I must have heard about Lyall Watson before, since I recognize the title of his apparently pro-paranormal book "Supernature: The natural history of the supernatural", but I knew next to nothing else about the man. Until now. This South African writer had degrees in a wide variety of fields, including biology and anthropology, and even commented on and wrote about sumo wrestling! He also coined the phrase "the hundreth monkey effect".
The book reviewed in the link below is titled "Whales of the World" (1981) and was intended as a field guide to these particular sea mammals. However, it seems that Watson was very heterodox in his approach to whale evolution, systematics and naming conventions. His illustrator Tom Ritchie may also have taken some liberties. To take just one example of Watson´s unusual takes, he believed that baleen whales and toothed wales are really two different groups with separate evolutionary ancestries.
"Whales of the World" became something of a hit among the reading public, but the scientific community rejected it. The reviewer, Darren Naish, points out that the 1970´s were an exciting time when entrenched orthodoxies were often challenged, so in that sense Watson´s work was typical of the period.
Can we please go back to such times?
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