A Valentine

For Love of Gaia

Let me point you to the February 12 program of Quirks and Quarks on CBC Radio. If you go to that page, scroll down to the audio link for the interview with Dr Anna Machin about Why We Love. A spoiler: it isn't poetry; it's science, specifically evolution, neurology and endocrinology. How do I love thee? Let me count the hormones. If you want to get the anatomy right, replace the heart on your Valentine card by a brain, but don't expect kisses. The disembodied nervous system may be interesting, but it's yucky.

I have commented before about the difference between the precise language of science and the suggestive language of poetry. Personally, I embrace them both warmly with a dopamine rush for each. One without the other is incomplete and broken. 

The brain comes with some faculties built-in, some predispositions such as attraction to faces and fear of sudden changes. These instincts are modulated by experience and by the aggregate knowledge of culture transmitted largely through language. The language of poetry moves us to aversion, indifference or love. The language of science tells us about the way things are, how things work, and what is possible. We need all of this in our present situation.

In the 1970s James Lovelock proposed the Gaia hypothesis, a new paradigm suggesting that the physical world and all the living organisms together constitute a complex, self-regulating super-organism. It is a perfect blending of science with poetry. One important thing about Gaia: it isn't all about us. Gaia would be in better shape without us. On the other hand, for us Gaia is the mother without whom we do not exist and the home without which we cannot persist. Mars with Elon Musk is an impossible anthropocentric dream leaving Gaia behind. This is why we need science with our poetry and poetry with our science, words to awaken enthusiasm for some lovely and possible future. Here, within Gaia, I think.

It's getting late, and Valentine's Day has arrived. I started a poem but it wasn't working so I threw it in the basket. Now I'm tired and out of rhymes. Somebody write us a poem for love of Gaia.