GLOBAL: Last adventure for maverick polymath

Obituary: Lyall Watson: 12 April 1939 - 25 June 2008

He was born in South Africa, lived in Ireland and died in Queensland: Lyall Watson led such a remarkable and varied life it would have seemed unbelievable even as a work of fiction. Except it was probably almost all true. A hero to the 1970s New Age and alternative lifestyle hippies, Malcolm Lyall Watson has been described as a maverick scientific polymath and explorer who became famous for his best-selling book Supernature and his wacky ideas that plants are sentient, dull razor blades will sharpen if left overnight under a cardboard model of a pyramid and that oysters possess a tidal memory.

Although he had numerous degrees, including in anthropology, chemistry, botany and ethology, Watson was also an adventurer who travelled the globe from the Antarctic to the Kalahari, Madagascar to Borneo.

The world today has become a global village but Watson explored it at a time when it was still possible to discover lands no foreigner had ever been to. In one place, he claims to have encountered the Asmat people, a man-eating tribe of cannibals who knew outsiders simply as Manowe - "the edible ones" - but avoided being placed on the menu and lived to write about his experiences.

Watson designed zoos, ran a safari company in Kenya, created a whale sanctuary in the Seychelles (where his work on the International Whaling Commission resulted in worldwide bans on the hunting of some whale species), and, for 12 years, is said to have lived on a converted shrimp trawler in the Amazon while travelling through the jungle with Fred, a tapeworm he introduced into his body in the belief it would keep him free of stomach problems.

As an obituary in the New York Times last week noted, despite a conventional if astonishingly wide-ranging science background, Watson "chafed at the limitations of traditional science, which he considered inadequate to address the mysteries of the natural world".

So he set out to explore not only the physical world but also the far intellectual frontiers that encompassed investigations into eyeless sight, clairvoyance, telepathy and the spoon-bending demonstrations of Uri Geller whom Watson claimed to have discovered and who was introduced to British audiences via the BBC where he once worked as a reporter and producer. He gained a huge following in Japan and, after visiting the country, developed a passion for sumo wrestling which he then acted as a commentator on for Channel 4.

"His most famous contribution to paranormal debate was the 100th monkey theory, proposed in the 1979 book Lifetide: A biology of the unconscious" and enthusiastically embraced by New Age thinkers," the Times reported. "Japanese scientists studying macaques on the island of Koshima found that members of the colony took to washing sweet potatoes left by the researchers before eating them.

"When enough macaques engaged in this behaviour - say 99 - the addition of one more monkey would create a critical mass, and the practice spread not only throughout the tribe but also, telepathically it seemed, to colonies on other islands. The habit, Watson wrote 'seems to have jumped natural barriers and to have appeared spontaneously, like glycerine crystals in sealed laboratory jars, in colonies on other islands and on the mainland in a troupe of Takasakiyama'."

Withering criticism from sceptics, who showed the facts behind the theory were wrong, forced Watson to concede the 100th monkey theory was "a metaphor of my own making", a way of suggesting how mechanisms other than natural selection might work in evolution.

Born in Johannesburg in 1939, Watson was the eldest of three boys and his childhood was spent roaming the veldt on his grandfather's farm. He claimed to have learnt to read by poring over Birds of South Africa and seems to have been instilled with a passion for nature by a Zulu chief turned farmhand called Jubula who showed him how to survive in the bush, in part by eating caterpillars.

On one memorable occasion, Jubula helped him rescue a young warthog orphaned by hyenas and the pig is said to have become "a charismatic member of the family". The last of Watson's 25 books was The Whole Hog, written in 2004 as a celebration of pigs and inspired by his childhood pet.

When Watson was 10, his grandmother, described by the London Times as a formidable pioneer who began riding a red Harley-Davidson at the age of 72, decided that, as their fathers were still away because of the war, he and his friends were becoming unruly.

"She loaded a wagon with a dozen of the most turbulent boys, drove them to a one-room driftwood shack on a beach, miles from the nearest road, and left them to fend for themselves for a month among the leopards, baboons, buffalo and elephants," the Times writer said. "Avoiding a descent into Lord of the Flies anarchy, they thrived, and the ritual was repeated every summer. Watson described the experience as 'a glimpse of the last of the best of times to be young'."

Sent to a boarding school in Cape Town, he must have enrolled in the University of the Witwatersrand at the age of 15 because by 19 he had graduated with degrees in botany and zoology. He took up an apprenticeship in palaeontology under Raymond Dart that led to anthropological studies in Germany and Holland

He also studied geology, chemistry, marine biology, ecology and later completed a doctorate in ethology, the study of animal behaviour, with Desmond Morris - himself to become famous as the author of The Naked Ape - at the University of London.

Watson wrote Supernature on a Greek island in 1968 but it took two years and many rejections before a publisher thought it might be worth adding to his booklist. By then Watson had left for the Philippines to investigate psychic surgery and, when he returned a year later, the book had spent 50 weeks at the top of the bestseller list and eventually sold 750,000 copies in paperback as well as being translated into eight languages.

Like Ulysses, Watson never appears to have tired of travel or of exploring strange beliefs. He married twice but had no known children and variously lived in South Africa, England, America, finally settling in West Cork in Ireland. It was there he suffered a series of strokes and then came down with Lewy body dementia, a poorly understood malady that produces the symptoms of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.

One of his brothers had migrated to Australia and was living in an old gold-mining town called Gympie on the Queensland Sunshine Coast. Of all the odd places Watson had been in his life, Gympie was where he experienced his last big adventure.

At a time when all too few academics have the courage to provoke controversy, the London Times was entirely correct when it recorded his death with these words: "With his fondness for conclusions that questioned the scientific status quo, Watson relished challenging established thinking and was unapologetic about his fascination with what he called the soft edges of science."

Watson himself wrote: "It is here, it seems, that we get fleeting glimpses of strange shadows just beneath the surface of current understanding. Such will-o-the-wisps, I suspect, may be our best chance of some sort of reconciliation between hard science and softer, more organic, human experience."