Lyall Watson

"Watson received degrees in zoology, marine biology, anthropology, botany, chemistry and ethology over the course of his career, but he was foremost an explorer, both of far-flung ideas and far-flung places. He trekked to Antarctica and the Kalahari Desert, to Tonga and Kuala Lumpur, always in search of extremes, always probing the limits of what’s known and accepted. He was a scientist in the grandest tradition of the art, roughing it in country, armed with an open mind and an indefatigable curiosity, and like so many of those grand trampers before him (Charles Darwin and more pointedly his grandfather Erasmus Darwin come to mind), he had the knack for turning out his observations in sharply readable prose"


"The number of atoms in the universe has been estimated as ten-to-the-power-of-eighty. And the age of the universe in seconds is something rather less, like ten-to-the-power-of-eighteen. Therefore the number of distinct events which can occur in our finite area, is limited by time. And the number of configurations in which a system of atoms can exist is much greater than the number in which it does exist. It follows from this that it is highly unlikely, even impossible, that any two samples of matter should ever be the same. Which means that no two individual organisms, no two cells, and none of the entities in those cells, can ever be in the same internal state. Individuality is inevitable."