Lovelock himself.. But going back fifteen billion years makes her vision contracted: she falls into traps of ‘athletic physics’, an unfortunate contemporary marriage of cosmology and physics of elementary particles. So you read nonsense after nonsense, like "hot energy cooled", "energy formed itself into particles", etc. In any case, however, her own experience of a walk through time back to time zero is so misleading that it takes your breath away.

Some reviewers of this book felt the value of its scientific arguments was diminished by its feminist emphasis. Elisabeth does not blink on the point: "This puts me in a bind, for I believe resistance to accepting ourselves as part of a live planet is profoundly linked to the loss our species has suffered as a result of the failure to give women equal say in forming worldviews and managing human affairs. Scientists, for better or worse, are the priests of our society; when they say Earth is alive, we shall all believe it. But science, as Brian Easlea has documented in his book Fathering the Unthinkable, is built on an intensely male perspective and drive to conquer and rule nature. It is this perspective and drive that cries out to be modified by a female perspective."

Elisabeth has a point ... and I tend to accept it - out of wishful thinking, perhaps.

Wait, there’s more: "What if modern science and our view of human society had evolved from organic biology rather than from mechani- cal physics? We will never know how the course of human events would have differed had they taken this path, had physics developed in the shadow of biology rather than the other way around."