Alister Hardy

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Sir Alister Hardy
FRS
Marine zoology
InstitutionsUniversity of Hull, University of Aberdeen, University of Oxford

Sir Alister Clavering Hardy

FLS[1] (10 February 1896 – 22 May 1985) was an English marine biologist, an expert on marine ecosystems spanning organisms from zooplankton to whales
. He had the artistic skill to illustrate his books with his own drawings, maps, diagrams, and paintings.

Hardy served as

zoologist on the RRS Discovery's voyage to explore the Antarctic between 1925 and 1927. On the voyage he invented the Continuous Plankton Recorder
; it enabled any ship to collect plankton samples during an ordinary voyage.

After retiring from his academic work, Hardy founded the Religious Experience Research Centre in 1969; he won the Templeton Prize for this in 1985.

Camoufleur and artist

Chimaera monstrosa

Hardy was born in

Oxford University in 1914, but on the outbreak of war he instead volunteered for the army, and was made a camoufleur, a camouflage officer. Hardy wrote that he had been[3]

equally drawn to science and art, and if the truth be known, I must confess that it is the latter that has the greater appeal. I am lucky in not having been torn between the two; I have managed to combine them.[3]

He was selected for camouflage work by the artist

Solomon J. Solomon, who apparently mistook him for a different Hardy who was a professional artist.[4] Hardy however did have sufficient artistic skill to serve his military and scientific work. He illustrated his New Naturalist books with his own line drawings, maps, diagrams, photographs, and paintings.[5] For example, plate 2 of Fish and Fisheries illustrates the depicted "Rare and Unusual Fish in British Waters" both accurately and vividly. Hardy described the camoufleurs as including artists and "scientists with artistic inclinations", himself perhaps among them.[4]

In later life, Hardy travelled in

Burma, Cambodia, China and Japan, recording his visits to temples in all those countries in watercolour paintings. Many of these are in the University of Wales Trinity Saint David collection.[6]

Zoology

RRS Discovery in the Antarctic

Hardy was the

zoologist on the RRS Discovery voyage to explore the Antarctic between 1925 and 1927, as part of the Discovery Investigations. Through his studies of zooplankton and its relationship with predators, he became expert in marine mammals such as whales. Whilst on board the Discovery he designed and later built a mechanism called the Continuous Plankton Recorder or CPR. The CPR collects plankton
samples and stores them on a moving band of silk, preserving them in formalin. His pioneering research into plankton distribution and abundance is continued by the Continuous Plankton Recorder Survey (CPR Survey).

Hardy was the first Professor of Zoology at the

Merton College, a position he held until 1963.[7] In 1940, Hardy was made a Fellow of the Royal Society.[1]
He was knighted in 1957.

Evolution

Hardy identified as a

inheritance of acquired characteristics. He was a proponent of organic selection (also known as the Baldwin effect). He held the view that behavioral changes can be important for evolution.[8][9]

Aquatic ape hypothesis

Main article: Aquatic ape hypothesis

In 1930, while reading

Wood Jones' Man's Place among the Mammals, which included the question of why humans, unlike all other land mammals, had fat attached to their skin, Hardy realized that this trait sounded like the blubber of marine mammals, and began to suspect that humans had ancestors that were more aquatic than previously imagined. Fearing a backlash against such a radical idea, he kept this hypothesis secret until 1960, when he spoke and later wrote on the subject, which subsequently became known as the aquatic ape hypothesis in academic circles,[10] and has been promoted in particular by Elaine Morgan, who acknowledged her debt to Hardy in her book The Scars of Evolution,[11] and elsewhere.[12]

Study of religion

Dating from his boyhood at

Vedic literature, the divine flame and Rabindranath Tagore.[13]

Hardy's biological approach to the roots of religion is non-reductionist, seeing religious awareness as having evolved in response to a genuine dimension of reality.[14] For his work in founding the Religious Experience Research Centre, Hardy received the Templeton Prize shortly before his death in 1985.[15]

Family

He was married to Sylvia Garstang in 1927.[16]

Works

Hardy wrote numerous scientific papers on plankton, fish and whales. He wrote two popular books in the New Naturalist series, and in later life he also wrote on religion.

Books
  • The Open Sea. Its Natural History (Part I) The World of Plankton. New Naturalist No. 34, Collins, 1956.
  • The Open Sea. Its Natural History (Part II) Fish & Fisheries. New Naturalist No. 37, Collins, 1959.
  • The Living Stream: A Restatement of Evolution Theory and its Relationship to the Spirit of Man. Collins, 1965.
  • The Divine Flame: An Essay Towards A Natural History of Religion. Collins, 1966.
  • The Spiritual Nature of Man: Study of Contemporary Religious Experience. Oxford University Press, 1979.
Papers
  • The Herring in Relation to its Animate Environment. Fish. Invest. Lond., II, 7:3. 1951.
  • (with E.R. Gunther) The Plankton of the South Georgia Whaling Grounds and Adjacent Waters, 1926-7. 'Discovery' Report, II, 1–146.

Recognition

Hardy's "pioneering work" was recognised by

South Georgia & South Sandwich Islands in 2011 with a set of four commemorative stamps bearing his image.[17]

The University of Hull has named a building on its Hull Campus after Hardy.

References

  1. ^
    doi:10.1098/rsbm.1986.0008
    .
  2. ISBN 0-902-198-84-X. Archived from the original
    (PDF) on 24 January 2013. Retrieved 10 September 2016.
  3. ^
    PMID 19000975
    .
  4. ^
    Dazzled and Deceived: Mimicry and Camouflage
    . Yale, 2009. p. 101.
  5. ^ Hardy, The Open Sea, 1956 and 1959.
  6. ^ Schmidt, Bettina (2012). "Sir Alister Hardy's Art". The Alister Hardy Society. Archived from the original on 22 May 2013. Retrieved 16 October 2012.
  7. ^ Levens, R.G.C., ed. (1964). Merton College Register 1900–1964. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. p. 353.
  8. ^ Wyles J. S., Kunkel J. G., Wilson A. C., (1983). Birds, Behavior and Anatomical Evolution. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 80: 4394–4397.
  9. ^ Burkhardt, Richard W. (2013). Lamarck, Evolution, and the Inheritance of Acquired Characters. Genetics 194: 793–805.
  10. ^ Hardy, Alister Clavering (1977). "Was there a Homo aquaticus?". Zenith. 15 (1): 4–6.
  11. ISBN 978-0195094312
    .
  12. S2CID 39428800
    .
  13. Bhaktivedanta Book Trust International. Archived from the original
    on 19 July 2012. Retrieved 12 April 2013.
  14. ^ Hay, David (2006). Something There: The Biology of the Human Spirit. London: Darton, Longman & Todd.[page needed]
  15. ISBN 978-1-57230-116-0
    .
  16. ISBN 0-902-198-84-X. Archived from the original
    (PDF) on 24 January 2013. Retrieved 10 September 2016.
  17. ^ Stamps Issues: SGSSI Recognize the Pioneering Work of Sir Alister Hardy Archived 25 February 2013 at the Wayback Machine. 19 March 2011.

Further reading

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

External links

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alister_Hardy&oldid=1178260837"