The Gaia Mind

Life on Earth makes up the most complex system ever known, a system whose nature and development seem at times so intricate and improbable that we intuitively wonder if there isn't some intelligence behind it.

The Gaia Hypotheses (online summary), as expounded by its originators, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, paints the picture of life on Earth working as a coherent whole to create and maintain the conditions necessary for life to exist. Just as scientists studying entropy have noted that life's building blocks on a cellular level--protein and DNA--are only produced within cells themselves, so Lovelock and Margulis have demonstrated that the macro environmental conditions necessary for life, such as temperature and chemical makeup of the atmosphere, are created or maintained by the processes of life itself.

From an intuitive point of view, we are left to wonder how life "knows" to create the exact conditions necessary for its further development. And we are left in amazement at how the Gaian system--unlike complex non-living systems scientists have studied--has maintained a condition of homeostasis so far from equilibrium for some 3 billion years--even in the face of a gradually heating sun, meteoric disruption, and the substantial change in the makeup of life itself over the years.

The Gaia Hypothesis

James Lovelock discovered the first clues of Gaia's ability to shape the Earth's environment when he compared the atmospheres of the Earth, Mars and Venus.

Lovelock predicted the absence of life on Mars or Venus based on the makeup of their atmospheres which were in a chemical state of dead equilibrium.  Mars' atmosphere is 95% carbon dioxide and 3% nitrogen. Similarly, Venus's atmosphere is 95% carbon dioxide and 4% nitrogen. By contrast Earth's atmosphere is 77% nitrogen and 21% oxygen--the result of hundreds of millions of years of bacteria and photosynthetic algae extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and releasing oxygen back into it. Since oxygen is one of the most highly reactive of elements, this atmospheric composition is highly improbable.

Starting from this observation Lovelock developed the "Gaia Hypothesis"   which stated that "certain aspects of the Earth's atmosphere--temperature, composition, oxidation reduction state, and acidity--form a homeostatic system, and that these properties are themselves products of evolution."   The atmosphere acts as a circulatory system that makes available necessary elements for life. Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, hydrogen, sulphur, phosphorus, sodium, calcium, magnesium potassium, iodine, selenium, and molybdenum are all found in the atmosphere in quantities many orders of magnitude larger than their equilibrium state. Furthermore, since life processes take place on a very short time scale compared to geological processes, these chemicals must be circulated through the atmosphere rapidly. In all cases that are known, the agents responsible for cycling these chemicals into the atmosphere are living things. Gaia creates and maintains the conditions of its survival.

The oxygen cycle is particularly important for advanced life. Not only do animals breath oxygen, but the mitotic cell division requires oxygen. Since life has existed uninterrupted for hundreds of millions of years, it almost certain that the concentration of oxygen has never fallen significantly below its present value during that time. Similarly, concentrations of oxygen only a few percent higher than present would lead to spontaneous combustion of organic material, including grasslands and forests, so the level of oxygen could not have strayed much higher than present.

As oxygen was added to the atmosphere by early anaerobic life forms carbon dioxide was removed which may have also served Gaia's purposes since it is generally accepted that the sun's energy output has increased by at least one quarter in the last 3.5 billion years. As the sun heated, the gradual reduction of CO2 in the atmosphere would have lowered the greenhouse effect and served to keep the temperature relatively constant. Since the geological records shows that the oceans (the birthplace of more advanced life forms) have never frozen over or boiled away, the temperature must have been maintained at a remarkably stable level. Of course the mechanism for removing CO2 from the atmosphere has been by fixing it into the fossilized remains of organic material--in other words; Gaia!

Lynn Margulis sums up;

"The Earth's atmosphere maintains chemical disequilibria of many orders of magnitude containing rapidly turning over gases produced in prodigious quantities. The temperature and composition seem to be set at values that are optimal for most of the biosphere ... Is it not reasonable to assume that the lower atmosphere is maintained at an optimum by homeostasis and that this maintenance (at the ultimate expense of solar energy, of course) is performed by the party with the vested interest: the biosphere itself?"

Gaia has the characteristics Bateson listed for mind. Clearly Gaia is an aggregate of interacting parts; it reacts to changes in the environment by changing itself; it responds with the collateral energy generated by it's many parts; and it requires circular chains of action. Most importantly, Gaia's coded version of its perception of the world is stored in DNA which is remarkably stable as well as flexible. DNA is the physical code for storing Gaia's collected information.

