2017年8月2日 大域情報(GI)セミナー 案内
とき ：2017 年 8月 2日（水）13:00-14:00
ところ：奈良女子大学理学部 G棟3階 G-302
Mechanisms for Gaia
James Dyke (University of Southampton)
Since life emerged on Earth, there have been a series of significant external (e.g. asteroid impacts) and internal (e.g. volcanism) events that have produced mass extinction events. But they never managed to completely kill off life. In that respect life has been lucky. Good fortune, plus Anthropic principle arguments (if life on Earth had not been lucky, we would not be here to puzzle over how it has managed to persist) may be sufficient to explain life’s long history of Earth.
What if there was more to it than luck? What if the Earth system possessed self-stabilising or homeostatic processes that reduce the magnitude of impacts on life? This is a form of the original Gaia Hypothesis first proposed by James Lovelock nearly half a century ago. Since then many articles, books and popular press reports have been published. Initially written off as ‘not even wrong’, the hypothesis has persisted in one form or another. What has remained is what appears to be a lack of any mechanism by which planetary-scale homeostasis could operate.
In this talk, I will give an overview of a mechanism for Gaian homeostasis. The mechanism operates if a few simple assumptions are satisfied. In outlining this mechanism, I will give an overview of the Gaian debate, how it relates to evolutionary biology, Earth system science, and where luck and anthropic principles play a role in our attempts to understand the evolution of the Earth, and other planets with biospheres.
アクセス
６３０−８５０６
奈良市 北魚屋西町 北魚屋西町
奈良女子大学 G棟
E-mail: seto[at]ics.nara-wu.ac.jp
数理生命システム分野の研究室はG棟3階にあります。
近鉄奈良駅1番もしくは5番出口を出て北へ徒歩3分、南門からお入りいただき、
左手に見える駐車場を越えてすぐ左に曲がって直進しますと、G棟への入り口が右手に見つかります。
