to the fields of geobiology and astrobiology because it offers a startling new interpretation of the nature of Darwinian evolution. Ward's conclusion is both troubling and provocative: life may be its own worst enemy. Like James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, Ward's Medea hypothesis is likely to be debated for the next thirty years."--Joseph L. Kirschvink, California Institute of Technology

"A provocative rethinking of the coevolution of life and its environment. Peter Ward mounts a sustained critique of optimizing/homeostatic Gaia, providing a lucid set of examples of significant positive feedbacks arising from life. This book will have a strong heuristic impact on future research."--David Schwartzman, author of Life, Temperature, and the Earth

Customer Reviews

Life is the agent of its own destruction
The Gaia hypothesis first proposed by James Lovelock (or Gaia theory as he and his supporters now call it, claiming that it is able to satisfy predictive tests) is fairly well known these days. Life is supposedly maintaining the biosphere in homeostasis, stabilising atmospheric composition, temperature, ocean chemistry and so forth thus maintaining conditions suitable for life; humans however are working against and destabilising the system.

Peter Ward is a palaeontologist who here proposes the opposite, that life by its actions works to its own detriment, even to the extent of its own mass destruction. He calls it the Medea hypothesis, after the legendary figure who killed her own children.

He begins in the first two chapters by considering the definition of life and the definition of evolutionary success. If Darwinian evolution is one of the defining qualities of life, it seems almost a logical conclusion that competition will cause life to work against itself.

The third chapter, "Two hypotheses on the nature of life on earth", introduces the Gaia hypothesis, and then the Medea hypothesis. He contends that whilst his Medea hypothesis is just that, a hypothesis, the Gaia model can be shown to be incorrect in many ways.

Chapter four, "Medean feedbacks and global processes" seeks to demonstrate that many of the supposedly negative feedbacks of Gaia which work to keep the biosphere in homeostasis are in fact the opposite, positive feedbacks. So for example temperature increase causes changes which result in yet further temperature increase, a runaway effect.

Then in the fifth chapter, "Medean events in the history of life", Ward asserts that all but one of the many mass extinctions in the history of life on earth (the exception being the end Cretaceous extinction accepted by most as being the result of a meteorite impact) were caused by life itself causing catastrophic changes to the conditions of the biosphere. These events include:

- 3.7 billion years ago: methane generation causing planetary cooling
- 2.5 billion years ago: oxygen generation killing off many life forms
- 2.3 billion years ago: consumption of methane and carbon dioxide causing global glaciation
- between 2 and 1 billion years ago: hydrogen sulphide generation poisoning the oceans ("eutrophication")
- 700 million years ago: second global glaciation
- 600 million years ago: rise of animals causing major temperature drop
- 395-365 million years ago: microbial mass extinctions
- 400 - 250 million years ago: global temperature changes due to colonisation of land by plants
- 251 million years ago: Devonian eutrophication

Chapter six, "Humans as Medeans" considers how we are causing biosphere destruction as if we were prokaryotic life form; for example our population is growing exponentially and we are creating waste which is poisoning many other life forms.

Chapter seven, "Biomass through time as a test" suggests a falsification of the Gaia hypothesis in that the earth's biomass peaked at somewhere between 1 billion and 300 million years ago and has been decreasing since. We are effectively already in planetary old age. This theme leads into chapter eight, "Predicted future trends of biomass". Decreasing carbon dioxide levels, a consequence of life itself, mean that many plants could be extinct in as little as 100 million years time. Grasses, which are more efficent at carbon dioxide absorption will last longer, but in 500 million years time all plants could be extinct, with obvious consequences for all other life.

After a brief summation are the chapters "Environmental implications" and "What must be done". Because life is "Medean", humans are in fact the only possibility for sustaining life on earth into the far future by actively changing the planet. Rather than a "back to nature" approach, we must take an active management approach.

For further related reading, see earlier works by Ward: Under A Green Sky concerning mass extinctions; (with Don Brownlee) The Life and Death of Planet Earth considering both past and future life. Other recommended works by Ward: Life as We Do Not Know it: The NASA Search for (and Synthesis Of) Alien Life and (again with Brownlee) Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe.

A revolutionary hypothesis (in Italian)
Una visione rivoluzionaria e provocativa delle relazioni della vita con la biosfera terrestre. In contrasto con la visione dell'ipotesi di Gaia di James Lovelock (l'idea che la vita sostiene e mantiene condizioni di abitabilità sulla Terra) l'ipotesi di Medea (la madre della mitologia greca che uccise i propri figli) di Peter Ward sostiene che la vita ha tendenze biocide e causerà la scomparsa della vita sulla Terra nel futuro cosí come è già avvenuto nel passato... "Solo la capacità di modificare il futuro ci salverà..." sarà l'uomo che dovrà modificare le condizioni ambientali per evitare la scomparsa della vita, e dell'uomo, in un futuro i cui effetti "Medea" già sono rilevabili... Un'ipotesi che aprirà un acceso dibattito, scientifico e metodologico, sulle modalità di conservazione della natura...

Interessante!
Mi è piaciuto.
L'ho trovato scritto con estremo rigore scientifico.
Mi ha aiutato a riflettere su questo delicato tema e ad approfondire le mie conoscenze dell'argomento.
Soprattutto mi ha aperto un modo di giudicare diverso dal solito.
Spero che il testo possa essere presto pubblicato anche in lingua italiana in maniera che possa essere diffuso anche nel mio Paese con maggiore facilità.