Biography:Lyall Watson

Short description: South African biologist (1939–2008)

Lyall Watson
Born	Malcolm Lyall-Watson (1939-04-12)12 April 1939 Johannesburg, Union of South Africa
Died	25 June 2008(2008-06-25) (aged 69) Gympie, Queensland, Australia
Occupation	Zoologist, anthropologist, conservationist, writer
Nationality	South African
Education	Rondebosch Boys' High School; BSc (Hons) University of the Witwatersrand and University of Natal (now University of KwaZulu-Natal); PhD Westfield College, now merged with Queen Mary University of London
Subject	Completed his BSc (Hons) in the Department of Zoology at the University of Natal, awarded in 1960. PhD in ethology (the study of animal behaviour) awarded by London University in 1964, supervisor Desmond Morris
Notable works	Supernature, The Romeo Error, Gifts of Unknown Things, Lifetide, Lightning Bird, Elephantoms

Lyall Watson (12 April 1939 – 25 June 2008) was a South African botanist, zoologist, biologist, anthropologist, ethologist, and author of many books, among the most popular of which is the best seller Supernature. Lyall Watson tried to make sense of natural and supernatural phenomena in biological terms. He is credited with coining the "hundredth monkey" effect in his 1979 book, Lifetide; later, in The Whole Earth Review, he conceded this was "a metaphor of my own making".

Born in Johannesburg in South Africa, full name Malcolm Lyall-Watson, he had an early fascination for nature in the surrounding bush and learned much from a Zulu minder, who taught him bushcraft and native African animism from an early age. Watson attended boarding school at Rondebosch Boys' High School in Cape Town from the age of ten, completing his studies in 1955. He enrolled at the University of the Witwatersrand at the age of 16 where, by the time he was 20, he had earned degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand and from the University of Natal (now the University of KwaZulu-Natal).

At the University of the Witwatersrand he had studied under Raymond Dart, leading on to postgraduate anthropological studies in Germany and the Netherlands. He completed a doctorate in ethology at the University of London, under Desmond Morris. He also worked at the BBC writing and producing nature documentaries, and for many years he spent seasons as an expedition leader and resident biologist on board the MS Lindblad Explorer, leading to the publication of a textbook for the general reader on Whales of the World in 1981. He was involved in setting up the Indian Ocean Whale Sanctuary, and in 1977 was appointed as the Seychelles Commissioner for Whales.

Watson wrote twenty-four books in all, during a writing career which spanned four decades.

Life

Childhood (1939–55)

Born on 12 April 1939, in Johannesburg, South Africa, Watson, born Malcolm Lyall-Watson, was the eldest of three brothers. His father, Doug Lyall-Watson, was an architect who served abroad during World War II with the British Royal Air Force (RAF). Douglas Lyall-Watson was of Scottish ancestry, although five generations removed from his Scottish roots. Watson's mother Mary was of Dutch South African heritage, descended from Simon van der Stel, the first Dutch governor of the Cape.

Watson spent his memorable childhood on his maternal grandparents' ranch in a corner of the Transvaal that borders Mozambique and Swaziland, where his mother Mary helped to run the large farm for her aging parents. His grandmother Ouma, Afrikaans for "old ma", English name Grace, was interviewed by the authorities once for defacing postage stamps; she was accustomed to drawing devil's horns on the portrait of the statesman who instigated apartheid, before posting her letters. Watson was often placed in the care of an elderly Zulu, the son of a tribal chief, who taught the inquisitive boy bush craft, gave him the nickname Mbuzi, meaning "The Goat" because of his delight in sampling and exploring everything, and impressed him with the animistic ideas of African tribal culture.

When his father returned from the war, Watson was already attending a local school at a neighbouring farm. His father's subsequent, itinerant lifestyle as an architect, and his mother's profession as a radiologist, kept Watson on his grandparents' farm until the age of ten, when he was sent to a boarding school in Cape Town. It was during summer breaks from Rondebosch Boys' High School, spending a month unsupervised with a dozen other boys from his local district on a beach in Plettenberg Bay, in the southeast corner of the Western Cape, that Watson developed his thirst to explore, and learned the independence of thought that stayed with him all his life. Already, at the age of nine, on his grandparents' farm, his grandmother had taken him to the chief of a local tribal community who had been a life-long friend of hers, to be initiated into adulthood with all the other boys of the village. By the time he went to boarding school, he was fluent in Afrikaans, English and Zulu.

