I first met Jim Lovelock in 1994 when he was staying in Oxford with his devoted wife, Sandy. He was a visiting fellow at what was then Green College. We discussed a whole variety of things on that first meeting, including his Gaia theory, and I came away hugely impressed by the extraordinary fluidity of his mind, which ranged over many, many disciplines. I’ve met some very clever people, but I think he was closest to genius. He said he benefited from never having a regular university post; he never had to specialise. He used to tell me he got his schooling as a boy from Brixton public library and visits to the Science Museum.
I’d read Gaia when it came out and been very impressed by it. Partly because contrary to what many people claimed it seemed to me both rigorously scientific and rigorously Darwinian. Jim believed life was closely interconnected, and in some ways self-regulating. Some of the more mechanistic Darwinists, Dawkins and others, objected to that. Others wanted to find a mysticism in the idea of Gaia, but that was never there.
