WHEN James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis first advanced the hypothesis of a self-regulating planet in the 1970s, they came under severe attack. Biologists disliked the idea of Earth being in any sense “alive”. It is misleading at best, they said: life is about Darwinian evolution taking place against a dead, inorganic background. Lovelock and Margulis’s notion of a self-regulating planet – christened “Gaia” by the novelist William Golding – seemed nonsensical.
How attitudes have changed. Today scientists accept that living things have a significant impact on the composition of the atmosphere and the oceans, and that they in turn respond to those…
