They don't make decisions that might upset their career prospects. It just takes that. We've certainly made the case that the planet self-regulates. Shortly after, Bill produced a paper called Spora and Gaia, about one of the self-regulating mechanisms we had discovered, namely that algae in the ocean produce a gas that makes the condensation nuclei that produce clouds. Without the clouds the planet would be 20 degrees hotter and none of us would be here.
Biologists have the problem of wondering what the hell the algae know about what is going on.
The first working hypothesis towards an answer came from Bill. Perhaps the most important thing that organisms face is how to disperse their seeds. Bill saw that one of the consequences of creating clouds was stirring up wind. I thought the algae did it to stir up more nutrients from deeper water but what he saw was that when you stir up storms, the breaking waves produce an aerosol above the surface and the algal spores get carried up by clouds and get dispersed. So the theory has reached a really interesting stage where people are looking at the mechanisms by which it can work, rather than saying it can't happen.