Alister Hardy

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Biographical Information

Sir Alister Clavering Hardy FRS wiki "stunned the world of paleoanthropology into a prolonged silence that persists to this day when, in 1960, he gave a speech at the British Sub-Aqua club in Brighton. It was at this meeting that he broke thirty years of self-imposed silence and decided to publicise his long held and growing belief that humans may have had a more aquatic past. Hardy was a marine biologist born in England the East Midlands city of Nottingham in 1896. He was educated at Oxford and in 1921 he was appointed assistant naturalist at the Fisheries Laboratory in Lowestoft where he started the work on the life stages of the herring and - for which he would gain most of his professional respect - their dependence on zooplankton...

"After a brief spell in Aberdeen he became Linacre Professor of Zoology in Oxford between 1945 and 1961, becoming knighted in 1957. It was only when he was approaching retirement that Hardy decided to go public on his "fantastic" theory. There was such an outcry in the popular press that Hardy was compelled to write up his theory in a more scientific journal - New Scientist.

"The response was underwhelming and apart from a few positive letters of reply in the pages the official response was to ignore it. Desmond Morris mentioned his idea in The Naked Ape in 1967 but if Elaine Morgan had not picked up on it and been so determined to pursue the issue we might never have heard of the idea today.

"By the time he died, in 1985, he had still not received any recognition for his ingenious theory and even today the world of paleoanthropology remains unable to give any proper scientific argument as to why the theory is flawed.

"Hardy's other (probably his biggest) interest was in the area of religious and telepathic experiences. In the forward he wrote in Elaine Morgan's (1990) book the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis, he explained why he hadn't written a book on the subject himself by stating that "I have been fully immersed in research into other features of man's nature that I have felt to be even more important than his aquatic past. This has been the subject of my last two books." His approach was scientific. He wanted to compile a database of people's religious experiences so that he might try to determine if there were common properties amongst them. His work led to the founding of the Alister Hardy Trust which continues to investigate these matters to this day"

• Winner of the 1985 Templeton Prize

Biography

• David Hay, God’s Biologist: A life of Alister Hardy (London, Darton Longman and Todd, 2011).