Lovelock and Gaia: Signs of life by Jon Turney, Icon Books, £9.99, ISBN 1840464585. Reviewed by Roy Herbert
FOR life to exist on Earth, the surface temperature must remain within certain limits, the atmosphere be breathable, the oceans stay only mildly salty…and so on. These multiple conditions for life are met rather precisely. Moreover, they remain so.
Could there be some system of regulating these things? James Lovelock advanced the idea of subtle controls at work in his 1970s book Gaia – named for the ancient Greek goddess of the Earth. This proposition that the Earth was alive and…
