Sir
As the late Peter Medawar1 wrote “Scientists are entitled to be proud of their accomplishments, and what accomplishments can they call ‘theirs’ except the things they have done or thought of first?”
In this spirit I would like to correct the recent News and Views article2 on the second Chapman Conference on Gaia. In an otherwise interesting article, Jim Gillon gets both my name and affiliation wrong, calling me D. Williamson of the University of Liverpool rather than D. Wilkinson of Liverpool John Moores University.
It may be of interest that some of my ideas on Gaia and evolution were published in Oikos last year3; since writing that paper I have become slightly less sceptical about the possibility of global regulation, for the reasons summarized in Gillon's article.
References
Medawar, P. Pluto's Republic (Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford, 1982).
Gillon, J. Nature 406, 685–686 ( 2000).
Wilkinson, D. M. Oikos 84, 533–553 ( 1999).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Wilkinson, D. Let's get the right man in the right job. Nature 406, 933 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/35023190
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/35023190
