People have always wondered how life evolved on Earth. Richard Dawkins’ book The Selfish Gene and James Lovelock’s book The Ages of Gaia attempt to shed some light on this debate. Dawkins’ presents a reductionist point of view in that he argues that evolution takes place entirely through the effects of natural selection on the survival of selfish genes. Lovelock, on the contrary, provides a holistic view of evolution and argues that the entire earth evolves as a super-organism where the biota controls the abiota. Besides the disagreement in the differing scientific views, the language used in both of the books is also very different. Most of our understanding of a concept depends, to a certain degree, on the language used to describe it. Both Dawkins and Lovelock heavily use scientific metaphors in explaining the biological theories presented in their books. However, the metaphors used by Dawkins make the reader think beyond the scope of the scientific message of his theory, thus weakening his argument. While, Lovelock’s use of metaphors stimulates scientific reasoning and thus strengthening his argument.John Lovelock in his book The Ages of Gaia presents an argument for a theory governing the relationship between the earth's biota and its physical environment. Lovelock holistic view of nature combines biology and geoclimatology as one science, which he calls geophysiology, “the study of living and non-living Earth as a single system (Lovelock 11).” Lovelock’s theory states that life is necessary to maintain the planet’s thermodynamic and chemical composition in its current state of homeostasis (the tendency of a system to maintain stability even with external disruptions) until some external force interrupts it, at which point it will move to a new stable state. He terms this theory “Gaia”, after the Greek goddess of Earth. The Gaia theory delivers two primary implications:...