Fritjof Capra, in The Turning Point (online excerpt), puts it this way;

"In the stratified order of nature, individual human minds are embedded in the larger minds of social and ecological systems, and these are integrated into the planetary mental system-the mind of Gaia--which in turn must participate in some kind of universal or cosmic mind. The conceptual framework of the new systems approach is in no way restricted by associating this cosmic mind with the traditional idea of God. In the words of Jantsch, 'God is not the creator, but the mind of the universe.' In this view the deity is, of course, neither male or female, nor manifest in any personal form, but represents nothing less than the self-organizing dynamics of the entire cosmos."

The Collective Gaian Conscious

If Gaia is a mind is it necessarily conscious? Capra's work suggests that this is not necessarily true, that Gaia can be explained as a self organizing system. Although the development of life is rarely explained by mere chance anymore, systems theory has emerged as a new explanation that does not require any "vital force" beyond the physical.  Drawing analogies with other examples of spontaneous organization such as the ordering of water molecules in an ice crystal or the complex patterns of air molecules in a whirlwind, some scientists now consider life an emergent system,  where sufficiently complex mixes of chemicals can spontaneously crystallize into systems  which sustain themselves and reproduce.  In the words of Stuart Kauffman, we get order for free.

The development of life depends as much on the compilation and storage of information as the ordering of molecules.  Here Bateson's concept of a hierarchy of information becomes important.  DNA holds information that, in Bateson's words, contains a physical component of its own, separate from but relating to the features of the world the information represents.  In other words, abstract information.

With ice crystals the medium is the message, the ordering of the molecules determines the structure. With DNA the ordering of the molecules determines characteristics entirely unrelated to them such as body form or animal behavior.

DNA has been compared to language in its complexity and structure, but language is useless without somebody to interpret it. DNA goes through a complex process of interpretation; copied by RNA which then moves to the Ribosomes to make proteins which then get interpreted into all hereditary characteristics. The information processing system of DNA can be described, but not fully explained. Systems theorist Stuart Kauffman calls DNA a complex chemical computer ... a parallel-processing computer of some kind where many genes and their products are active at the same time.  This is an interesting comparison since computers can interpret abstract symbols without being conscious.  However, computers are not a self organizing system, but rather a product of conscious design.

 Lyall Watson comments; The capacity of DNA for storing and processing data is immense, but I suggest that on its own it cannot result in intelligence greater than we could expect from any machine. True mind depends, I contend, on the creative intrusion of a second system, which sets up subtle interference patterns between the two.  Suggestive evidence that physical characteristics depend on more than just DNA coding was discovered by Joseph Campbell during his studies of Egyptian mythology.  Campbell described "the educative (paideumatic) influence of an inhabited space upon its population." In nineteenth century Egypt when an epidemic wiped out the native breed of cattle, new breeds were introduced, but after a few generations they began to show the distinctive features of the original breed By modern times they exactly resembled the Egyptian cattle depicted in the Old Kingdom. Game wardens have reported similar transformations of breed brought into game reserves to replace extinct breeds. Dandelions grown on mountain tops from seeds brought up from the valley acquire a form distinctly different from the plants in the valley, a paideumatic transformation that "neither chemistry, physics, nor meteorology can explain."

David Chalmers' theory that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe raises the possibility that Gaia involves consciousness. Although the question is not one generally searched for, science does contain a growing body of evidence of a conscious element at work in nature. It should be pointed out that the nature of Gaian consciousness may be radically different from our own.  The conscious experience is inextricably intertwined with information which always has a physical component. Our conscious experience is shaped by the physical characteristics of our minds, and since the Gaia mind is radically different, our concept of consciousness may need to be seriously stretched.

Evidence for a collective Gaian Consciousness.

Physical evidence of a Gaia mind comes in three forms; evidence of remarkable cooperation between individuals that is unexplainable by their physical traits, remarkable mental links between individuals, even of different species, and evidence of information passed from one individual to another unexplainable by physical methods.  

Remarkable cooperation

There are examples in nature of the simplest of life forms being able to cooperate to an extent totally unexplainable be their physical attributes.

Chondromyces aurantiacus bacteria begins in a little lemon-shaped spore that blows in the wind to settle on suitably moist soil.

