Science Guide

I started out to recommend any science or nature books by Lyall Watson; he wrote quite a few. I have read two of them, "Jacobsen's Organ and the Remarkable Nature of Smell," and "Pigs Pigs Pigs," which is a survey of all the pig species of the world and included his experience of raising and befriending an orphaned warthog in Africa.

But when I searched for his name to find a list of books, I found instead that he died last month! His obituary in The Guardian mentions a "versatile and telegenic life as an anthropologist, biologist, botanist, ethologist and zoologist."

He wrote 25 books, mostly based on nature but also exploring some unproven ideas: ESP and the like. I'd skip those. Lyall Watson apparently came up with the "Hundredth Monkey" theory:

He had the knack, too, of distilling his discoveries about animal behaviour into catchy theories, such as that of the "hundredth monkey". The concept was based on a story in Lifetide that a number of macaque monkeys on the Japanese island of Koshima were washing sweet potatoes in the sea, uncopied by the others; when another monkey - the hundredth - also started washing sweet potatoes, all the rest took to doing just that. He thought this could be because once the potato-washers assumed a "critical mass", the washers changed the behaviour of the whole group.

Tie that in with Connie Willis's Bellwether and you've got something.