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The Medea Hypothesis emerged in 2009 from the work of Paleontologist Peter Ward as an inverse to Gaia Theory and the work of James Lovelock. It proposes that rather than life on earth begetting more life in a kind of self regulating system, complex life is suicidal or biocidal by nature, evolving in such a way to beget the conditions of its own annihilation. Ward replaces the Greek deity of Gaia with what he believes to be a more fitting maternal character from Greek antiquity.
“I think all life is suicidal. I thought up something tongue-in-cheek I call the Medea Hypothesis. Medea, Jason’s wife, was probably the worst mother in Greek History. She murdered her children because of Jason’s infidelities. Jason was probably not very good at anything, apparently, except making women fall in love with him. He was good at that.”
The earth is Medea and we are her children. Under the Medean modality of thought things are less than the sum of their composite parts, organisms in their individual bids for survival often over consume resources depleting ecosystems and creating ecological imbalances and extinctions. Though living systems may appear to locally create homeostatic conditions decreasing entropy through order and structure, a Medean Cosmology suggests that, in aggregate, life may drive the biosphere toward increased and accelerated entropy, undermining its own existence.
Ward posits that for Gaia theory to be true three major conditions would have to be observable:
- There should be an observable increase in aggregate biomass over time, present within the geological record.
- The opposite of which is true as within the geological record periods of growth are often followed by periods of periods of mass extinction.
- The majority of feedback present in nature should be negative, “corrective” events would come into being following ecological imbalances, to create synergy.
- Feedback mechanisms are more often positive, resulting in changes that reinforce instability in natural systems, leading to cascading failures like unchecked resource consumption.
- The life span of the biosphere should be extended by life.
- An expanding sun creates a finite lifespan of earth, and a biosphere unable to adapt to the resulting increase of energy.
Proponents of the Medea Hypothesis look to major mass extinction events as proofs for the viability of the theory. In Earth’s 4.5 Billion years of existence there have been 5 major mass extinction events the majority of which, with exception of the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction which was caused by a meteor impact, was the result of evolutionary changes in organisms that lead to inhabitable ecological changes.
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The Great Oxidation event, which occurred 2.49 billion years ago and killed 99% of life on earth, came as the result of photosynthetic cyano-bacteria evolving to produce oxygen poisoning life on earth over the course of a few million years.
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The Sturtian and Marinoan Glaciations that occurred 715 million and 650 million years ago, as the result of the over sequestering of atmospheric carbon by plants resulting in ice ages that became totally inhospitable for life.
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The Late Ordovician Mass Extinction, which occurred 440 million years ago as well as the Great Dying Euxinic (251.9 million years ago) both where in part the result of sulphur reducing bacteria resulting in the over production of hydrogen sulphide.
Ward as well as other proponents of the Medea hypothesis cite our current 6th mass extinction event as another proof, believing that future Medean extinctions could be Anthropocentric in nature.
Despite a cool nihilism that seems to be at the core of the Medea Hypothesis, Ward leaves room for the possibility that intelligent life could in fact overcome its Medean nature and combat potential Ecological collapse in the future
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