ABSTRACT
The philosophy behind Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis is that life on earth forms an integrated entity. The individual species constitute each other's environment. Biological evolution can be seen as a dynamical process in which many species interact. The various species in the self-organized criticality (SOC) state would be globally connected, and evolving together, precisely as envisioned in the Gaia theory. The phenomenon of SOC appears to be quite universal and provides a unifying concept for large-scale behavior in systems with many degrees of freedom. The species try continuously to improve their fitness by modifying their genetic code, but avalanches originating all over the system tend to prevent this from happening. Each species has a number of genes, represented by small boxes, which can be in either of two states, black or white, or 1 and 0. The various co-existing species correspond to various local energy minima.
