Wow you have a functioning university library with books?

I mean, based on the taken-for-granted claims of the post: reserved support for a populace that's (partly) swayed by a guy being good looking.

I just realized you're studying philosophy at Pardubice! Say hello to my good friend Lesley Jamieson ☺️

We explain this by drawing from literature on units of selection that distinguishes between replicators, interactors, manifestors of an adaptation, and beneficiaries. Using these, we note that Gaia is not a replicator and maybe not an interactor, but they are a manifestor and beneficiary. 9/9

Still, Lovelock & Margulis described Gaia as having functions and 'adaptive control systems'. How do we make sense of that? Biology is used to talking about these in terms of evolution by natural selection. Gaia may be an organism, but its parts can still be shaped by natural selection. 8/9

We use this to argue that, while Gaia is not a DI, Gaia is nevertheless an organism in the same way that a holobiont is plausibly not a DI but nevertheless an organism (though there is debate on this; some of the folks we draw from argue that holobionts ARE DIs). 7/9

holobionts are integrated functional units composed of different species, and don't fit the standard picture of evolution described above. One example of this: while you are the descendant of your human parents, your gut bacteria may not be descendants of your parents' gut bacteria. 6/9

However, we argue that there are good theoretical reasons to distinguish between entities that are subject to selection ('Darwinian Individuals' or DI) and organisms, and draw from work on holobionts (symbiotic composites of hosts and microbiomes, e.g., you + your gut bacteria) to do so. 5/9

Gaia is a population of one and does not reproduce, and requires a level of symbiosis that would seem to be impossible given concerns about group selection and evolutionary altruism (in short, cheaters would ruin everything) so it's not clear how it would fit into evolutionary thinking. 4/9

However, there were many criticisms of Gaia, mainly focused on how such an entity did not fit into our understanding of biology, and, more specifically, our understanding of evolution by natural selection and its recipe of phenotypical variation, differential fitness, and heritable fitness. 3/9

The Gaia hypothesis, as put forward by Lovelock and Margulis, sought to explain the long-term stability of the Earth's conduciveness to life in terms of seeing it as a collective entity with adaptive control systems keeping it in homeostasis, and to incorporate this entity into our biology. 2/9

Oh I think they may find the work valuable for sure, but not necessarily in the way specified here. Some value knowledge and understanding, others may have anthropocentric goals, etc., "connection to nature" in a way that has an impact on finding one's life meaningful may not be part of it

Might even have the opposite effect, as exemplified by Steven Weinberg: "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless."

there's imo a difference between making nature more intelligible and having a stronger/meaningful connection to it. Scientific understanding of how it works need not bear on finding it intrinsically valuable.