For full text search please use the '?' prefix. e.g. ? Onboarding

Reproduction

This note is about reproduction in living and other far-from-equilibrium systems.

Not all agents are self-reproducing, but all agents are products of self-reproducing agents.

Sharov, Alexei A. ‘Mind, Agency, and Biosemiotics’. Journal of Cognitive Science 19, no. 2 (2018): 195–228. https://doi.org/10/gssxcv.

Reproduction of genetic, phenotypic, cultural, and other patterns in living systems can be influenced by various factors, such as environmental conditions, genetic variation, natural selection, genetic drift, gene flow, mutation, recombination, epigenetics, social interactions, and cultural transmission.

Reproduction of Individuals

But see the complications on biological individuals.

Reproduction is the process by which living systems produce new individuals that are similar to themselves, but also different in some ways. Reproduction plays a vital role in maintaining the continuity, diversity, and evolution of life on Earth.

  • sexual
  • asexual

Cultural Reproduction

Cultural reproduction in nonhuman societies is the process by which animals and plants transmit their cultural traits, such as behaviours, skills, knowledge, and preferences, from one generation to the next. Can occur through various mechanisms, such as social learning, imitation, teaching, communication, and gene-culture coevolution. Can affect the survival, adaptation, and evolution of different species and populations.

  • The transmission of song dialects in birds, such as canaries, sparrows, and parrots. Birds learn their songs from their parents or other conspecifics, and can modify or invent new songs over time. Bird songs can serve various functions, such as attracting mates, defending territories, or signalling identity.
  • The transmission of tool use in primates, such as chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. Primates learn how to use tools from their mothers or other group members, and can use tools for various purposes, such as cracking nuts, fishing for termites, or extracting honey. Tool use can enhance the foraging efficiency and ecological niche of primates.
  • The transmission of migration routes in mammals, such as whales, elephants, and caribou. Mammals learn their migration routes from their elders or leaders, and can adjust their routes according to environmental changes or social factors. Migration routes can help mammals find food, water, shelter, or mates.

Catchpole, Clive, and P. J. B. Slater. Bird Song: Biological Themes and Variations. 2nd ed. 1996. Reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Autopoietic and Other Self-Maintaining Systems

It is an open questions what persists.

Szerszynski, Bronislaw. ‘Infrastructuring as a Planetary Phenomenon: Timescale Separation and Causal Closure in More-Than-Human Systems’. Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung 47, no. 4 (2022): 193–214.

Lenton, Timothy M., Timothy A. Kohler, Pablo A. Marquet, Richard A. Boyle, Michel Crucifix, David M. Wilkinson, and Marten Scheffer. ‘Survival of the Systems’. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 36, no. 4 (2021): 333–44. https://doi.org/10/gjsfd5.

Zaharescu, Dragos G., Carmen I. Burghelea, Katerina Dontsova, Christopher T. Reinhard, Jon Chorover, and Rebecca Lybrand. Biogeochemical Cycles. American Geophysical Union (AGU), 2020.

Stencel, Adrian, and Dominika Wloch-Salamon. ‘A Pluralistic View of Holobionts in the Context of Process Ontology’. Frontiers in Microbiology 13 (2022): 911577. https://doi.org/10/gstcxd.

Egbert, Matthew, Martin M. Hanczyc, Inman Harvey, Nathaniel Virgo, Emily C. Parke, Tom Froese, Hiroki Sayama, Alexandra S. Penn, and Stuart Bartlett. ‘Behaviour and the Origin of Organisms’. Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres 53, no. 1 (2023): 87–112. https://doi.org/10/gstcxg.

Veigl, Sophie J., Javier Suárez, and Adrian Stencel. ‘Rethinking Hereditary Relations: The Reconstitutor as the Evolutionary Unit of Heredity’. Synthese 200, no. 5 (2022): 367. https://doi.org/10/gstc3m.

