IVIV (12): 195-197

[rich]

pour vous, Robin if this hasn't been noted already

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23387

Volume 56, Number 18 · November 19, 2009
A Great Jump to Disaster?

By Tim Flannery
The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning
by James Lovelock
Basic Books, 278 pp., $25.00
James Lovelock: In Search of Gaia
by John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin
Princeton University Press, 262 pp., $24.95
The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive?
by Peter Ward
Princeton University Press, 180 pp., $24.95

The idea that Earth is a living thing goes back at least as far as
Plato, who according to Francis Bacon believed that the planet "was
one entire, perfect, living creature." But it was James Lovelock and
his colleague Lynn Margulis who, in the early 1970s, developed a
testable scientific hypothesis aimed at investigating Earth's lifelike
properties. Known as the Gaia hypothesis, it states that life on Earth
works to keep conditions at the planet's surface favorable to life
itself. In 2006 this led to Lovelock joining the likes of Louis
Agassiz and Charles Darwin in receiving geology's most prestigious
prize—the Geological Society's Wollaston Medal. In presenting the
award the society's president acknowledged that the Gaia hypothesis
had "opened up a whole new field of Earth Science study."

On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 5:32 PM, Robin Landseadel
<robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
> On Nov 5, 2009, at 12:32 PM, alice wellintown wrote:
>
> Surrounded by a mountain of logorrheic & essentially OT verbiage:
>
>> . . . Such a simplicity is characteristic of the repose of perfect
>> intellectual culture. . .
>
> . . . Res ipsa loquitur
>
>