Lyall Watson, 69, author, adventurer at edges of science
NEW YORK - Lyall Watson, a maverick scientific polymath and explorer who wrote the best-selling book "Supernature" and introduced the "hundredth monkey" theory to explain the sudden and inexplicable transmission of behavior and ideas across social groups, died June 25 in Gympie, Australia.
He was 69 and lived in West Cork, Ireland.
The cause was a stroke, said Katherine Lyall-Watson, his niece.
Dr. Watson - whose interests and academic degrees embraced animal behavior, anthropology, chemistry, botany, and geology - chafed at the limitations of traditional science, which he considered inadequate to address the mysteries of the natural world.
His restless mind and wanderlust led him on expeditions to the
His most famous contribution to paranormal debate was the hundredth monkey theory, proposed in the 1979 book "Lifetide: A Biology of the Unconscious" and enthusiastically embraced by New Age thinkers.
Japanese scientists studying macaques on the island of Koshima, he wrote, found that members of the colony took to washing sweet potatoes left by the researchers before eating them. When enough macaques engaged in this behavior - 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.
Under withering criticism from skeptics, who showed that the facts behind the theory were wrong, Dr. Watson conceded in The Whole Earth Review that the hundredth monkey theory was "a metaphor of my own making.".
Malcolm Lyall-Watson was born in Johannesburg, the eldest of three brothers. His Scottish father worked as an architect, and his mother was a radiologist.
As a child, Mo, as his brothers called him to his lifelong annoyance, roamed his grandparents' farm and learned the ways of the veldt from a Zulu farmhand. He learned to read by studying a voluminous work called "Birds of South Africa." 