Homage to Gaia Read Online Free Page A

himself in a country village instead of enjoying the intellectual stimulation Cambridge offered must be mad. As I see it, the reviewer, not Darwin, was the lunatic.
    I want to tell you in this book why I ‘buried myself’ in the country village of Bowerchalke. I worked happily there until 1977, when sadly the agribusiness revolution socially cleansed the village. My escape was to West Devon and to a house surrounded by trees and almost a mile from its nearest neighbour. I want to show that the solitary practice of science in a country village, or even a remote house, is both pleasant and productive.
    Soon after starting work in Bowerchalke, chance favoured me with a view of the Earth from space and I saw it as the stunningly beautiful anomaly of the solar system—a planet that was palpably different from its dead and deserted siblings, Mars and Venus. I saw Earth as much more than just a ball of rock moistened by the oceans, or a spaceship put there by a beneficent God just for the use of humankind. I saw it as a planet that has always, since its origins nearly four billion years ago, kept itself a fit home for the life that happened upon it and I thought that it did so by homeostasis, the wisdom of the body, just as you and I keep our temperature and chemistry constant. In this view the spontaneous evolution of life did more than make Darwin’s world: it started a joint project with the evolving Earth itself. Life does more than adapt to the earth; it changes it, and evolution is atight-coupled dance with life and the material environment as partners , and from the dance emerges the entity Gaia. This book is as much about Gaia as it is about me. That part which is about me is to set the scene for the birth of what is still a revolutionary theory. I doubt if the scientific establishment would have allowed a proper doctor to work on so unfashionable a topic and one with a name that many scientists regard as politically incorrect.
    The naming of things is important. Our deepest thoughts are unconscious and we need metaphors and similes to translate them into something that we, as well as the rest of humankind, can understand . For reasons that I never understood, many scientists dislike Gaia as a name; prominent among them is the eminent biologist, John Maynard Smith. He made clear when he said of Gaia, ‘What an awful name to call a theory’, that it was the name, the metaphor, more than the science that caused his disapproval. He was, like most scientists, well aware of the power of metaphor. William Hamilton’s metaphors of selfish and spiteful genes have served wonderfully to make his science comprehensible, but let us never forget that the powerful metaphor of Gaia was the gift of a great novelist. I would remind those who criticize the name Gaia that they are doing battle with William Golding, who first coined it. We should not lightly turn aside from the name Gaia because of pedantic objection. Why do scientists, who now accept Gaia as a theory that they can try to falsify, continue to object to the name itself? Surely, it cannot be metaphor envy. Perhaps it is something deeper, a rejection by reductionist scientists of anything that smells of holism, anything that implies that the whole may be more than the sum of its parts. I see the battle between Gaia and the selfish gene as part of an outdated and pointless war between holists and reductionists. In a sensible world, we need them both.
    I gladly accepted William Golding’s choice of the name Gaia for my theory of the Earth and I have devoted all my working life, since completing my apprenticeship, to the furtherance of Gaia theory. It has been an exciting but bruising battle and this book tells both the story of Gaia and tries to explain how my life as a scientist led me to it. I take comfort in the fact that Gaia theory is now widely accepted by scientists in disciplines ranging from astrophysics to microbiology, they only reject the name Gaia, not the theory