 There each spore germinates, spitting out several thousand tiny rod-shaped bacteria.  These bacteria, without the aid of any visible moving parts, congregate with similar associations from other spores, forming a colorless slime.  The slime moves through the soil searching for food, each bacteria following in the tracks of another.  When the food runs out, the slime begins to pile up on itself, rod upon rod, each bacterium secreting more slime until the organisms are perched thousands high.  From this height new spores are released to start the cycle all over again.  No one has yet discovered how these bacteria communicate and how joint decisions are made.

The amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum lives in liquid films on the forest floor, consuming bacteria and dividing relentlessly.  When an amoeba senses a shortage of food, it releases a short burst of the chemical cyclic adenosine monophosphate.

 Any amoeba that receives the call amplifies it and relays it on, then begins to move toward the source of the first signal (but never any of the secondary signals.)  Within minutes, the amoeba form a pattern of feathery crystal shapes as they converge on the original.  After two or three hours, all amoebae in the area are gathered around a small number of original signalers where they congeal into a sausage shape about two millimeters long.  This form, known as a grex, begins to act like a single, multicellular organism, developing a distinct front and hind end, and moving slowly toward any source of heat it senses.  After as long as two weeks, the amoebae sort themselves out into work groups with a variety of different jobs.  A small group of amoebae gets sealed into a capsule to create a new spore, then hoisted into the air at the end of a long, thin, well anchored stalk. The grex seriously blurs the definition of what an individual is.

Even more interesting; compare the description of the grex with Elias Canetti's description of the crowd in human history;

The crowd, suddenly there where there was nothing before, is a mysterious and universal phenomenon.  A few people may have been standing together--five, ten or twelve, not more; nothing has been announced, nothing is expected.  Suddenly everywhere is black with people and more come streaming from all sides as though streets had only one direction. ... It seems as though the movement of some of them transmits itself to the others.  But that is not all; they have a goal which is there before they can find words for it.  This goal is the blackest spot where most people are gathered. ... As soon as a man has surrendered himself to the crowd, he ceases to fear its touch.  Ideally, all are equal there; no distinctions count, not even that of sex.  The man pressed against him is the same as himself.  He feels him as he feels himself.  Suddenly is is as though everything were happening in one and the same body.

Theorists of self organization would reduce all behavior to the effects of DNA, RNA and proteins.  The complex specialization of cells in advanced animals is due to the genetic coding that has developed over the millenia. And yet here is the grex, a simple, one celled animal, which under the effects of one signal chemical, suddenly transforms itself into a multicellular organism with specialized skills.  And here is mankind, most advanced animal of them all, responding to its own vaguely understood signals in a way that mirrors the simple grex.  It is hard to explain such behavior with reference to something that transcends the individual body.

Perhaps the most remarkable example of all is the behavior of the wasp Pepsus marginata which feeds its young only on the tarantula Cyrtopholis portoricae.  The female wasp provides an adult tarantula, alive but paralyzed, for each egg she lays.

The tarantula body hair is extremely sensitive, normally any contact causes the spider to whirl and pounce.  Yet, the wasp will explore the spider with her antennae to make certain it is the right species, walking all over it without evoking any response.  The wasp next moves off to dig a ten inch hole to bury the egg and spider.  Then she returns, feeling the spider all over once again and sliding underneath to get into just the right position, as she can penetrate the exoskeleton only at the soft hinging membrane where the legs join the body and only if she stings with surgical precision to the right depth, at the right angle, and in precisely the right place.  During this whole time, the spider makes no move to save itself.  Burying the spider in the hole she has dug, the wasp lays one egg next to it.  When the larvae hatches it must survive for weeks with only the spider for nourishment so it eats the spider piece by piece, keeping it alive by saving the vital organs for last.  The whole ritual of the wasp and spider is so complex and well planned that it led naturalists such as Fabre to conclude that It is not in chance that we will find the key to such harmonies.

The Behavior of Complex Societies and Herds

A few species of animals have developed highly complex social systems that would seem to be obvious places to look for evidence of a group mind.  But even less developed societies show evidence of activity that cannot be explained by the individual minds involved.  Shoals of fish and flocks of birds show a coordination that has so far defied explanation.  Flocks of dunlins, for example, can wheel and bank as if they are a single superorganism, and the rate at which the "maneuver waves" pass through the flock is too rapid to admit of any simple mechanistic explanation.  One of the few studies of this ability, by Wayne Potts, fount that the movement could be initiated anywhere in the flock and the maneuvers always passed through the flock like a wave radiating from the site of initiation.  These waves took, on average, 15 milliseconds to pass from neighbor to neighbor even though laboratory tests found that dunlin's reaction time to a flash of light was 38 milliseconds.  

