“There is little doubt that the planetary patina—including ourselves—is autopoietic. Life at the surface of the Earth seems to regulate itself in the face of external perturbation, and does so without regard for the individuals and species that compose it. More than 99.99 percent of the species that have ever existed have become extinct, but the planetary patina, with its army of cells, have continued for more than three billion years. …trillions of communicating, evolving microbes. The visible world is a late-arriving, overgrown portion of the microcosm, and it functions only because of its well-developed connection with the microcosm's activities.”

"The Man Who Named the World" (1990)

What is Life? (1995)

What is Life? (1995)

Source: The Mote in God's Eye (1974), Chapter 3 “Dinner Party” (p. 31)

Source: Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 4.8

Source: The Weather Makers (2005), Chapter 18 (p. 172)

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

A variant — "Professor Einstein, the learned scientist, once calculated that if all bees disappeared off the earth, four years later all humans would also have disappeared" — appears in The Irish Beekeeper, v.19-20, 1965-66, p74, citing Abeilles et Fleurs (Bees and Flowers, the house magazine of Union Nationale de l'Apiculture Française) for June 1965. Snopes.com mentions its use in a beekeepers' protest in 1994 in Europe http://www.snopes.com/quotes/einstein/bees.asp suggesting invention and attribution to Einstein for political reasons.
Misattributed

with Dorion Sagan, Dazzle Gradually: Reflections on the Nature of Nature (2007).