Gaia is not a Figure of Totality

If I am so interested in Lovelock it is precisely, and somewhat paradoxically at first sight, because I recognize in his view (and that of Lynn Margulis) a powerful way to ensure that a prematurely unified Whole does not take over the definition of what organisms are up to. Connectivity without holism. That is, exactly the opposite of what Tyrrell argues against him. To be sure, Tyrrell knows infinitely more science than I, but I have tracked the conundrum of those two levels in more places than he and that’s, for now, the crux of the matter. Biology is so infused with spurious sociology that I might give a hand at this point since the difficulty of sticking to one level is the same for the Body Politic as well as for the Body proper, or, in the present case, for Gaia.