Schools of fish respond to attacks by splitting in half, each of the two halves swimming around the predator and eventually rejoining.  Even more spectacular is the "flash expansion" where all of the fish simultaneously dart away from the center of the school when attacked.  The entire expansion may occur in as little as one-fiftieth of a second, during which the fish may accelerate to a speed of ten to twenty body lengths per second.  Yet the fish do not collide.  This behavior has no simple explanation in terms of sensory information because it happens too fast for nerve impulses to more from the eye to the brain and back to the muscles.

Naturalist William Long observed that when birds found food, other birds would quickly appear, even relatively rare birds, widely dispersed over the countryside.  Long concluded that either the birds could send forth a "silent food call" or that their excitement was "felt" by other hungry birds at a distance beyond all possible range of sight and hearing.  Long also studied the behavior of herds of caribou and elk.  The whole herd would at times become alarmed and flee when one animal sensed danger--even at times when the alarmed individual was well out of sensory range of the herd.

Insect colonies provide even more remarkable examples of social cooperation.  Naturalist Eugene Marias' studies of South African termites found remarkable cooperation in building and repairing their nests. Even though the termites were blind, and worked from either side of a breach, they connected each side of the structure perfectly.  Marias carried out a simple but fascinating experiment.  He took a large steel plate several feet wider and higher than the temitary and drove it right through the center of th breech so that it divided mound into two parts.  Marias commented; "The builders on one side of the breach know nothing of those on the other side.  In spite of this the termites build a similar arch or tower on both sides of the plate, the two halves match perfectly after the dividing cut has been repaired.  We cannot escape the ultimate conclusion that somewhere there exists a preconceived plan which the termites merely execute."  Marias concluded that the termites had a "group soul."

Psychic Links

A different evidence for a consciousness extending beyond the individual comes from the apparent psychic link between individual humans or between humans and animals.  For example, in 1940 the twelve year old son of a county sheriff in West Virginia was taken a hundred and twenty miles to the Myers Memorial Hospital at Philippi for an operation.  About a week after his arrival, he heard a fluttering at the window of his hospital room.  He called a nurse and told her there was a bird trying to get in.  To humor the boy, she opened the window  and a pigeon came right in.  He immediately recognized it as his personal pet.  He told the nurse to look for a ring on its leg carrying the number 167.  She did and there was.  The pigeon had succeeded in traveling a hundred and twenty miles and locating the correct window in the right building in a strange town at night and in a snowstorm.

Joseph Banks Rhine and his researchers at Duke University sifted through hundreds of cases of what they called "psi-trailing" in animals, trying to obtain precise verification.  The one which most impressed them was that of a cream colored Persian cat called Sugar who in 1951 seems to have trailed his owners across fifteen hundred miles of mountainous country between California and Oklahoma.  The cat escaped them just before they moved, but fourteen months later suddenly turned up, leaping through the window of their new home in Gage, Oklahoma.  The cat had a deformity of the left hip which served as positive identification, easily recognizable by a veterinarian. The possibility that these incidents occurred merely by chance may be somewhat better than the odds of DNA forming spontaneously, but they are hard to explain on the basis of a self organizing system.

British horse trainer Harry Blake was convinced that horses could communicate telepathically with one another as well as with humans.  Blake carried out a number of experiments with horses, using horses that were related or who had lived close together.  In one set of experiments he separated a pair of horses and fed them randomly.  In twenty-one out of twenty-four cases, the horse who was not being fed would become agitated and demand food at the same time the other was being fed.  In another experiment, one horse would be taken out and exercised and the other would become agitated.  In a third, Blake would make a fuss over one horse and the other would would show signs of disturbance, as though it were jealous.  Blake achieved a positive result in 68 percent of 119 experiments he conducted.  As a control experiment he tried the same things with two horses who were hostile to each other.  In only one out of fifteen cases was there a positive result.  Similar experiments have been conducted with dogs and rabbits with similar results.

