The criticisms against Gaia are solidly founded on conventional scientific dogma. However, conventional dogma also denies the arrow of time and free will as fundamental, and it struggles with fundamental problems of quantum interpretations.

Ford stated “I’d hope that Darwin, were he alive today, wouldn’t balk at the non-traditional steps I’m about to take.” In fact, Darwin was well aware that his law of natural selection was incomplete, and he firmly believed that it would be generalized to non-living systems. In an 1882 letter [1], he stated:

"Though no evidence worth anything has as yet, in my opinion, been advanced in favour of a living being, being developed from inorganic matter, yet I cannot avoid believing the possibility that this will be proved some day in accordance with the law of continuity.… If it is ever found that life can originate on this world, the vital phenomena will come under some general law of nature."

In The Physical Basis of Free Will—A Conversation [2] and references therein, I describe a contextual interpretation of physics. It introduces the Kelvin Selection Principle as an extension of Darwinian evolution. The KSP describes the relative stability of dissipative processes, applicable to all far-from-equilibrium systems, living and non-living. Ford’s emphasis on process and cooperation of a system’s parts is fully compatible with the KSP.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2745620/

[2] https://medium.com/science-and-philosophy/the-physical-reality-of-free-will-a-conversation-f979b3a2df41