Independent Science
James Lovelock has been called many things in his long life, ranging from "mad inventor" to "holy fool" (although, as he remarks, "wholly fool" may have been intended). No wonder that he has become something of a cult figure, a matter of embarrassment to him as the effect is to caricature or a least give a wrong impression of ideas which under his and other auspices are now entering mainstream science. A prime example is the Gaia hypothesis, a metaphor no more or less allusive than such other metaphors as "the selfish gene".
Lovelock's place as an inventor and scientist emerges clearly from this autobiography. His curiosity about the natural world was dominant from the start. Fortunately an experiment to try deadly nightshade berries on girls from another class (as he calls it, an apprenticeship to the Borgias) was stopped in the nick of time. His father, no mean inventor and household fixer himself, gave him a wooden box filled with electrical odds and ends for Christmas when he was four, and this opened opportunities not just for experiment but for far reaching questioning about how and why things work. He remembers his early years as full of happiness and sunshine.
Now as in the 1960s science is practised by the big battalions, and research teams are composed of specialists. Lovelock has always had ideas far beyond any speciality, although he has contributed to many such. It was the width of his range which prompted the arrival, apparently out of the blue, of a sensational letter from NASA in March 1961, inviting him to join a group of scientists whose mission was to explore the condition of the moon. With some misgivings he left the Mill Hill Institute, and began, first in the United States and then in this country, what he describes as the independent practice of science, which he has continued to this day.
In Britain as elsewhere, there are, as Lovelock says, internal tribal barriers between the sciences (particularly marked, for example, between physics and biology). Overcoming them was perhaps easier in the United States, and Lovelock found undreamed of opportunities, which he was able to exploit on his return to Britain years later. He was thus able to act as advisor to such companies as Shell, to Lord Rothschild, and to many others, and to exercise his remarkable inventiveness.
The list of his inventions, most based on laboratory work with relatively simple equipment, is impressive. Beginning with the argon detector (designed to analyse compounds from a gas chromatograph column), he went on to a device for measuring the intensity of heat radiation, a transmodulator, probably the first working microwave-oven, and most famously the electron capture detector (ECD), which led to the discovery of ozone depletion by chlorofluorocarbons and the series of international agreements to end their manufacture and use. The story of how these inventions were made is one of the most fascinating parts of this book. It was the same kind of reasoning which enabled him to tell reluctant NASA engineers that it was unnecessary to send the Viking mission to Mars to show there was no life there today. The composition of the Martian atmosphere, detectable from the Earth, showed that it was a dead, high entropy planet close to chemical equilibrium.
This insight led to another of greater significance. The Gaia hypothesis was born of the realization in September 1965 that although the Earth's atmosphere was in chemical disequilibrium, it was nonetheless stable and had been so for billions of years. Something was therefore regulating the atmosphere. If most atmospheric gases came from living organisms, then it must be life at the surface which did the regulation through a complex system of feed backs. In other words the Earth was behaving like a living organism. It was the novelist William Golding who suggested Gaia as the name for a self-regulating Earth.
The Gaia hypothesis developed over the years. In 1974 it was described by Lovelock and the micro-biologist Lynn Margulis as "a tightly coupled system whose constituents are the biota and their material environment, which comprises the atmosphere, the oceans and the surface rocks." To illustrate the means by which feed back mechanisms maintained stability, Lovelock invented a theoretical model which he called Daisyworld, in which black and white daisies acted to their own selective advantage as a kind of planetary thermostat. The model has been much elaborated in response to criticism, but its underlying principles remain the same.
Lovelock well describes initial reactions to the Gaia hypothesis. To chemists, physicists and engineers used to non-linear systems, it created no difficulties. But many biologists did not like it at all, although some, notably the late W D Hamilton, later changed their minds. For those who took any notice, it looked too much like the age old suggestion that the Earth was itself a living organism; and in that event it failed to meet the usual neo-Darwinian criteria. Lovelock himself was a little debonair in his use of language. As he says, his first book on the subject was "more a love letter than a text book". Moreover it proved alarmingly attractive to those who were in search of a new religion, and saw the Gaia hypothesis as a kind of legitimisation of a mother-goddess. It has taken time, and careful research (some of it published in Nature ) to establish Gaia's scientific credentials as earth systems science. This fits admirably with the objectives of the Geological Society of London with which the Gaia Society is at present being merged.
Lovelock's autobiography brings out his single most important characteristic as a scientist: his refusal to accept dogmas in small things or in big, or to establish dogmas of his own. His skill as an inventor and insights as a scientist come from scepticism about the conventional wisdom and from putting together somewhat unlikely elements from different disciplines. Hence his suspicion of big science, his feelings about the sometimes stifling character of peer review, and his belief in the individual approach.
As for dogmas of his own, he has always maintained that his ideas are provisional. As I know from personal knowledge of him, he hates the polarisations which come from public controversy. There is a profound agnosticism which runs through his book. With it goes a painful honesty leavened by joie de vivre, manifest even in dialogue with his computer: indeed he finds composing computer programmes like writing poetry, with the blame for any mistakes invariably his own.
Almost anyone with an interest in science will enjoy this book. If I have a criticism, it is that the chronology is occasionally confusing so that the ways in which the author and his thinking evolved get lost. The story is one of a very human being whose mind grows in the play of experiment and ideas. Like the philosopher Mary Midgley, he believes that one of the blind spots in current society is its alienation from the world around us. For him Gaia represents the essential unity of the living and physical environment. We do not have to be holy - or wholly - fools to recognise it.
Sir Crispin Tickell is Chancellor of the University of Kent and former Warden of Green College, Oxford and HM Ambassador to the UN. This review first appeared in 'Nature' and is reproduced with permission.