Higher education (1955–60)

At Rondebosch Boys' High School Watson's academic progress caused him to jump over a year and consequently he finished his studies a year early, at the age of fifteen. His father allowed him to travel before starting at university, and the fifteen-year-old indulged a growing passion for elephants by visiting the only two areas in the southern Cape still to have them. At the age of sixteen he began his studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, one of four English language universities in South Africa at the time.

He initially intended to study medicine, and one of his tutors was Raymond Dart, who taught anatomy at the university but had worked extensively gathering fragments of fossil hominids, being the first to describe the genus Australopithecus. Watson volunteered to help sort a large collection of donated fossils for Dart, and the two struck up a friendship that would last until Dart's death in 1988.

Watson came to realize that his interests lay in zoology and anthropology rather than in medicine, and he completed his BSc degree at the University of the Witwatersrand having taken courses in a wide range of subjects including botany, zoology, geology, geography and even psychology. He gained his BSc(Hons) in the Department of Zoology at the University of Natal, now the University of KwaZulu-Natal, in 1959, awarded in 1960.

Doctoral research (1960–1963)

By now Watson had developed a fascination with animal behaviour, and following his graduation at the University of Natal in South Africa he travelled to Germany to offer his services to the renowned ethologist Konrad Lorenz. But the fishes Lorentz set him to study did not satisfy Watson's interest in larger mammals, so he moved to Holland to study anthropology and from there to England and to Oxford, where the Dutch zoologist Niko Tinbergen, now a British citizen, headed a research team studying animal behaviour at Oxford University. Watson was offered a place there as a doctoral student on a project studying black-headed gulls, which did not fill him with much enthusiasm either. One of Tinbergen's former postgraduate students, Desmond Morris, had recently become Curator of Mammals at London Zoo, and it was arranged that Watson should became Morris's first PhD student.

Watson was awarded his PhD in 1964, from Westfield College, University of London, later merged with Queen Mary College to become Queen Mary University of London. The title of his thesis was 'The ethology of food-hoarding mammals - with special reference to the green acouchi, "Myoprocta pratti"' The green acouchi is a South American rodent found in the Amazon basin.

In order to support himself during his studies in London, Watson worked during the evenings in the kitchen of a large London hotel, rising to the grade of souffle chef. He met his first wife, Vivienne Mawson, when she interviewed him for a BBC Overseas Service radio programme on the activities of South African postgraduate students in London, and they were married in 1961. On the wedding cake was a sculpture of the Loch Ness monster. Shortly after gaining his doctorate, and given his experience at London Zoo and his association with Desmond Morris, he was offered the job of Director of Johannesburg Zoo in his native South Africa.

Johannesburg Zoo (1964–1965)

It was very soon after completing his PhD in London that Watson was offered the position of Director of the Johannesburg Zoo, an offer he found too good to refuse, despite his distaste for the apartheid system. He served as director there from 1964 to 1965. During this time, despite bureaucratic obstacles and financial constraints, he oversaw an expansion of the elephant house, introducing two companions for a long-time resident there, a female elephant named Delilah, as well as a new lion enclosure and a wooded area for the wolves. The 1960s was a time of general improvement at the zoo, introducing larger and more natural enclosures, the development of education and environmental programmes and involvement in local and international breeding programmes. Following completion of the new lion enclosure, however, as Watson describes in his 1982 BBC radio interview for Desert Island Discs, attempts by the local authorities to impose racial segregation on visitors to the new enclosures caused friction between himself and wider authorities leading to a number of interviews with the police and his ultimate resignation. He left South Africa and went to the Seychelles.

Tomorrow's World (1966–1967)

By the summer of 1966, Watson was in London again and he joined the production team on the BBC's tech television magazine programme Tomorrow's World, on the same day as its longstanding-co-presenter-to-be, James Burke. Watson, however, was only there for a year before moving on.

