‘His Quakerism clearly influenced his work.’ Photo: Kenneth Cukier (right) interviewing James Lovelock (left).
In respect to Gaia: Kenneth Cukier celebrates the life of James Lovelock
‘Lovelock’s Quakerism was not straightforward.’
Gaia is the Greek goddess of Earth, the mother of life. It was thus a suitable name for a theory that the planet’s natural systems, from air and water currents to wetlands and volcanos, are not discrete phenomena but act as a self-regulating system, like a living organism. When James Lovelock conjured up the idea in the 1960s, it was far off mainstream scientific thinking. But the Gaia hypothesis influenced the green movement and today is the standard way that people think about the environment.
It was just one of many scientific contributions that James Lovelock, who passed away at his home in Dorset on his 103rd birthday on 26 July, would make over his lifetime. He roamed intellectually; his nomination to the Royal Society in 1974 included contributions in physics, chemistry and biology. He rejected academia and industry to avoid the silos that crimped thinking, and worked from a home laboratory. It was an independence of mind that was matched in the spiritual realm: Lovelock was raised a Quaker, which was occasionally evoked to explain his non-dogmatic thinking.
‘Do you think it gave you the courage to be a nonconformist, a heretic in science?,’ asked John Ryle for the Independent on Sunday in 1991. ‘I think you’re right,’ Lovelock replied. ‘The thing about the Quakers is that they took dissent seriously. They weren’t just talkers. Making the jump from expressing strong opinions to actually doing something is quite a leap. They certainly helped me.’
In 2005 he was asked by Third Way magazine if his Quaker background helped him to ‘see a bigger picture’.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘The Quakers were almost a breeding ground for agnostics. I mean, the Sunday school I went to was far more ready to talk about cosmology than any religious topic, and as far as they were concerned God was the still, small voice within – an internal God, if you like, not an external entity running the universe. That was the kind of background I grew up in – which is a very favourable one for scientific thinking,’ he said, before adding: ‘Did you know that in 1900 more than half of the fellows of the Royal Society were Quakers? Quite extraordinary!’
Lovelock’s Quakerism was not straightforward. His mother took him to the Brixton Meeting House next to where they lived when he was around six. She wanted to prevent him being ‘forced into the murderous abattoire of the trenches’ in another war, he wrote in his memoir in 2000, Homage to Gaia. Working at a local council during world war one, she had attended conscientious objector (CO) hearings and noted that only Quakers were treated with respect.
Lovelock enjoyed Quaker Sunday school for their ‘wonderful stories, only rarely religious,’ he wrote. Later, he appreciated Meetings’ ‘open, unfettered discussions’. Yet he confessed that it ‘started me on the course of lifelong agnosticism’, he wrote, ‘as science began to fill the empty files of my mind’.
When the second world war began, Lovelock registered as a CO even though as a university student he was already exempt. It was granted. But he wasn’t formally a Quaker. He became one while at university in Manchester. In the summer between classes he worked on a local Quaker farm. But several years later he was so moved by the fact that he lived in a society that had the decency to honour his pacifism that, ironically, he decided to enlist to defend those principles.
Yet he was rejected. By this time he was a scientist working on the war effort, and was needed in the lab. He measured the bacteria in the stale air of bomb shelters to prevent infectious diseases, and worked on a vaccine against a form of Typhus, along with secretive things he still declined to divulge in his 100s.
When the war ended, so did Meetings. ‘I would probably still be a Quaker if it hadn’t been that the Meeting at Salisbury I joined after the war was so old-fashioned and rigid. They didn’t approve of me, so I left,’ he explained in the 1991 interview. ‘Quakers are a little bit austere. And I must admit I enjoy ritual in church services, even if I don’t approve of the dogma.’
Lovelock’s scientific achievements are monumental. In the 1950s he did foundational work in cryogenics by freezing and resuscitating hamsters. At NASA in the 1960s he was tasked to find a way to search for life on Mars: his ingenious solution was to look for an ‘entropy reduction’ (that is, an increase in complexity in the environment). His boss sneered at him and gave him two days to design a device or he’d be out. A day later he had the prototype for a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer experiment that was part of the Viking mission.
His most important invention arguably was the electron capture detector to identify traces of compounds in the atmosphere, which has been described as akin to Galileo’s telescope. It tracked pesticides such as DDT that motivated Rachel Carson’s seminal 1962 book Silent Spring, and it showed that CFCs were depleting the ozone layer, leading to a ban in 1987.
The concept of Gaia was an outgrowth of this earlier work. Though he resisted comparisons between his science and spirituality in later years, he accepted it earlier. ‘When I was a child I was marinated in Christian belief, and still it unconsciously guides my thinking and behaviour’, he wrote in The Revenge of Gaia in 2006. ‘Important concepts like God or Gaia are not comprehensible in the limited space of our conscious minds, but they do have meaning in that inner part of our minds that is the seat of intuition… Perhaps this is why the early Quakers knew that the still, small voice within does not come from conscious reckoning’, he explained.
In an interview two years ago, Jonathan Watts of the Guardian asked: ‘Are you at all religious?’ The 101-year-old replied: ‘No. I was brought up a Quaker. I was indoctrinated with the notion that God is a still, small voice within rather than some mysterious old gentleman way out in the universe. Intuition comes from that voice within and is a great gift for inventors.’
When I interviewed Lovelock in 2019, around his 100th birthday, I tried to draw him out on his spirituality, but he bristled. After talking about artificial intelligence and nature we landed on the subject of souls. ‘Does anything have a soul?’ ‘I don’t know anything about souls,’ he said. When asked whether humans have one, he replied: ‘No. No. I refuse to talk about souls because I think it’s a topic that is’ and paused, before continuing with a laugh, ‘unmanageable’.
Though Lovelock didn’t identify as religious, his Quakerism clearly influenced his work. One instance in particular stands out.
In the 1940s, working at the Medical Research Council, he and a colleague had to measure the temperature at which skin cells were irreparably damaged by heat. The idea was to burn the skin of anaesthetised rabbits. ‘I found this request repellant’ he wrote in his 2019 book Novacene, ‘and we decided to burn ourselves instead’. Though it was ‘exceedingly painful’, he collected the data – always infusing his research with his values.