Anecdotal evidence of telepathy among people is widespread and long standing, although scientific proof has been elusive.  Telepathy appears to be something that occurs most often under extreme or emotional conditions, not easily replicated in a laboratory.  For example,  during World War II there were many well-attested cases of mothers receiving telepathic news about their sons at the front long before the news made its way back home.  A famous historical case involved poet John Donne who visited France in 1610, leaving his pregnant wife at home in England.  Two days after his arrival, he was found by the English ambassador in a trance like state.  When he came to, he told the ambassador he'd had a vision of his wife passing through the room carrying a dead child in her arms.  Twelve days later they received the news that the baby had been delivered stillborn that very day.  Even a skeptic like Upton Sinclair came to believe after a series of experiments with his wife where he would think of an image and his wife, miles away would attempt to draw it.  Out of 290 attempts, Sinclair's "witch wife" scored 65 direct hits and 155 partial successes.

A few experiments have taken the idea of psychic links beyond telepathic communication to explore the possibility of psychokinesis.  French researcher Rene Peoc'h conducted an experiment with newly hatched chicks--who will imprint on the first moving object they see.  Peoc'h exposed the chicks to a robot that was program to move randomly around a room.  Initially the chicks followed the robot as though it was their mother.  But when Peoc'h put the chicks in a cage on one side of the room, the robot inexplicably confined it's motion to the side of the room nearest the cage--the chicks were apparently able to "pull" the robot closer to them when they couldn't follow it.  

In other experiments, Peoc'h kept non-imprinted chicks in the dark and put a lighted candle on top of the robot.  The robot in this experiment too the robot remained closer to the chicks than random change would predict.  In another experiment, he placed rabbits in a cage where they could see the robot.  At firs they were frightened of it and the robot moved away from them.  But after some days, when they had grown accustomed to it, they tended to pull to robot closer to them.  

Intriguing possibilities of psychokinesis stand out in human history as well.  Two of the driest summers in North American history, judging by the evidence of tree rings occurred the years of the first two attempts at permanent settlement, Roanoke colony and Jamestown.  Could the bitter starving winters of the first years of those colonies have been an sub conscious attempt to drive the invaders off the continent?  Similarly, the two bitterest Russian winters in recent history coincided with Napoleon's invasion in 1812 and Hitler's invasion in 1945.  This could be an area of fruitful research. 

Unexplainable Knowledge

 Evidence memory or learned behavior passed from one individual to another without any direct contact also suggests the presence of a collective mind.  A number of experiments have shown that learned behavior appears to be stored somewhere for future generations to benefit from. In the early years of the century, William McDougall of Harvard, one of the founders of American psychology, discovered that untrained rats were quick to learn a task (escaping from a water maze) previously acquired by many earlier generations of rats of the same strain. These findings were confirmed years later in both Scotland and Australia, when researchers discovered that untrained rats picked up the task almost immediately. Russian psychologist, Ivan Pavlov, discovered a similar effect when he trained several generations of white mice to run to a feeding station at the sound of a bell. The first generation required an average of about three hundred trials to learn the task, but the second generation required only about one hundred trials, the third generation took thirty and the fourth ten trials.

There have been similar experiments with people. In England, a picture containing a hidden Cossack face was broadcast over the television to test how fast people could recognize it as the features slowly appeared. Later, when the picture was shown in America, Europe and Africa, the ability to recognize the picture was dramatically faster than with the British audience. Experiments at Yale with non Hebrew speaking students asked them to look at Hebrew words from the old testament that were mixed in with other words that had their letters randomly rearranged. The students were asked to guess the meaning of the word and rate their confidence in their answer. Confidence ratings in the real words were considerably higher than scrambled words; and confidence in frequently used words were twice as high as in rarely used words. Similar experiments have tried teaching people Morse code using the standard code and a made up code, and teaching people to type using the standard keyboard and a keyboard with a different arrangement of letters. In both cases, the form that had been learned by many people before was picked up much more easily than the new form.

Some animals appear to experience premonitions of catastrophic events such as earthquakes, or in the case of domesticated animals, of serious illness or death of an owner.  

