Letter: Letters : Living Earth?

From Andrew Lovelock

Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex

Reading Fred Pearce’s review of Tyler Volk’s Gaia’s Body
(Review, 17 January, p 46),
I was somewhat amused by the comment that the book was getting
rid of some of my father’s “mumbo jumbo”.

Pearce says that Volk “is forced to jettison a lot of Lovelock’s language
about the Earth being `alive'”. Pearce then goes on to say: “Volk sees Gaia as a
`global metabolism’…a `symphony of material flows and cycles’.”

I make no claims to be a biologist, but my copy of the Dictionary of
Science and Technology defines metabolism as the “sum-total of the chemical
and physical changes constantly taking place in living matter”. Might I suggest
a rule of thumb in this tricky area: if it has a metabolism, then it is probably
alive.

Also, isn’t a symphony something that has been orchestrated by an
intelligence?