Watson's marriage to Vivienne ended in 1966. Around this time he shortened his name to Lyall Watson.

Seychelles and Indonesia (1967–1971 )

Following his departure from the BBC, Watson's life goes off the radar for a while. But there are clues. He tried freelance film-making, shooting underwater archaeology in Greece and Turkey. He set up a consultancy business specializing in zoo design and nature conservation, which he named BioLogic of London. He was already known in the Seychelles and was later to help set up wildlife conservation areas in the region. There is mention of him organizing safari tours in Kenya. There is a story of him building a wooden house in Mosambique, even melting sand to make glass, but it was abandoned before completion. Watson confesses in a 1982 BBC radio interview that he needed long periods spent alone. He was also writing his first book, based on his studies of biology and ethology, called Omnivore: Our Evolution in the Eating Game, published in January 1971.

In the summer of 1970 Watson worked as an expedition leader and scientist-in-residence for a travel company owned by Lars-Eric Lindblad, on board the MS Lindblad Explorer, leading onshore expeditions and giving lectures on board. Lindblad ran a travel company based in the USA offering worldwide adventure holidays to exotic and hitherto unvisited places. He was a keen conservationist and in 1971 was actively seeking new locations for his small new cruise ship the Lindblad Explorer to visit. Watson was recruited by him in the summer of 1971 to scout out locations to visit in the Seychelles and in the islands of Indonesia, as a commercial venture but also to raise awareness of the vulnerability of these places. Watson was approached because: "Not only did he have a vast knowledge of biology, but he had lived for some time in the Seychelles and Indonesia, and knew the islands and islanders well."

In his Desert Island Discs radio broadcast for the BBC, Watson mentions an MSc in Marine Biology as one of his degrees. Given his gravitation at this time towards the sea, as illustrated by his 1981 textbook Whales of the World, the fruit of ten years study on the Lindblad Explorer and elsewhere, it is possible that one of the years 1967 to 1969 may have been spent studying for this degree.

Supernature and the Lindblad Explorer (1971–1974)

MS Lindblad Explorer was launched in 1969. By 2005, when this photograph was taken, outside Scoresbysund in Greenland, she had been renamed the MS Explorer.

Watson wrote his two most popular books, Supernature and The Romeo Error, between 1971 and 1974.

The cruise ship MS Lindblad Explorer first arrived at Mahé in the Seychelles on 19 April 1970 and for the next two years "carried out twenty-four cruises between Mombassa [Kenya] and the Seychelles, with the naturalists on board emphasizing the need for protection of the locations we visited." Having voyaged with her in 1970, Watson was recruited in 1971 to help in survey work to scout out suitable locations for the ship to visit in the Seychelles and in Indonesia.

This was following a sojourn in Greece. He arrived in the port of Kamares, on the Greek island of Siphnos, on 21 May 1971, wearing white trousers and carrying a canvas sea bag; he was there for a long-planned rendezvous at the Temple of Athenian Zeus on the midsummer solstice (21 June 1971). As it happened, the lady didn't show up. But the hippies he befriended, returning from their journeys to the east, prompted him to write a book exploring the interface between science and the paranormal that became Supernature. It took him three months to write. Failing to find a publisher for it, he eventually left it in London before travelling to the Philippines, intending to research spirit healers there, but perhaps also scouting for Lindblad, who was looking at this time to sail the Lindblad Explorer from Fiji to the Philippines, as well as to New Guinea. He spent over six months in the Philippines.

It is not exactly certain when this trip to the Philippines was, but in 1972, Watson was researching possible ports of call on the river Amazon with Lindblad, while the Explorer was in Norway undergoing repairs after a grounding in the Antarctic. She was due to sail for the Arctic in August, then for a cruise along the Amazon with passengers in the autumn before her next Antarctic foray in the southern summer. Watson subsequently served as expedition leader and naturalist on the autumn voyage along the Amazon during October and November, a round trip along this river totaling well over four thousand miles.

