The Naked Ape / Desmond Morris was a master of provocative truths |
When the recently deceased zoologist Desmond Morris chose the title for his 1967 book – The Naked Ape – that would make his name, one wonders if he didn’t look back at the last book of ‘popular science’ in the field of biology. Charles Darwin’s 1871 The Descent of Man scandalised Victorian society by claiming that humans are descended from apes. Morris seemingly decided to go that one step further and claim that we still are apes, just hairless ones.
Morris was a master of provocative truths. He enjoyed generating pseudo-scandal by extrapolating from known scientific facts towards possible implications in realms which were difficult to stomach even in the Swinging Sixties. He put forward the idea, for example, that women’s lips emphasised with rouge were a form of signalling mimicry of genitalia – the ‘naked ape’ indeed. Just as their breasts were meant to mimic the buttocks – the usual view for our primate ancestors, given their preferred sexual positions.
It was actually his next book, expanding on that topic – Manwatching – which caught my own teenage interest in the other subject that sells just as well as sex: violence. Morris pointed out that a man in an argument with a flushed face has all his blood in his skin,........