• DOI:10.1111/0033-0124.00337
• Corpus ID: 10796292

Directed Evolution of the Biosphere: Biogeochemical Selection or Gaia?

@article{Lapenis2002DirectedEO,
  title={Directed Evolution of the Biosphere: Biogeochemical Selection or Gaia?},
  author={Andrei G. Lapenis},
  journal={The Professional Geographer},
  year={2002},
  volume={54},
  pages={379 - 391}
}

• A. Lapenis
• Published 1 August 2002
• Environmental Science
• The Professional Geographer

At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, a few Russian scientists proposed an interrelated hypothesis on the coevolution of life and the environment. Because political, linguistic, and cultural barriers between Russia and the rest of the world existed through most of the twentieth century, many of their concepts are not well known in Western science. The synthesis of their works presented in this article leads to the concept of directed evolution of the global ecosystem. Similar to the influential Gaia hypothesis, this concept predicts evolution of the global ecosystem toward conditions generally favorable for organisms. Unlike the Gaia hypothesis, however, the directed evolution in works of Russian scientists results from the superposition of “micro–forces” controlled on local and regional scales by the universal criterion of biogeochemical selection.