Perhaps the greatest stumbling block in the way of widespread acceptance of Gaia is the implicit shadow of doubt it throws over the concept of the uniqueness of humanity in nature. Gaia denies the sanctity of human attributes. If intricate planning, for instance, can be mimicked by cunning arrays of subvisible entities, what is so special about Homo sapiens and our most prized congenital possession, the human intellect? The Gaian answer to this is probably that nothing is so very special about the human species or mind. Indeed recent research points suggestively to the possibility that the
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