In December 1972, photographs record a family reunion with his parents. In 1973, he was again scouting Indonesia for interesting ports of call for the Explorer, and in particular the Asmat region of West Irian, on the island of New Guinea. The summer of 1973 marked the Explorer's first voyage from Bali to New Guinea, and Watson was on board as expedition leader and naturalist. He entertained the young people on board by demonstrating the kinds of faces that monkeys make to show emotions like fear, anger and happiness.

Watson returned to London in the autumn of 1973 to find that his book Supernature, written over two years earlier, had at last found a publisher. In November he used his connections with the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) to introduce Uri Geller to a British audience, and on 23 November 1973 Watson appeared with Geller on "The Dimbleby Talk-In" for the BBC, alongside host David Dimbleby and Professor John Taylor of King's College, London. Watson remained convinced of Geller's spoon-bending and telekinetic powers until at least 1976, where he discusses Geller's powers in his book Gifts of Unknown Things. Doubt has subsequently been cast upon Geller's talents being anything more than stage magic.

Watson was soon to spend nine months marooned in the Banda Sea before returning to London to discover that Supernature had sold tens of thousands of copies and was being translated into many languages. His second book, The Romeo Error, published in 1974, complemented Supernature by being an exploration of biological death, using an eclectic mix of biology and the paranormal in the same way that Supernature had been an exploration of biological life in the same vein and from the same standpoint. Given its publication in 1974, it is likely that The Romeo Error was written and submitted to publishers before his prolonged stay on the Indonesian island that he chose to call Nus Tarian when he wrote about this experience in his book Gifts of Unknown Things.

Gifts and Whales (1974–1981)

Cousin Island, in the Seychelles, has been the focus of wildlife conservation efforts since its Seychelles Warbler population first received protection in 1968.

1974. Publication of The Romeo Error.

1976. Publication of Gifts of Unknown Things.

Nine months on Nus Tarion, shipwrecked from a native dhow, possibly while scouting for Lindblad. Lindblad Explorer cruises to Indonesia continued successfully for years, continually finding new places to visit, sometimes "on islands whose inhabitants had never seen a large ship or a doctor before".

During this period Watson continued to work as an expedition leader to various locales, and he was the Seychelles commissioner for the International Whaling Commission in the late 1970s.

Japan and Ireland (1981–1991)

From at least 1985 until his death in 2008, Watson's permanent residence, if such a thing is possible for such a nomadic traveller, was a cottage in Ballydehob, County Cork, in the Republic of Ireland.

In the mid-1980s, having earlier been approached by the American landscape photographer Jerry Derbyshire with an offer of collaboration, Watson appeared unannounced at Derbyshire's home in Austin, Texas, quickly rented a nearby apartment and spent six weeks writing the text for The Water Planet.

Watson signs his book Heaven's Breath: "Lyall Watson, Kyoto, Japan, 1983". In its final chapter he makes clear his familiarity and affinity with Japanese Shinto belief, which he regards as the last surviving refuge of a fully functioning animistic belief system, all others around the world having provided for anthropologists only fragments of a dying tradition. Watson's book Bali Entranced: A Celebration of Ritual was published in 1985, in Japanese only.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s Watson presented Channel 4's coverage of sumo tournaments.

Ireland, New Mexico and the Amazon (1991–2008)

Watson's introduction to his book Dark Nature, published in 1995, is signed " LYALL WATSON, On the Amazon. The Amazon was a converted fishing vessel that Watson used to sail the oceans during this period. His 2004 publication The Whole Hog lists his domicile, during suitable parts of the year, as "a cliff-top cottage on the rocky west coast of Ireland [and] an adobe ranch-house on the high desert of New Mexico".

Watson married Vivienne Mawson in 1961, and they divorced in 1966. His second wife was Jacquey Visick, and his third wife, Alice Coogan, died in 2003. He was the eldest of three brothers, one of whom (Andrew) lived in Gympie, Queensland, Australia. It was while visiting Andrew that he died of a stroke on 25 June 2008.

Writing career

Watson began writing his first book, Omnivore, during the early 1960s while under the supervision of Desmond Morris, and wrote more than 21 others.

