The main idea behind Peter Ward’s The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive? is that a good mother would never kill her children.[1]  Only a bad mother would commit such a hideous crime, and Medea is singled out as the worst of mothers ever known.[2]  But even the best of mothers, such as James Lovelock’s Mother Earth of the Gaia hypothesis fame, would kill her children if she feared that they faced a future worse than death.  The opposition of the two hypotheses is thus false.  Gaia perforce turns into Medea once she realizes that she cannot take care of her children any longer.  That is, when the planet bearing life comes under mortal threat, as it always must.

Footnotes

1. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.

2. For details, see any translation of Argonautica by Apollonius of Rhodes.