Alister Clavering Hardy was born on 10 February 1896 in Nottingham, England. A zoologist and investigator of religious experience, he invented the continuous plankton recorder. During the First World War, he served in the Northern Cyclist Battalion. In 1921, he was appointed Assistant Naturalist at the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries Lab, and in 1924, Chief Zoologist on the Discovery expedition. Professor of Zoology at University College, Hull in 1928, he was made Regius Professor of Natural History at Aberdeen in 1942. Three years later, he became Linacre Professor of Zoology at Oxford.
In 1963, he founded the Alister Hardy Research Centre to investigate the phenomenon of religious experience and was recognised with the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. Awarded the Scientific Medal for the Zoological Society in 1939, he was knighted in 1957. Important works include Discovery Reports (1928–1935), The Open Sea, the first part of which was The World of Plankton (1956) and the second, Fish and Fisheries (1959), Great Waters (1967), The Biology of God (1975), and Darwin and the Spirit of Man (1984).