Desmond Morris, the English zoologist whose 1967 bestseller The Naked Ape argued that modern humans are basically fancy primates still running on Stone Age software, died Sunday near Dublin at 98, according to the New York Times. Twenty million copies and 23 translations later, the book is still in print — despite being pulled from shelves in a Long Island school district and denounced by professionals in roughly every relevant academic field.
The central claim — that ancient primate genes shape human behavior in ways civilization can't override — outraged academics across several disciplines. Morris, who called the book "deliberately insulting," was unbothered. The profits funded a move to Malta, a villa with 27 rooms, a pair of Rolls-Royces, and a yacht.
The book had been written in a month, under financial pressure, which may explain its breezy confidence. Before it, Morris was best known as a Granada TV host who got sprayed by a urinating lion at the London Zoo, and as the man who staged Congo the chimpanzee's painting career — a 1957 show that got plenty of press and annoyed the art world considerably. He'd trained under three Nobel laureates, including Nikolaas Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz, and earned his Oxford doctorate in 1954.
He wrote more than four dozen books over his career — body language, dogs, cats, horses, football players treated as an anthropological tribe. The Lives of the Surrealists came out in 2018, when he was 90. He had no patience for footnotes, on the grounds that loading books with charts and data would keep people from reading them.
When reviewers complained about the difficulty of writing around the word "penis" in their coverage of The Naked Ape, Morris pointed out to Newsweek: "Newspapers commonly use the word gun. They don't mind printing a word describing something that shoots death, but if it shoots life, they won't have it."
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