At ninety-four, Desmond Morris has excelled in many roles – a zoologist, an author, a curator, a surrealist painter, an art institute director, a radio broadcaster, and a television show presenter. “I just loved everything I was doing, and I wanted to do it all,” Morris says in his interview, The Artistic Ape, on the video series Reason with Science. In this hour-long conversation, we go on a journey of his observations of human behavior, and his passion for surrealist art and catch glimpses of his multifaceted interests.
Growing up during the Second World War, Morris described the human species as ‘a monkey with a diseased brain’. That predicament sadly rings true in today’s day as well. Deeply disturbed by the conflict and warfare, he decided to follow a path of ‘constructive rebellion’. “I turned my back on human beings and turned towards the animal world,” he says. “I became a zoologist and spent all my time…studying microscopic life…birds and fish, reptiles, amphibians, and studying animal behavior.”
About a decade later, Morris studied the reproductive behavior of a type of freshwater fish called ten-spined stickleback at the University of Oxford. After completing a doctoral degree in Zoology, he started presenting a TV program about the animal world called Zoo Time. The popularity of this show made him a prominent public figure.
In 1966, as a curator for the Zoological Society, Morris was exhausted from overwork and decided to take a break. During this time, he found himself asking questions like ‘what kind of animal am I?’ and became deeply intrigued with the science of human behavior. This curiosity led to his best-selling book The Naked Ape. “I have always been able to type faster than the keys will accept my fingers,” he says. “I sat down with my typewriter and wrote an entire book in four weeks…just non-stop!”. In this book, he used a new term ‘naked ape’ to describe humans, as if he were an alien who landed on this planet and wondered, ‘what is this strange ape who doesn’t have hair?’
In prehistoric human hunter-gatherer societies, the males hunted, and the females gathered food. Morris’ rationale for the sexual division of labor, suggesting that the males undertook dangerous hunting pursuits because the female child-bearers were considered too valuable to be sacrificed, has garnered both curiosity and critique.
Morris never thought the book would be a best-seller as he had only set out to write about his honest observations of human behavior.
He now attributes its success to three keywords ‘simplification without distortion’. “If you are going to be accurate and honest [about science], and to do that in simple language is extremely difficult, and every word has to be exactly right,” Morris states.
As a sequel to The Naked Ape, he wrote The Human Zoo, exploring human lives in a crowded urban setting.
“People refer to the city as a concrete jungle…but it is much more like a zoo,” he says. Unlike ants and termites that have evolved to live in huge colonies, humans have historically lived in small tribes. Large metropolitan cities are unnatural human habitats. Morris explains that we haven’t forgotten our tribal instincts and, in fact, continue to form our tribes – family, friends, and colleagues, in this vast human zoo.
Of more than a hundred books that Morris has written, his personal favorite is Manwatching, published in 1977. It was his first attempt to develop a human ethogram, a catalog of behaviors and actions. “Although we had a dictionary of words, we didn’t have a dictionary of actions, gestures, postures, movements,” he says. “My aim was to analyze and describe every known human action.” Morris is a pioneer in the study of ‘body language’, a phrase that wasn’t commonplace back then.
Another passion that Morris has nurtured since his childhood is surrealist art. At last count, he has created over three thousand four hundred paintings, many of them of imaginary biomorphic figures inspired by the animal world. “My public life has always been on television or as a scientist, but my private life has always been that of an artist,” he says.
In his early twenties, Morris directed two surrealist movies, Time Flower, and The Butterfly and the Pin. His artwork was displayed at the London Gallery alongside Spanish painter and sculptor Joan Miró. In 2017, BBC made a documentary called The Secret Surrealist highlighting his career as an artist.
Morris has organized several art exhibitions over the years, but Paintings by Chimpanzees displayed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in 1957, was the most noteworthy. In an interview with writer and painter Melanie Coles, Morris had said, “Paintings by Chimpanzees was important because it was the first time that zoology and fine art had come together.”
For years Morris has investigated the artistic habits of chimpanzees. The chimpanzee Congo (1954-1964) was a prolific painter nicknamed ‘the Picasso of the Simian world’. Congo created over four hundred paintings, and his work was displayed at the Mayor Gallery in London in 2019. Though Congo never painted images, there was a structure in his patterns. In an email to Artnet News, Morris had written that watching Congo paint was like ‘witnessing the birth of art’. It was on these occasions Morris’ scientific and artistic worlds collided.
“In the scientific method, you take something extremely complicated and make it simple,” he says. “The artist is doing the exact opposite. He starts out with a few tubes of paint and brush, and with that, he makes the Mona Lisa.”
Morris says both the scientist and the artist are explorers, the former relying on analytical abilities and the latter on intuition. As a polymath, Morris has successfully traversed both these worlds.
The secret to his success has been staying away from what he describes as ‘the worst thing one can do’ – retirement. In all these years, he has never stopped asking questions and trying new things, and his plan to go skydiving on his 100th birthday with his grandchildren is a true testament to that.
The complete video of this interview with Dr. Desmond Morris is available on the YouTube channel of our media partner, ‘Reason with Science’. It is a series of conversations with scientists discussing the importance of science in society. You can listen to the full conversation with Dr. Morris here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7JdHUX8ZEM&list=PLila1Jm-QEwK-BR_Xj_29rK_cEw9BVIdB&index=8
Author
Sneha Das is pursuing her Ph.D. in Microbiology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She fell in love with the microbial world during her undergraduate education at St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata. Her current research focuses on understanding DNA damage and repair in bacteria using genetic tools. Sneha discovered her passion for science communication as a teaching assistant for undergraduate Molecular Biology and Microbiology courses. Since then, she has talked about different scientific topics to the general audience as a part of science communication outreach programs. In her free time, she enjoys writing, traveling, exploring nature, and meeting new people.
Editors
Sumbul Jawed Khan is the Assistant Editor-in-Chief at Club SciWri. She received her Ph. D. from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, where she studied the role of the microenvironment in cancer progression and tumor formation. During her post-doctoral research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she investigated the gene regulatory networks important for tissue regeneration. She is committed to science outreach activities and believes it is essential to inspire young people to apply scientific methods to tackle the challenges faced by humanity. As an editor, she aims to simplify, translate, and excite people about current advances in science.
Roopsha Sengupta is the Editor-in-Chief at Club SciWri. She did her Ph.D. at the Institute of Molecular Pathology, Vienna, and post-doctoral research at the University of Cambridge UK, specializing in Epigenetics. During her research, she was involved in many exciting discoveries and had the privilege of working and collaborating with many inspiring scientists. As an editor for Club SciWri, she loves working on diverse topics and presenting articles coherently while nudging authors to give their best.
Illustrator
Atharva Deshpande is a 4th-year student at IISER Mohali pursuing a Biology major and minor in Science Education who eventually wants to become a full-time science illustrator. He believes blending science, art, and storytelling makes for an interesting recipe. You can follow him on Instagram and Twitter.
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