By:
Desmond Morris
Reviewed by OFW editor: Carlos J Cortes
Published: October 09, 2012
I seldom have to justify reviewing a book, but The Naked Ape is non-fiction and this is a website for fiction writing. At OFW we want to review not only the work of colleagues and exponents of the fiction craft, but also those works that in our opinion could be useful to writers.
The concept behind the book is beautiful in its simplicity. Dr. Morris is a zoologist who had the brilliant idea of examining his brethren as pure animals. This humbling book shows humans as animal like through analyzing our mating habits, the ways in which we raise our young, our preferences for foods, how we interact with one another, and what bodily features are universally desired over others. It shows how humans answer to the basic laws of animal behavior—and how power and position are transparent—through a stirring look at the primal factors behind love, work, or war, to give a few examples.
Writers should read this book not because it shows our similarities to apes, but because of its insights into why we act the way we do and the root of our relationships with one another. Though we may make different decisions, deep down we're genetically similar.
The Naked Ape will afford writers the benchmarks to assay relationships between characters and identify posturing for what it is. Thus, this provocative and challenging book will force a writer to question the reactions and motivations behind his characters’ behavior.
Desmond Morris wrote in the late 1960's The Naked Ape, a classic that established the field of evolutionary anthropology. His ideas were revolutionary at the time, and he clearly says so.
Forty-five years ago—when this book was first published—its no-nonsense view of humanity's origins caused a stir. Writers will appreciate that Dr. Morris’s is a rarity. He’s a scientist who can speak plainly to the layman, without jargon, and impart an understanding of science clearly. In other words: He writes for a non-academic readership while still being thorough in his exposition. Not in vain has he been described as the Carl Sagan of Ethnology.
A word of warning: Much of this book reflects undeniable facts—for those of us who accept the gradual changes of organisms over millions of generations in their attempt to survive a changing environment. For those who are uncomfortable with the idea of evolution or with humanity's animal ancestry this would be a boring book, and a waste of time.
The Naked Ape is divided into sections, which cover our human peculiarities of origin, sex, anatomy, child rearing, exploration/innovation, fighting, feeding, comfort; relations to all other animals and environment; population management and the cultural peculiarities unique to humans: written language, religion, politics, and economics.
There are eight sections in the book: Origins, Sex, Rearing, Exploration, Fighting, Feeding, Comfort, and Animals.
In the first section, Morris writes about how we became bipedal, lost our fur, and our social origins. As a paradigm of the human race, it depicts our striking characteristics, lowest instincts, and highest aspirations in a unique way. It strips man and civilization of its alleged superiority making the work of mankind and its subtleties a simple consequence of evolution. It isn't a simplistic job—and Morris doesn't take a reductionist approach—but rather peruses every aspect of the human conditioned behavior and explains it as a consequence of our unique circumstance as carnivore apes.
The rest of the book discusses our tendencies. Morris suggests the reasons we do the things we do, and why they are part of our being. These sections will be an eye opener for most writers, highlighting, for example, why the reader subconsciously loves or dislikes a given character on the basis of his gestures or inner thoughts.
To set reader’s perceptions or paradigms on end is the dream of most writers. Unfortunately, books capable of questioning deeply-set concepts are rare. The Naked Ape has changed many readers: they might never view their world (or write about it) in the same way again after reading the book. This is by no means an exaggeration. Morris suggests plausible origins to our primal urges and breaks down human beings methodically to prove that stripped of our veneer of civilization, the inner workings of a naked ape are all one is left with.
To be fair with the passage of time, The Naked Ape’s assumptions have been cast into doubt; not in the overall picture, but the detail. As a result, Morris' theories have been updated over the years, and refined to provide more accurate perspectives. Therefore, this book should not be read as an infallible account of our current understanding of man, but an introductory work on evolutionary sociology/anthropology, written in friendly and clear prose, devoid of technicalities.
Modern day evolutionary scientists fault Morris for—among other concepts—his pair-bond theory. In my opinion, this is just a chink in the elaborate chains of thought Morris constructs, unlike his detractors who claim it undermines his entire book. This is stupid and shortsighted. Morris wrote The Naked Ape when evolutionary psychology was unknown to anyone beside a handful of scientists. He sets forth in his book powerful, logical evidence, and explanations that support the clearest model with which to view our species. Even after the work of Morris, Wilson, Trivers, Williams, Symons and others, academia still has yet to embrace the sociobiology paradigm, despite the mountain of evidence and obvious elegance of the theory (a theory that helps understand ourselves), our relations to each other and society as a whole.
For those who want to study the subject of this book in more updated detail I recommend The Human Zoo and the coffee-table Manwatching also by Desmond Morris, The Social Contract, and African Genesis by Desmond Morris and Robert Ardrey, Mammal in the Mirror by David and Ilona Barrash, a father and daughter science team, The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis, and Scars of Evolution by Elaine Morgan, How The Mind Works by Steven Pinker and The Moral Animal Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology by Robert Wright.
I’ve often pondered that if an intelligent species from another world ever visited ours, their observations could probably read like Dr. Morris’s study of the human animal. In my opinion, to read The Naked Ape will feel to many writers as if cataracts have been removed from their eyes.
I seldom have to justify reviewing a book, but The Naked Ape is non-fiction and this is a website for fiction writing. At OFW we want to review not only the work of colleagues and exponents of the fiction craft, but also those works that in our opinion could be useful to writers.