Descriptions of animal behavior predicting earthquakes date back as far as 373 B.C. when, according to the historian Siculus, rats, snakes, weasels and other animals left the city of Helice, Greece in droves, beginning five days before a catastrophic quake.  Similar detailed reports can be found from quakes in Wurttemberg in 1095 and Lisbon in 1755, as well as references from hundreds of other quakes.  In recent times stray animals were seen streaming from the city of Agadir, Morocco in 1960 just before a quake that killed 15,000 and again three years later before the quake in Skopje, Yugoslavia.  Before the earthquake that destroyed much of Kobe, Japan, on January 17, 1995, unusual behavior was observed in mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, insects and worms.

By the 1970s, the Chinese had become convinced of the ability of animal behavior to predict earthquakes and encouraged the public to watch for possible signals of a quake.  In June, 1974, the Chinese State Seismological Bureau issued a warning that a serious quake should be expected in Liaoning province within a few years.  A network of some 100,000 people were trained to watch out for unusual behavior by animals, as well as for other signs.  In the middle of December 1974, snakes came out of hibernation, crawled from their burrows and froze to death.  Rats appeared in the open in large groups, often in a confused condition, cattle and fowl were strangely excited.  There was a minor earthquake on December 22, but throughout January 1995, reports of strange animal behavior continued.  Plans were made to evacuate the city of Haicheng.  At the beginning of February the number of reports climbed steeply when cattle, horses and pigs began panicking.  According to one observer, "geese flew into trees, dogs barked as if mad, pigs bit each other or dug beneath the fences of their sties, chickens refused to go into the coops, cattle tore their halters and ran away, and rats appeared and acted as if drunk."  On the morning of February 4, the decision was made to evacuate Haicheng.  At 7:36 P.M, the same day an earthquake measuring 7.3 on the Richter scale hit, destroying over half the buildings in the city.  Heeding the animals' warnings saved tens of thousands of people.  The Chinese have continued to use these techniques for predicting quakes, and although they have missed some major quakes they have also had some remarkable successes.

There have long been instances of domesticated animals predicting the onset of elipectic seizures, comas, or premature death in their masters.  Dogs have demonstrated this ability most widely, but cats and rabbits have also been known to show such predictive ability.  In the early 1990s, Andrew Edney, a British veterinarian carried out the first systematic survey of the ability of dogs to predict epileptic seizures.  He studied twenty-one cases of dogs the seemed able to predict attacks.  The dogs looked apprehensive or restless, alerted people in the vicinity to seek help, barked or whined frequently, sat by their owners or herded them to safety and encouraged them to lie down..  When the seizure struck they either stayed beside the person or went to seek assistance.  Edney commented that "No dog seemed to get it wrong--one even ignored 'fake seizure attempts."  A small charity group in Sheffield now works to train dogs who seem to have this predictability to train them to signal more demonstratively so that their owner recognizes the warning.

Anecdotal evidence also exists for cross generational memory in the wild. Psychologist S. Exner relates how a young hunting dog, never before employed at a chase, began to search for a downed partridge as soon as he heard the first gun shot, which the dog could not have seen fall to earth. In England, the spread of a learned habit of opening milk bottles by several species birds--most notably in great tits, coal tits, and blue tits--shows this same phenomenon. Once discovered in any particular place, the habit spread locally, presumably by imitation. Since these birds do not venture more than a few miles from their breeding place the appearance of the custom in widely spread areas represented new discoveries. The habit was only rarely noted before 1935, but as the number of new cases grew, the pace of learning accelerated. The behavior also spread to Sweden, Denmark, and Holland. During World War II milk bottles virtually disappeared in Holland, only becoming common again in 1947 or 1948. In spite of the fact that few if any of the pre-war birds could have still been around, the habit reappeared rapidly.

The task of explaining memory at all has proven difficult.  Scientists have been unable to locate where it is stored in the mind. In one experiment, learned habits survived in animals even after more and more of the cerebral cortex was removed, leading perplexed scientists to conclude that "memory is both everywhere and nowhere in particular." In one particularly thorough experiment, young chicks were injected with radioactive substances and then underwent simple forms of training. When the chicks were examined, the substance was found to be concentrated in the left hemisphere, indicating that part of the brain had been where the learning took place. But when the affected areas of the brain were removed the following day, the chicks could still remember what they had learned. The physical brain may not be the sole repository for memory after all.

Similarly, Ethnologists have found it difficult to explain the many forms of instinctive behavior in animals. While it has been shown that genes influence behavior in a variety of minor ways, it has been impossible to demonstrate that behavior is genetically programmed. Some scientists believe that the role of genes has been overstated, and that "properties are projected onto them that go far beyond their known chemical roles." These findings mesh perfectly with a theory that affords Gaia some level of consciousness. Though there is an interaction with the physical chemistry and the information stored by it, there are simply too many instances that cannot be explained without a larger mind at play.

