Perhaps the most spectacular, and most spectacularly wrong, application of systems analysis was the Gaia hypothesis, advanced by chemist and atmospheric scientist James Lovelock in 1974. Influenced by the increasingly popular science of ecology and made intuitively plausible by the first photos of our planet from space, the hypothesis proposed that Earth and all that live on it comprise a single “system,” in fact, a self-regulating, living system in which the parts (humans, for example, or algae) interact to make Earth habitable for living creatures. That majestic image of a blue planet in
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