博客來Sir Alister Hardy (1896-1985) was a figure whose mind spanned the physical and the metaphysical, making him one of the most unique thinkers of the 20th century.
In the 1920s, as Chief Zoologist aboard the RRS Discovery in the forbidding Antarctic, Hardy solved one of oceanography’s great puzzles. He invented the Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR), a brilliant device that provided the first-ever large-scale maps of marine life distribution and unveiled the delicate food chain that sustained the colossal whale populations. His work established him as a titan of evolutionary biology and secured him a prestigious chair at Oxford.
Yet, the immense, self-regulating beauty of the natural world pushed him toward a radical question: What is the biological basis of faith? After his retirement, Hardy embarked on the second great mission of his life, founding the Religious Experience Research Unit (RERU) to scientifically collect and analyze thousands of anonymous reports of spiritual encounters.
This definitive biography traces Hardy’s extraordinary journey from the frozen latitudes of the Southern Ocean to the frontiers of human consciousness. It explores the mind of the man who dared to subject the human soul to the same systematic rigor he applied to zooplankton, arguing that the spiritual drive is a core evolutionary feature. Discover the profound dual legacy of the scientist who anchored faith in the foundations of the living stream. Approx.164 pages, 28900 word count
