Lynn Margulis, Autopoietic Gaia, and the Novacene

Abstract

VJames Lovelock describes his earlier professional milieu as a salaried researcher at the National Institute for Medical Research [NIMR] in London in 1961, prior to his emancipation as an independent scientist. It was then that NASA sent him “an invitation to be an experimenter on the first lunar Surveyor mission. It was well known at the NIMR that I regarded science as a way of life in which science fiction was reduced to practice” (Lovelock 1980, 24). In United States patent law, reduction to practice technically means to move an invention beyond the initial stage of conception to the testing and application of a prototype. Lovelock speaks at the end of the 1970s as the inventor who engineered the Gaia hypothesis. Single-handedly and in collaboration with the American microbiologist Lynn Margulis, Lovelock would bring the Gaia concept forward as applied systems science. His Gaia discourse is the speculative practice of a systems engineer steeped in the technological imaginary of cybernetics and information theory. In Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence, Lovelock admits that “I have never really been a pure scientist, I have been an engineer” (Lovelock 2019, 24). (...) ■ Bruce Clarke is the Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Literature and Science in the Department of English at Texas Tech University. He was the 2019 Baruch S. Blumberg NASA Chair in Astrobiology at the Library of Congress. His latest book, Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene, will be published this fall by the University of Minnesota Press.