Many religious mythologies had a view of Earth as being a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts (e.g. some Native American religions and various forms of shamanism).
"[1] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a paleontologist and geologist, believed that evolution fractally unfolded from cell to organism to planet to solar system and ultimately the whole universe, as we humans see it from our limited perspective.
Building to some degree on his observations and artifacts, e.g. the Dymaxion map of the Earth he created, others began to ask if there was a way to make the Gaia theory scientifically sound.
These are conjectures and perhaps can only be considered as social and maybe political philosophy; they may have implications for theology, or thealogy as Zell-Ravenheart and Isaac Bonewits put it.
In this view, the atmosphere, the seas, the terrestrial crust would be the result of interventions carried out by Gaia, through the coevolving diversity of living organisms.
The most extreme form of Gaia theory is that the entire Earth is a single unified organism with a highly intelligent mind that arose as an emergent property of the whole biosphere.
Some evolutionary biologists, on the other hand, view it as an undirected emergent property of the ecosystem: as each individual species pursues its own self-interest, their combined actions tend to have counterbalancing effects on environmental change.
Proponents of this view sometimes point to examples of life's actions in the past that have resulted in dramatic change rather than stable equilibrium, such as the conversion of the Earth's atmosphere from a reducing environment to an oxygen-rich one.
A social science view of Gaia theory is the role of humans as a keystone species who may be able to accomplish global homeostasis.
Alan Marshall, in the Department of Social Sciences at Mahidol University, for example, reflects upon the way Gaia philosophy has been used and advocated in various societal settings by environmentalists, spiritualists, managers, economists, and scientists and engineers.
[12] Rosemary Radford Ruether, the American feminist scholar and theologian, wrote a book called Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing.
A book edited by Allan Hunt Badiner called Dharma Gaia explores the ground where Buddhism and ecology meet through writings by the Dalai Lama, Gary Snyder, Thich Nhat Hanh, Allen Ginsberg, David Abram, Joanna Macy, Robert Aitken, and 25 other Buddhists and ecologists.