Ibanez, Sébastien. ‘The Evolution of Ecosystem Phenotypes’. Biological Theory 15, no. 2 (2020): 91–106. https://doi.org/10/gqvm3m.

Gaia

The idea that the whole-planet system regulates, maintains, and reproduces itself.

!

From Gaia
Go to text →

Notes on Gaian thinking and its consequences for design, justice, and intelligence.

Cf.

Lenton, Timothy M., Stuart J. Daines, James G. Dyke, Arwen E. Nicholson, David M. Wilkinson, and Hywel T. P. Williams. ‘Selection for Gaia Across Multiple Scales’. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 33, no. 8 (2018): 633–45. https://doi.org/10/gd3qcm.

Implications

Gaian framing reshapes a range of related questions. If Gaia is a coupled system that can be selected, stabilised, destabilised, and partially steered through feedbacks across scales, this carries implications for Design, Justice, and Intelligence, among other concepts.

Design

  1. Move from object design to feedback design. If planetary persistence depends on system feedbacks, design should target monitoring loops, response loops, and repair loops, not only products or services.
  2. Evaluate interventions by contribution to Earth-system stability. The key question becomes: does this design strengthen adaptive capacity and reduce destabilising feedbacks?
  3. Design at nested scales at the same time. The multi-scale argument means local interventions need explicit links to regional and planetary effects.
  4. Treat humans as regulators, not the controllers. Gaia 2.0 supports reflexive stewardship, but it does not support total control narratives.
  5. Redefine success criteria in design briefs. Success should include long time horizons, cross-species impacts, and reversibility under uncertainty.

Justice

  1. Expand the subject of justice beyond humans. A Gaian framework supports ecological and multispecies justice because habitability depends on interspecies relations.
  2. Connect justice to Earth-regulating functions. Fairness is not only the distribution of harms and benefits. It is also fair access to stable climatic and ecological conditions.
  3. Make responsibility multi-dimensional. Governance compatible with Gaia and with the conditions for life implies responsibility by historical contribution, present capacity, and current leverage over feedback systems.
  4. Strengthen procedural justice for absent stakeholders. Future generations, nonhuman life, and affected ecologies need representation in decisions.
  5. Guard against technocratic capture. Planetary systems can lead to biased top-down control unless governance includes accountability, plural knowledge systems, and contestability.

Intelligence

  1. Reframe intelligence as a distributed planetary process. Intelligence is not only human or machine cognition. It includes sensing, memory, coordination, and adaptation across the biosphere, institutions, and technologies.
  2. Shift from optimisation intelligence to viability intelligence. The relevant intelligence question is not maximising one metric. It is maintaining conditions for continued life.
  3. Position AI as a subsystem of planetary intelligence. AI should support early warning, coordination, and repair, while remaining constrained by justice and ecological limits.
  4. Link cognition to niche and feedback construction. This view aligns with accounts of intelligence that emphasise decision-making in changing environments and more-than-human cognition.
  5. Use system-level intelligence metrics. Track whether intelligence infrastructures reduce delay, improve collective learning, and prevent tipping dynamics.

Good design and good intelligence are those that increase just habitability. Justice is not an external addition to design or intelligence. It is part of the condition for stable planetary regulation.

References

Bapteste, Eric, Philippe Gérard, Catherine Larose, Manuel Blouin, Fabrice Not, Liliane Campos, Géraldine Aïdan, et al. “The Epistemic Revolution Induced by Microbiome Studies: An Interdisciplinary View.” Biology 10, no. 7 (2021): 651. https://doi.org/10.3390/biology10070651.

Callicott, J. Baird. Thinking Like a Planet: The Land Ethic and the Earth Ethic. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Clarke, Bruce. Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020.

Clarke, Bruce. ‘Rethinking Gaia: Stengers, Latour, Margulis’. Theory, Culture & Society 34, no. 4 (1 July 2017): 3–26. https://doi.org/10/gf37jv.

