Nearly forty years of letters between the two scientists who co-developed the paradigm-changing Gaia hypothesis make for fascinating, humanising reading
Humans 24 August 2022
By Adam Vaughan
James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis corresponded for nearly 40 years.
Tim Cuff/Alamy
Edited by Bruce Clarke and Sébastien Dutreuil
Cambridge University Press
HERE’S something for the archive: “The New Scientist one seems to have stirred up some interest including an amazing number of crank letters of a gentle and non-aggressive kind,” wrote the late independent scientist and polymath James Lovelock, in a letter to biologist Lynn Margulis.
The “cranks” were responding to an article in this magazine, dated 6 February 1975. In it, Lovelock presented the idea and world view of Earth as a self-regulating system, the Gaia hypothesis, to a wider …