Geophysiology

Geophysiology (Geo, earth + physiology, the study of living bodies) is the study of interaction among living organisms on the Earth operating under the hypothesis that the Earth itself acts as a single living organism.

The term "geophysiology" was popularized by James Lovelock in his writings on the Gaia hypothesis. The term was in fact foreshadowed by many others. James Hutton (1726-1797), the "Father of Geology" in 1789, in a lecture presented on his behalf by Dr. Black, wrote "I consider the Earth to be a super-organism and that its proper study should be by physiology." This view that the Earth in some ways could be viewed as a superorganism was widely held in the early 19th century, and was supported even by such early biologists as Huxley (1825-1895), but is disputed today. An analogous alternative geophysiology which views the Earth as a single cell was developed by Lewis Thomas in his The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (1974).

Vladimir Vernadsky (1863-1945), founder of biogeochemistry suggested that geophysiological processes were responsible for the development of the Earth through a succession of phases in which the geosphere (of inanimate matter) develops into the biosphere (of biological life). Vernadsky's thinking significantly influenced the development of ecology in Russia, culminating in the "Russian Paradigm" (a term first coined by Georgii A. Zavarzin in 1995). The basic tenets of this approach are i) that life can only exist in the form of interconnected nutrient cycles (i.e. the ecosystem); ii) that ecosystem assembly is an organized process as opposed a haphazard one; iii) that the emergence of life on earth was congruent with respect to the appearance of primordial nutrient cycles; iv) that in addition to the evolution of species there exists a separate process of ecological evolution the direction of which is predetermined by community composition and dynamics (Lekevičius, 2006).

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