Dahlmann, Frederik. “Conceptualising Sustainability as the Pursuit of Life.” Journal of Business Ethics 196, no. 3 (2025): 499–521. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-024-05617-y.

Doolittle, W. Ford. ‘Making Evolutionary Sense of Gaia’. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 34, no. 10 (2019): 889–94. https://doi.org/10/gf8xdh.

F. Gilbert, Scott. “Ethical Implications of Being a Holobiont.” Integrative and Comparative Biology 65, no. 3 (2025): 525–37. https://doi.org/10.1093/icb/icaf124.

Frank, Adam, David Grinspoon, and Sara Walker. “Intelligence as a Planetary Scale Process.” International Journal of Astrobiology 21, no. 2 (2022): 47–61. https://doi.org/10.1017/S147355042100029X.

Harding, Stephan. Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia. 2nd ed. 2006. Reprint, Cambridge: Green Books, 2013.

Humphreys, Stephen. “How to Define Unjust Planetary Change.” Nature 619, no. 7968 (2023): 35–36. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-01743-1.

Landecker, Hannah. “Life as Aftermath: Social Theory for an Age of Anthropogenic Biology.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 50, no. 4 (2025): 679–712. https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439241233946.

Latour, Bruno, and Catherine Porter. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge: Polity, 2017.

Lenton, Timothy M., and Bruno Latour. ‘Gaia 2.0’. Science 361, no. 6407 (2018): 1066–68. https://doi.org/10/gfgnf9.

Lenton, Timothy M., Stuart J. Daines, James G. Dyke, Arwen E. Nicholson, David M. Wilkinson, and Hywel T. P. Williams. ‘Selection for Gaia Across Multiple Scales’. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 33, no. 8 (2018): 633–45. https://doi.org/10/gd3qcm.

Lenton, Timothy M., Sébastien Dutreuil, and Bruno Latour. “Gaia as Seen from Within.” Theory, Culture & Society 41, no. 5 (2024): 69–90. https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764241275574.

Lenton, Timothy M. “Life on Earth Is Hard to Spot.” The Anthropocene Review 7, no. 3 (2020): 248–72. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053019620918939.

Lenton, Timothy M., Timothy A. Kohler, Pablo A. Marquet, Richard A. Boyle, Michel Crucifix, David M. Wilkinson, and Marten Scheffer. “Survival of the Systems.” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 36, no. 4 (2021): 333–44. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2020.12.003.

Lenton, Timothy M. “The Evolution of Gaia(s).” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 380, no. 1931 (2025): rstb.2024.0095. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2024.0095.

Margulis, Lynn, and Dorion Sagan. Slanted Truths: Essays on Gaia, Symbiosis and Evolution. New York: Springer, 1997.

Margulis, Lynn. Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution. New York: Basic Books, 1998.

Nordblad, Julia. “The Nature of Planetary Habitability: A Conceptual History of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.” Environmental History 30, no. 2 (2025): 256–80. https://doi.org/10.1086/734558.

Pak, Chris. Terraforming: Ecopolitical Transformations and Environmentalism in Science Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016.

Ruse, Michael. The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Schneider, Stephen Henry, ed. Scientists Debate Gaia: The Next Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.

Shoshitaishvili, Boris. “Is Our Planet Doubly Alive? Gaia, Globalization, and the Anthropocene’s Planetary Superorganisms.” The Anthropocene Review 10, no. 2 (2023): 434–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/20530196221087789.

Tyrrell, Toby. On Gaia: A Critical Investigation of the Relationship between Life and Earth. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.

Relevance

Reproduction is presumed in the notion of 'future generations' and the ethical obligations towards them.

Mulgan, Tim. Future People: A Moderate Consequentialist Account of Our Obligations to Future Generations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

References

Nuño de la Rosa, Laura. ‘Agency in Reproduction’. Evolution & Development, 2023. https://doi.org/10/gsmzwj.