JAMES LOVELOCK
Independent scientist James Lovelock, who has died on his 103rd birthday, is best known for his formulation of the Gaia theory, which he came up with in the 1960s and further developed with Lynn Margulis in the 1970s. Seen at the time as a radical and heretical idea, Gaia proposed that the Earth behaved much like a single organism whose interlocking systems co-operated to maintain an environment in which life could be sustained. While this did not come as a surprise to ecologists, who had long realised that it was impossible to find any completely isolated ecosystems and that the biology, geology and hydrology of the planet had to be intimately connected, the idea was trenchantly opposed by many scientists such as the evolutionary geneticist Richard Dawkins, who saw
