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Lyall Watson
(12 Apr 1939 - 25 Jun 2008)
, whose education was very broad, including botany, zoology, ecology, marine biology, chemistry, geology, paleontology and anthropology. This he put to good use writing 24 books, beginning with
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Science Quotes by Lyall Watson (5 quotes)
Everything around us is filled with mystery and magic. I find this no cause for despair, no reason to turn for solace to esoteric formulae or chariots of gods. On the contrary, our inability to find easy answers fills me with a fierce pride in our ambivalent biology … with a constant sense of wonder and delight that we should be part of anything so profound.
— Lyall Watson
In Lifetide: A Biology of the Unconscious (1979), 14.
If elephants didn’t exist, you couldn’t invent one. They belong to a small group of living things so unlikely they challenge credulity and common sense. Compared to them, we are primitive, hanging on to a stubborn, unspecialized, five-fingered state, clever but destructive. They are models of refinement, nature’s archangels, the oldest and largest land mammals, touchstones to our imagination
— Lyall Watson
In Elephantoms: Tracking the Elephant (2002, 2003), 38.
Mitochondria seem to be able to exist, in the form of free-living bacteria, without our help. But without them, we die in a matter of seconds.
— Lyall Watson
In Lifetide: A Biology of the Unconscious (1979), 78.
The sun rises. In that short phrase, in a single fact, is enough information to keep biology, physics, and philosophy busy for all the rest of time.
— Lyall Watson
In Lifetide: A Biology of the Unconscious (1979), 23.
There is nothing quite like an elephant. Nothing with which it can be compared, though the proverbial Six Blind Men of Indostan did their best, likening each part encountered separately to a snake, a spear, a fan, a wall, a tree, and a rope. Taken altogether, these ingredients add up to a most singular animal….
— Lyall Watson
In Elephantoms: Tracking the Elephant (2002, 2003), 38.
See also:
- Heaven’s Breath: A Natural History of the Wind, by Lyall Watson. - book suggestion.
- Booklist for Lyall Watson.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
