Desmond Morris

Mm-hmm.

His whole way of thinking was, and this is quite a popular idea, I, I had been interested in this before I came across the project, about how I'd been interested in writers like Desmond Morris, who wrote The Human Zoo, um, in the '70s, and was talking about how basically society, uh, technology has, has developed faster than human biology.

Mm-hmm.

And we're designed to...

They are.

They're distributed in a different way, and they're also, you know, where we're naked, as Desmond Morris called us, the naked ape, our hair follicles or our hairs rather, are thinner.

So they're fine and kind of puny.

[laughs] Sorry, pun.

answer.

That's a sort of Desmond Morris

question.

It would make sense, though, wouldn't it? It does.

Of immigrant surges, well, you know.

And finally, of the three, there was Desmond Morris, superb TV star and author, father of The Naked Ape.

But soon, looking at his examples, so many were finding animal examples proving or not that traditional wives like chimps or magpies and alpha males were like that because they're still apish or cocksure.

And so to their stories with Sharon Carleton.

[upbeat music] Lynn Margulis changed how we think about the origins of life.

Paul Ehrlich about how much of that human life our world can sustain.

And Desmond Morris, the British zoologist, changed the way we look at ourselves by asking us to see human beings as part of the animal kingdom.

But each had a blind spot.

Of immigrant surges, well, you know.

And finally, of the three, there was Desmond Morris, superb TV star and author, father of The Naked Ape.

But soon, looking at his examples, so many were finding animal examples proving or not that traditional wives like chimps or magpies and alpha males were like that because they're still apish or cocksure.

And so to their stories with Sharon Carleton.

Lynn Margulis changed how we think about the origins of life.

Paul Ehrlich about how much of that human life our world can sustain.

And Desmond Morris, the British zoologist, changed the way we look at ourselves by asking us to see human beings as part of the animal kingdom.

But each had a blind spot.

Second, he says, why are we so obsessed with being superior to animals? In my personal opinion, I think it is to justify our continued exploitation of them.

But writers like Desmond Morris, who wrote The Naked Ape, says this obsession is a sign of insecurity.

And actually, this self-consciousness, this insecurity, is another trait we have that animals don't appear to have.

But this isn't a good trait.

Desmond Morris says, And third, Lindsay says we should be suspicious of our tendency to think of ourselves as unique because, like we have discussed before, the whole conversation is self-serving.

In our collective mindset, the lens we are looking through is human-centric.

We cannot see any point of view other than our own.

And there are studies on this.

I have no idea who did the studies, but this was originally written about by a guy named Desmond Morris, who just, I think, died in the last month or two.

He was in his 90s.

But it's like the first researcher who wrote a book about really observing humans as if they were animals, like how did their body move and stuff.

Like a tongue jut, like after someone tells a lie, like there's something called a tongue jut that's very common like this.

This is our first no. It's a way to force a nipple out of the mouth.

And these are theories of Desmond Morris's as well.

Like this is our first way of withholding and keeping milk in the mouth.