Supernature

Watson wrote Supernature while working in Greece in the summer of 1971, possibly film-making, and living on a yacht, aboard which the book was written. By his own account, he was meeting hippies and fellow travellers returning from their journeys to the east and realised that he knew a lot more about their wild enthusiasms, that is, the interface between science and the supernatural, than they did themselves. Keen to set it all down, he wrote Supernature, but had difficulty finding a publisher for it.

Gifts of Unknown Things

Still without a publisher for Supernature, Watson continued his work with Eric Lindblad and the MV Lindblad Explorer in Indonesia and the Banda sea. Following a storm while on a local craft he was using in the Banda Sea he was stranded on an island for nine months where he worked as a teacher and collected anthropological material which he wrote into Gifts of Unknown Things, published in 1974.

Lifetide

Lifetide was published in 1979 and continued Watson's exploration of the interface between biology, zoology, extrasensory perception and the supernatural. It was in this book that his concept of a spontaneous acquisition of knowledge by an organism through the transmission of unconscious thoughts, mirroring C G Jung's collective unconscious, was coined the 'Hundredth Monkey'. It rested on an example of an acquired behavior in monkeys that was later disputed.

Other writings

Biology and natural history

Heaven's Breath (published 1984)

A look at the wind, from every conceivable direction. Written in an engaging and often humorous style for the general reader, packed with facts and anecdotes, and awarded Bernard Levin's Book of the Year for the British Sunday Newspaper The Observer in 1984. "In Heaven's Breath, Lyall Watson blends science, history, folklore and anecdote to explore the many wonders of wind."

The Earth's atmosphere has changed considerably over the planet's history and seems to be part of a thermostatic control allowing life on Earth to have maintained, and still maintain, a suitable temperature for itself, despite changing solar intensity. Watson reveals himself as a fully paid-up member of James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis. The movement of this atmosphere, the wind, carries heat from the equator to the poles, allowing for temperatures suitable for life almost everywhere on the planet. The troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere and ionosphere blanket the Earth, winds in the troposphere distribute heat and provide both predictability and endless variety to weather systems at the surface. The wind gave the Fertile crescent in the Middle East its nurturing westerlies as the northern ice melted ten thousand years ago; it dictated the pattern of human migration into the pacific four thousand years ago, gave sails to European explorers and brought unexpected relief to the Japanese from seaborne invasion in AD 1274. Windmills spread all over Europe in the late Middle Ages and now give the promise of widespread electric power generation from wind farms.

In addition to salt, clay particles, sand and extraterrestrial dust, wind contains a myriad of tiny living things, including pollen, bacteria, viruses and fungal spores, as well as millions upon millions of tiny insects that use the wind everywhere, to migrate and to propagate. A large number of plants and trees ensure widespread dispersal of their seed through the agency of the wind. The wind propels spiders who take to the air on gossamer sails, it is alive with insects, birds and bats, determining the direction and timing of migration routes, and just as surely casting pioneering individuals upon unexpected shores. Varying wind strength affects humans and animals in many ways, changing behaviour, determining habitat, dispersing man-made pollutants and mixing gasses that cause acid rain and fuel the Greenhouse Effect. Named winds, like the Sirocco, affect human mood and psychology through a sudden alteration in humidity, temperature, turbidity, purity or state of ionization. There are strangely similar wind creation myths from all over the world; the Greeks and Romans personified four cardinal winds and gave each a personality. English literature has preferred a more natural evocation, as have the paintings of John Constable, William Turner, and the music of Berlioz and Debussy.

The Water Planet: a Celebration of the Wonder of Water (published 1988)

A coffee table book, or perhaps a teenager's introduction to Earth Science. Written in easily comprehensible text, the pages are filled with revealing facts and figures about water, and copiously illustrated by the American landscape photographer Jerry Derbyshire. Like Heaven's Breath, it takes a property of the Earth, in this case the planet's water, and studies its form and behaviour from every possible angle: physical properties, chemical idiosyncrasies, erosion, meteorology, ice and glaciation, rivers and lakes, the hydrological cycle, biology, its passage through plants and trees, biochemistry, atmospheric physics, geography, its role in human evolution, the development of agriculture, and its celebration in religion, mythology and literature.

Published in America in 1988. Watson and Derbyshire had plans to extend this work into a series of four: Earth, Air, Fire and Water, an ambition that was cut short by Derbyshire's death in 1989.

