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LIFE

Born in 1919, James Lovelock was educated at the University of London and Manchester University and holds a Ph.D. in medicine. In the United States he has taught at Yale, the Baylor  University College of Medicine, and at Harvard University.

Some of his inventions were adopted by NASA in their program of planetary exploration. It was while working for NASA that Dr Lovelock has developed the Gaia Hypothesis.

Dr Lovelock is president of the Marine Biology Association, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, London in 1974. An independent scientist, inventor and author, Dr Lovelock works out of a barn-turned-laboratory in Cornwell, West Devon, England.

(photo from GAIA by Brig Klyce)

THEORY

In collaboration with other NASA project researchers, Lovelock predicted the absence of life on Mars based on the consideration of the Martian atmosphere and its state of being in a chemically dead equilibrium. In contrast, the Terran atmosphere is in a chemical state described as being far from equilibrium. The unlikely balance of atmospheric gases which comprise the Earth's atmosphere is quite unique in our solar system. This fact would be clearly visible to any extra-terrestrial observer, by comparison of the images of the planets Venus, Earth and Mars.

What was happening upon the Earth which enabled the maintenance of such an unlikely combination of chemical gases - specifically nitrogen and oxygen. What complex processes are at work within the terrestrial atmosphere - and have occurred for many billions of years - to explain this uniqueness? How have these processes arisen and what today maintains these processes at this equilibrium which is chemically far from equilibrium?

In the late 1960's Lovelock took the first steps in answering these questions by considering the the beginnings of life upon the planet Earth. The earliest of life-forms existed in the ancient oceans and were the smallest and the simplest - less than single celled. Contemporary microbiological research points to the fact that almost 3 billion years ago, bacteria and photosynthetic algae began extracting the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and releasing oxygen back into it. Gradually - over vast geological time spans - the atmospheric chemical content was altered away from the dominance of carbon dioxide, towards the dominance of a mixture of nitrogen and oxygen - towards an atmosphere which would favorably support organic life powered by aerobic combustion - such as animals and mankind.

So it was then that Dr James Lovelock, in looking for the evidence of extra-terrestrial life on Mars, observed the Earth as might an extra-terrestrial, and began to formulate a method of explanation as to why the Earth appeared therefore to be not so much a planet adorned with diverse life forms, but a planet which had been transfigured and transformed by a self-evolving and self-regulating living system. In view of the nature of this activity, Earth seemed to qualify as a living being its own right. And so the hypothesis took its initial form. And as the story goes, while on a walk in the countryside about his home in Wilshire, England, Lovelock described his hypothesis to his neighbour William Golding (the novelist - eg: Lord of the Flies), and asked advise concerning a suitable name for it. The resultant term "Gaia" - after the Greek goddess who drew the living world forth from Chaos - was chosen. However, there was a big difference between postulating such a grand schemed hypothesis and having it accepted by the traditional scientific community, and there remained much research work to be done in order to be able to more clearly specify the entirety of the processes by which the modern planetary atmosphere had been evolved and was continuing to be evolved. And in this task, in the early years of his further research concerning the Gaia hypothesis, Lovelock was supported by the collaboration of Dr Lynn Margulis, a leading and forward thinking American microbiologist.

"The entire range of living matter on Earth from whales to viruses and from oaks to algae could be regarded as constituting a single living entity capable of maintaining the Earth's atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts...[Gaia can be defined] as a complex entity involving the Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback of cybernetic systems which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet."

"To what extent is our collective intelligence also a part of Gaia? Do we as a species constitute a Gaian nervous system and a brain which can consciously anticipate environmental changes?"

WORKS

Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979) - The Ages of Gaia (1988)