GOD'S BIOLOGIST

I met Sir Alister Hardy on a couple of occasions in the late 1970s and early 80s, once when I had come over from Cambridge to have lunch with him at Merton College. He was a highly engaging character, as is evident from this excellent biography by David Hay, who was director of the Religious Experience Research Unit for a few years from 1985. The overall purpose of the book is to explore the link between Hardy's highly successful scientific career and his preoccupation with religion and spiritual experience. I remember him saying in a lecture at Manchester College that his father-in-law, Walter Garstang - also a Fellow of the Royal Society - had advised him to make his name in science before saying too much about his personal interest in religion. He broadly followed this advice, only creating the RERU after he retired in 1969.

Hardy was among the youngest to fight in the First World War, having been educated at Oundle and began his degree at Oxford and Julian Huxley. It is striking that, rather like Bede Griffiths, he had an early mystical experience in nature at around the same age of 16. Already in 1914, he was convinced that his mission, should he survive the war, was to bring about a reconciliation between evolutionary theory and the spiritual awareness of man. During the war, he did some special work on camouflage. He returned to Oxford and the Zoology Department and succeeded in obtaining a scholarship that took him to Naples, his first major field trip, which partly resulted from his finding a specimen of an extremely rare insect, much to the amazement of the interview panel. Hay writes of his boisterous charm, enthusiasm and meticulous scientific observation as hallmarks of his personality, to which he adds the ability to persist enthusiastically with a task.

His next major break was appointment to an expedition to the southern Antarctic on the Discovery. He had been working in Lowestoft, which marked the beginning of his career in Marine biology, and he was already aware of the potential problems of overfishing brought about by improved technology and increased demand for fish. He was also working on his Continuous Plankton Recorder, which was one of his most significant scientific achievements. At the age of 31, he was appointed Professor of Zoology at the newly established University of Hull. From there he moved to Aberdeen as Regius Chair of Natural History in 1942, and then to Oxford in 1946, having become a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1940 and already being awarded an honorary degree from Oxford in 1938. He was clearly very popular with his students, and went out of his way to make sure of their welfare. Desmond Morris observes that he made his scientific reputation as a brilliant marine biologist, but he was at heart a wide-ranging Victorian naturalist, adding that, compared with Hardy's animated domain, other zoology departments seemed boringly clinical and unstimulating.

In 1949, he made his first public mention of taking telepathy seriously in a lecture to the British Association. This led eventually to his appointment as a Gifford Lecturer in Aberdeen in the early 1960s. Some readers will be familiar with this prestigious series of lectures held in the old Scottish universities, and dedicated to the exposition of natural religion. Hardy had been enormously influenced in his approach by William James, and these lectures enabled him to develop his ideas freely, especially as he had by then retired from Oxford. He spoke about behavioural selection as the way in which animals themselves play a major part in narrow evolution and was convinced by his own experience that we were capable of sensing the presence of transcendent reality. He applied an empirical approach to these studies, eventually calling for examples from the general public, which have been collated and analysed in different categories, forming the basis of the archive at the Alister Hardy Centre. The famous so-called Hardy Question is: "have you ever been aware of, or influenced by the presence or power, whether you call it God or not, that is different from your everyday self?" In spite of the complexities of phrasing, the responses were interesting and wide-ranging. During that time, he received a visit from John Templeton, which led eventually to the award of the Templeton Prize just before he died in 1985.

As a biologist, Hardy was interested in the biological basis of religious experience while realising that spiritual awareness belonged to the realm of tacit knowing and has evolved, in his view, by the process of natural selection. The last part of the book gives a history of what started as the Religious Experience Research Unit and an account of some of the challenges it has faced over the years. As far as I know, Hardy had no connection with the Network, although his outlook would have made him an ideal member, questioning as he did the limitations of scientific materialism and integrating science with spiritual awareness. David Hay has certainly done justice to Hardy's life and has written what will surely be the definitive biography for many years.