Jacobson's Organ: and the remarkable nature of smell (published 1999)

In a work of scientific explanation, historical commentary and only a little wild speculation, Watson introduces the reader to the evolution of smell, from its beginnings in early fish, through amphibians and snakes to its indispensable use by contemporary mammals, including dogs, but also by humans. In particular, there are two organs associated with smell, both of which humans possess: the olfactory apparatus in the nose that is linked by neurons to higher areas of the brain, and a separate apparatus consisting of two pits in the nasal region known as Jacobson's Organ, which is able to detect heavier molecules and send emotive messages directly to unconscious parts of the brain. It is this sensory pathway that Watson explores as an explanation for moments of ESP and clairvoyance that might otherwise be deemed supernatural.

Humans, Watson assures us, are smelly creatures. Deliberately so, We secrete pheromones from our armpits and our groins, and volatiles from the entire surface of our skin. The historical record shows that the use of incense in ritual dates from the time of Ancient Egypt or earlier, and the modern perfume industry is perfectly aware of the often powerful human sexual messages conveyed by smell. But it is moments of intuition that interest Watson, when we instinctively recoil from something or someone, or are attracted to a situation or someone, for no apparent reason. And this, he believes, must have high survival value in any organism that possesses it.

In a chapter named 'The Sixth Sense', Watson writes: "Clairvoyance is usually described as mental 'seeing' or a way of knowing what exists 'out of sight'. A clairvoyant is said to be someone who has exceptional 'insight'. The emphasis, as usual, is a visual one, but I suspect that the information garnered is far more often olfactory."

Accolades and criticism

Most criticism has been directed towards Supernature. Ten years after its publication, Watson confessed that he no longer thought of the book as his, it had become such public property. Beyond Supernature, published more than ten years later, takes a more sober look at the extraordinary in science and everyday life, albeit from a similar stance, embracing Watson's belief in animism, an endorsement of James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis and Watson's expanded version of Carl Gustav Jung's collective unconscious to include psychic interconnectedness within all of life, but with less confidence in spiritualism.

Bibliography

• Omnivore: The Role of Food in Human Evolution (1971)
• Supernature: A Natural History of the Supernatural (1973)
• The Romeo Error (1974) (Later reprinted as The Biology of Death)
• Gifts of Unknown Things: An Indonesian Adventure (1976)
• Lifetide: a Biology of the Unconscious (1979)
• Whales of the World: A Field Guide to the Cetaceans (1981)
• Lightning Bird: An African Adventure (1982)
• Heaven's Breath: A Natural History of the Wind (1984)
• Bali Entranced: A Celebration of Ritual (1985) – published in Japanese only
• Earthworks: Ideas on the Edge of Natural History (1986) (Later reprinted as Dreams of Dragons)
• Beyond Supernature: A New Natural History of the Supernatural (1986) (Later reprinted as Supernature 2)
• The Water Planet: A Celebration of the Wonder of Water (1988)
• Neophilia: The Tradition of the New (1989)
• Sumo: A Guide to Sumo Wrestling (1989)
• The Nature of Things: The Secret Life of Inanimate Objects (1990)
• Gifts of Unknown Things: A True Story of Nature, Healing and Initiation from Indonesia's ''Dancing Island'' (1992)
• Lasting Nostalgia: Essays Out of Africa (1992) – published in Japanese only
• Turtle Islands: Ritual in Indonesia (1995)
• Dark Nature: A Natural History of Evil (1995)
• Dreams of Dragons: An Exploration and Celebration of the Mysteries of Nature (1996)
• Monsoon: Essays on the Indian Ocean (1996) – published in Japanese only
• Lost Cradle: A Collection of Dialogues (1997) – published in Japanese only
• Warriors, Warthogs, and Wisdom: Growing up in Africa (1997)
• Jacobson's Organ and the Remarkable Nature of Smell (2000)
• Elephantoms: Tracking the Elephant (2002)
• The Whole Hog: Exploring the Extraordinary Potential of Pigs (2004)

References

• WATSON, Lyall International Who's Who. accessed 3 September 2006.