I heard this week of the death, on his 103rd birthday, of scientist and writer James Lovelock. He started out as a chemist but became what is now called an “independent scientist” and “futurist”. These terms are often applied to people who are simply cranks, but he wasn’t just that. Unorthodox he was, certainly, but there was depth to his thinking that mere cranks never reach.
James Lovelock was best known to me – and I suspect to many others – for his work on the Gaia Hypothesis, which is roughly speaking the idea that the system of life on Earth functions as a single organism that defines and maintains the conditions necessary for its own survival.
I’ve just had a rummage around my bookshelves and found my copy of his famous book on this topic, which I bought and read back in the 80s. The first edition was published in 1979, but the one I bought was the version published in 1987 after the topic had been featured on the BBC TV programme, Horizon:
The Gaia hypothesis has been widely criticized by biologists and ecologists but I remember finding it a very thought-provoking book, though I interpreted more as a metaphor than a mechanism. At any rate it seems to me to be a useful counter to the extreme reductionism of many prominent life scientists. It’s also very well written and definitely worth reading over 40 years after it was written. James Lovelock was as inventive and ingenious a thinker as he was unorthodox.
Rest in peace, James Ephraim Lovelock (1919-2022).
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