Domesticated animals--One paw in two worlds.

The types of group behavior or knowledge unexplainable by the physical senses that animals demonstrate fits perfectly with the concept of a conscious Gaian system.  The level of consciousness necessary for such a system need not be very high--Gaia need not be an awake or vibrantly aware system to provide the functions we have seen, it need only have an ability to store information, be aware of its importance, and be purposeful in its utilization.  

Domesticated animals offer a somewhat different type of group think; demonstrating behavior not limited to the benefit of their own species or the general Gaian homeostasis.  Domesticated animals also demonstrate a unique bonding with humans, apparently for no other purpose than to satisfy their loyalty for their owners.  These animals seemed to have developed the kinds of mental bonds with both the Gaian mind as well as the human.  Rupert Sheldrake notes that "the bonds between people and animals are a kind of hybrid between the bonds that animals form with each other and those that people form with each other."

Rupert Sheldrake's fascinating new book Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, examines three major areas of psychic links between humans and their pets; telepathy, such as the ability of some dogs and other animals to know when their owners are coming home--even when it happens at random times, a homing ability among some pets that are able to traverse long distances over unfamiliar territory to find their way home, find their way to their owners' new home or even to visit relatives of their owners, and premonitions such as the ability to sense when an owner is about to have an epileptic fit.  All of these abilities may occur in animals in the wild, but they are unique with domesticated animals in that they seem to take on a distinctly extra-Gaian aspect in linking with a human mind.

Scientific theories

Phenomena such as these that clearly transcend the individual have led a number of scientists to offer theories to explain them. Rupert Sheldrake's A New Science of Life put forward the theory of morphic fields, a non-material field or force similar to electromagnetic fields, which stores information on form and function of all physical things. These fields would then inform all future physical objects. Sheldrake draws clues from a wide variety of sources, from the difficulty chemists have in forming new crystals to the anomalies and apparent redundancy in the course of evolution.  Using physics as a starting point, Sheldrake posits a new field on the model of the gravitational field or the electromagnetic field, with the obvious intent of potentially working out a unified theory that would explain all physical phenomena.

Ervin Laszlo describes something very similar in his theory of psi-fields. Laszlo's theory, grounded in quantum mechanics, suggests that the wave functions equivalent to quantum potentials are built up into enormously complex higher order, or nested, processes, retained in non-local psi-fields. Such processes could exert influences not only on single subatomic particles, or small sets of such particles, but also on large scale real world events such as the human nervous system. Thus, historical changes in dominant structures of consciousness could gradually gain substantial momentum through the mediating effect of psi-fields. Laszlo comments, "This makes living beings into elements in a vast network of intimate relations that embraces the entire biosphere--itself an interconnected element within the wider connections that reach out into the cosmos."  Like Sheldrake, Laszlo is attempting to use a model in line with other physical theories so that all of reality might be explained through one system of knowledge.  A model based on fields might explain how knowledge or structural information could be stored beyond the body but it seems explain the mysterious contact between individuals that transcends the body.

Lyall Watson came up with a more general hypothesis, a Contingent System, a force in nature with an evolutionary momentum of its own, whose existence may have a physical basis, but whose expression is almost certainly psychical.  The contingent system would have a collective rather than a personal nature but would operate only in areas where a slight shift in equilibrium would be sufficient to produce dramatic changes.  

Russian physicist and Nobel laureate A. D. Sakharov admitted late in life that, though he had never dared write about it in scientific publications, he was haunted by the idea that, after billions and billions of years of evolution, something of the intelligence of the universe would survive the superdense conditions of the Big Crunch and inform the next universe.

Whatever the system that explains these unexplained phenomena, it would seem likely that it would involve the functions of a mind as generally described by Bateson.  And if consciousness is a real phenomenon and universal as Chalmers suggests, then a meta-mind such as Gaia is likely to have some form of consciousness.  Indeed, most of the unexplainable phenomena we have seen involve some sort of conscious activity.  Just as scientists have been unable to find a physical location of memory in the brain, neither can we explain all memory and conscious behavior through the physical world.  Gaia is alive and real.  We are all Gaia.

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