The inventor who gave the world the pollution sniffer and the microwave oven has also made a brilliant contribution to the world of ideas – the Gaia theory. Fred Pearce reports
James Lovelock, independent British inventor and Gaia guru, added to his trophy cabinet this month when he went to Japan to claim the Blue Planet Prize and a cheque for a cool 50-million yen.
Nice work. Especially for a man who hasn’t had a proper science job for more than 30 years, and prefers to work from a lab bench at home in Cornwall. But consider his curriculum vitae. For starters, Lovelock invented the electron capture detector. This subtle and immensely sensitive pollution sniffer, the size of a matchbox, allowed environmental scientists for the first time to spot tiny amounts of dangerous toxins. Parts per trillion are its speciality – quite a novelty back in the late 1950s when he invented it.
Using his sniffer, Lovelock explored the world. He discovered the global spread of ozone-eating CFCs in the atmosphere. Others used it to track PCBs and pesticides in our food, in air and water and in living organisms worldwide. Lovelock’s widget virtually launched modern environmental sciences.
Without Lovelock’s detector, the 1995 Nobel prizewinners for chemistry could not have done their pioneering work warning that CFCs could eat up the ozone layer. But Lovelock didn’t share in their reward. After all, you can hear the judges whisper, he was only an inventor, not a real scientist.
Lovelock still makes his living from inventing gadgets. But his greatest invention is intellectual – a brilliant, original and immensely persuasive vision of the way our world works, known as Gaia.
Gaia is where cosmology and biology, palaeontology and computer sciences meet to address the question: why are we here? Why has life thrived on planet Earth where all around us in the cosmos there appears only barren desert? Why Earth and not Mars? How come this planet is just so damn nice?
But Lovelock seeks the answers not in the conventional scientific way, by breaking things down into little bits to see how they work. He says they don’t work as little bits, but only as a grand whole – Gaia.
In the labs and senior common rooms you can hear them mutter: this isn’t science, it’s New Age religion. Lovelock says the science establishment has lost the plot. They have forgotten that science is about seeing the whole, not peering down ever more powerful microscopes. In the jargon, he is holistic, while they are reductionist.
Lovelock’s voyage went like this. On the strength of his electron capture detector, he was, in 1961, snatched from his research sinecure in north London to work for Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. The lab was in a panic to devise light, portable instruments to send into space to find out if there was life on the planets. And they wanted Lovelock’s help.
But he quickly figured that the chances of landing a spaceship somewhere and stumbling on life were small. And even if they did, Nasa’s probes would probably not recognise it. “The experiments they were proposing to send to Mars were asinine,” he says.
Unlike his employers, Lovelock was influenced by his detector, which was revealing immense detail about the chemistry of Earth’s atmosphere. On Earth, living things were constantly absorbing and releasing gases. So much so that the atmosphere was completely different from any atmosphere without life. Earth’s atmosphere was in a chronic chemical disequilibrium, caused by life itself.
So, he suggested, why not apply that test to Mars? In fact, he said, you didn’t need to go to Mars to get your answer. Infrared telescopes on Earth could identify the make-up of its thin atmosphere. Martian “air” was stable, unreactive, inert and dominated by a single gas, carbon dioxide. Ergo, Mars was lifeless.
Of course that is not what Nasa’s Mars pioneers wanted to hear. They wanted a reason to go to the red planet. So Lovelock eventually found himself surplus to requirements.
But his insight took root. And its implications were revolutionary. Old notions about life on Earth hold that living things evolved simply by adapting to their environment. But this was nonsense. Life fundamentally influenced its own environment. What is more, its influence seemed to be strong enough to maintain stable conditions over hundreds of millions of years, even though the chemistry of the atmosphere was itself very unstable.
It could even apparently respond to outside events. The atmosphere’s temperature, for instance, had barely changed during a period when the sun had grown 25% hotter. If that extra heat had been transferred to the planet’s surface without dampening, we would all long since have fried. A lucky chance? The more Lovelock thought, the more unlikely that seemed. We don’t get that lucky.
As he told his Japanese audience, there was a “eureka” moment. “One afternoon in 1965 at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, when thinking about these facts, the thought came to me in a flash that such constancy required the existence of an active control system.” Life on Earth is controlling its environment for its own good. Crazy? Well, how else do you explain it?
The novelist William Golding soon afterwards coined for Lovelock the name Gaia, after the Greek earth goddess. And a hypothesis was born, edging into the scientific literature through obscure journals. But making it from the scientific fringe to the top tables proved harder. For many years, journals such as Nature and Science refused Gaian papers. Even now, Gaia is the science that dare not speak its name. In the journals, it usually masquerades under the deadening title of “geophysiology”.
And in the United States, the land where Lovelock had his eureka moment, some enthusiasts are getting cold feet. “There is Mars fever again,” says Lovelock. “And if you want to go to Mars to search for life, you don’t want Gaians telling you the trip is pointless.”
Some evolutionary biologists, notably Richard Dawkins, still steam at the ears at any suggestion that there could be biological control systems other than the individual’s “selfish genes”.
But Dawkins’s claim that, in nature, there is no such thing as society, is falling away before a more communitarian idea. Biologists call ant colonies and other similar manifestations of group behaviour “superorganisms”. And the ultimate superorganism is Gaia.
This links up to the new world of chaos and complexity theory. This theory holds that within complex systems, order can spontaneously emerge out of chaos. That fits exactly with what Lovelock sees Gaia as being. Suddenly, Gaia doesn’t seem so absurd.
Computers have been central to the development of these new ideas in mathematics and biology. They are very good at simulating the generation of order out of chaos, for instance.
Lovelock did this for Gaia by inventing a simple, computerised model world, which he called Daisyworld.
Daisyworld is a vast meadow populated by white daisies and black daisies, which spontaneously operate their own thermostat. If it gets hotter, the black daisies suffer because they absorb more heat. But white daisies, which reflect more heat, prosper.
Result: a world dominated by white daisies that reflect so much heat back into space they cool the planet down again. By contrast, if the world cools, black daisies do well and absorb more heat. The world warms. Here, in the simplest form imaginable, is the spontaneous creation of a control system connecting life and the environment.
Boffins and Gaia freaks have extended the Daisyworld idea, with rabbits eating the daisies and foxes eating the rabbits and so on. Their PCs hum with other worlds. “It is mainly numerical models on computers that demonstrate how a Gaia-type system can work,” says Lovelock. “More than half the work on Gaia has been done on PCs.”
Of course, neither computer models nor an intellectual fashion for superorganisms and chaos theory make the Gaia theory true. Whether or not Gaia is the literal truth, it is clearly a powerful way of looking at the world. By looking resolutely at the whole, it reveals things that you couldn’t get from peering at the sum of the parts.
ENDS