Royal Society Of Edinburgh Quotes (1 quote)
According to the historian D. B. McIntyre (1963), James Hutton, often known as the father of geology, said in a lecture before the Royal Society of Edinburgh in the 1790s that he thought of the Earth as a superorganism and that its proper study would be by physiology. Hutton went on to make the analogy between the circulation of the blood, discovered by Harvey, and the circulation of the nutrient elements of the Earth and of the way that sunlight distills water from the oceans so that it may later fall as rain and so refresh the earth.
In 'The Earth as a Living Organism', Essay collected in E. O. Wilson and F. M. Peter (eds.), Biodiversity (1988), Chap. 56, 488. [Notes: Donald Bertram McIntyre (1923–2009) was a geologist. Hutton had medical training early in his life. According to Mirriam-Webster’s dictionary, the first known use of the word “superorganism” was “circa 1899”—so Hutton did not use that word. However, McIntyre did adopt that sophisticated word to describe Hutton’s thought, twice, in Philosophy of Geology (1963), 7 & 10. Thus, McIntyre and Lovelock freely embroidered whatever Hutton actually wrote, perhaps over-stepping. Cándido Manuel García Cruz criticizes that these “assertions are merely a misinterpretation” although “Hutton has nevertheless an holistic view which is closer to the Alfred N. Whitehead’s organic mechanicism than the James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis,” as quoted from the abstract of his article 'From James Hutton’s «Theory of the Earth» to James Lovelock’s «Gaia Hypothesis»', Asclepio; Archivo Iberoamericano de Historia de la Medicina y Antropología Médica (Jun 2007), 59, No. 1, 65-100. Thus, it is best to read his own words in James Hutton, Theory of the Earth, which at length describes the “terrestrial system” as a “machine of a peculiar construction.” —Webmaster]
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
