Why do we call ancient stories about the cosmos “myths”? Perhaps their inferior status is due to their lack of use. They were once useful to us because of their simplicity, at least until we created more convenient fictions. Science seems to be the latest convenient fiction. But one thousand years from now, it's likely that we'll view today's scientific theories as myths that have lost their use, only to be repurposed in new contexts. Bruno Latour, for example, has been brave enough to question one of our most beloved contemporary fictions, “nature”.

“No, if we have to give up nature, it is neither because of its reality nor its unity. It is solely because of the short-circuits that it authorizes when it is used to bring about this unity once and for all, without due process, with no discussion, outside of political arenas, and when something then intervenes from the outside to interrupt-in the name of nature- the task of gradually composing the world.”(Latour 91)

Latour casts “nature” as a myth, a convenient fiction utilized by science, the arts, and politics, which also keeps us at an arm's length from nonhuman processes. Perhaps Latour wishes for us to build cognitive maps that do not create artificial boundaries between human and nonhuman domains. He wishes to do away with the term “nature” all together (Latour 9). It seems unsettling to scrap an idea as familiar as nature. But the conceptual separation it defines leads humans to do stupid things in the rest of the system. By separating ourselves any longer from the “gradual composing” formerly known as nature, humans will fail to take into account our connections to nonhuman systems.

But mythology doesn't just represent a pile of disused stories from the past. The metaphors that they convey often find new uses. A character from Greek mythology that has been recently repurposed in the service of scientific explanation is Gaia. In 1971, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis proposed a theory they called the Gaia Hypothesis (Lovelock). Gaia was appropriate to their theory, because she was the goddess of Earth. Lovelock and Margulis's theory proposed that Earth was like an organism, a united system, that had emergent, self-regulating properties including all organisms, plate tectonics, the salinity of the oceans, weather, and human activity (Lovelock 579). Needless to say, their idea sounded too much like mythology to the scientific community of the time (Capra 106). They perceived the theory as too teleological, or consciously driven by an outside source. I attribute this misunderstanding as a lack of understanding for emergent, generative processes, which this community still seemed to attribute to humans alone. The reason I introduce the Gaia Hypothesis is not to argue for its scientific validity, but for its scientific kinship to the mythological character of Gaia. It is a useful idea that is easy to understand and to take with you. And it has a greater resonance with hard science than with Creationism, for example. It sets emergence and evolution as the primary shapers of our world.