Watching Desmond Morris
Desmond Morris has been watching us for 40 years, applying his skills as a zoologist to human beings as if they were just another animal. Books such as The Naked Ape and Manwatching made him a household name. Now it is time to turn the tables and ask him a few questions.
With contributions from experts such as Richard Dawkins and Oliver James, and from Morris's old friend Sir David Attenborough, we ask how credible Morris's observations, and the conclusions, really were, and whether there is still anything to learn from studying humans in the way the he did.
With contributions from experts such as Richard Dawkins and Oliver James, and from Morris's old friend Sir David Attenborough, we ask how credible Morris's observations, and the conclusions, really were, and whether there is still anything to learn from studying humans in the way the he did.
Transcript
00:00Today, in this wildlife park in the Cotswolds, we're going to meet an extraordinary example
00:07of an extraordinary species. It's one of the most successful species on the planet, and
00:13he is one of its most successful examples. You can see him there now, engaged in typical
00:21feeding behaviour. But he would say such simple actions can tell a whole other story, and
00:29he should know. For the last 40 years, he has been watching us. Now, it's our turn
00:37to watch him.
00:38I'm an ape man, I'm an ape ape man, no, I'm an ape man. I'm a king kong man, I'm a koo
00:47koo man, no, I'm an ape man. Because compared to the sun that sits in the sky, compared
00:55to the clouds that say goodbye.
00:57Whenever you're with Desmond, you should be prepared for something new and exciting.
01:02I never went to university. Desmond Morris gave me my open university.
01:08I was vastly amused by him. He's the world's best raconteur, I think.
01:16In the 1960s, I was at a party and I said to a young publisher, I've got an idea for
01:22a book, I'm going to write a book about human beings, looking at them exactly as though
01:27it's another species. And I'm going to do it as a zoologist, not as an anthropologist,
01:32but as a zoologist, and I'm going to call it The Naked Ape. And he said, that's it,
01:35that's a great title, you must do that. And I said, well, it was only, I mean it seriously.
01:41But he went on trying to persuade me to do it for several years. Every six months, I'd
01:46get a telegram, we used to have telegrams, I was saying, where is The Naked Ape?
01:50And eventually, I did write the book, and of course, it changed my life.
01:54Here we come, walking down the street. We get the funniest looks from everyone we meet.
02:06It was a brilliant title. Never mind the science, applying zoology to humans as if they were
02:12just another animal. In 1967, The Naughtiness of Naked and The Friesen of Ape were enough
02:18to turn Desmond Morris, until then, an academic zoologist and presenter of television wildlife
02:24programmes, into an overnight sensation.
02:31Naked Ape was an extraordinarily daring book in its time, to extrapolate from animal behaviour
02:41of all kinds, not just chimpanzees, but of all kinds, to extrapolate from that into the
02:47behaviour of human beings, into the behaviour of traffic cops, into the behaviour of courting
02:52couples, in the behaviour of soldiers. That was an extremely original and daring thing
02:58to do in its time, and it made people's eyes pop.
03:02It forces us straight up against the question of evolution. It says, here we are, we're
03:09naked, we've got breasts, we have orgasms, we've got penises that are bigger than any
03:17other ape. Why is this? And he forces you to think through the Darwinian logic of that
03:27in a way that is absolutely persuasive and incredibly exciting.
03:33The vast bulk of copulation in our species is obviously concerned not with reproducing
03:37offspring, but with cementing the pair bond by providing mutual rewards for the sexual
03:42partners. The repeated attainment of sexual consummation for a mated pair is clearly then
03:48not some kind of sophisticated, decadent outgrowth of modern civilisation, but a deep-rooted,
03:54biologically based and evolutionarily sound tendency of our species.
04:01It wasn't just about pair bonding and copulation, to adopt the book's self-consciously scientific
04:10language. It took Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection and applied it in layman's
04:16terms to human beings. As well as describing what we were like, it explained, or at least
04:22suggested, how we'd got to be like that. There were chapters on rearing, fighting,
04:27proliferation, comfort, and so on, but the sex certainly helped. We are, as Morris himself
04:33put it, a very sexy ape.
04:37I think that Morris's use of sex throughout his career on television as well as in his
04:43books has been very artful and may help to explain why it did succeed in 1967. Because
04:491967 was when, you know, we're told, you know, sex began in the 1960s, as Philip Larkin
04:54famously said. Well, you know, that was a time when people wanted to believe that it
04:59was natural to be having lots and lots of sex. The fact that we like to have sex and
05:05animals like to have sex does not mean we're animals, Desmond. It's a lot more complicated
05:10than that.
05:18What added a certain piquant irony to the book's success was that until The Naked Ape,
05:23Morris had not been terribly interested in humans. As a child in Wiltshire, animals seemed
05:28more congenial and with good reason.
05:32You've got to remember that I was a child growing up in World War II. It did leave me
05:39with an anger. The anger was caused by watching my father die of the wounds he'd received
05:47in the First World War. And I was filled with an anger against the establishment that had
05:54done this to him. And I still have, I admit, an irrational dislike of the establishment.
06:01It seemed to me as a child that what you did when you grew up was you killed people. And
06:06that was why I spent more and more time with animals. So that my childhood was full of
06:13animal observation, animal study.
06:17A lot of the animals I found at the family lake. My grandmother had a... Wonderful sound.
06:26I love it. Wonderful, kookaburra. Makes me feel I'm in Australia again. My grandmother
06:34had a lake. And I spent a lot of time on that lake, watching the fish and the water birds.
06:43And in the wild land around the lake, there were frogs and toads and newts. And I spent
06:50a great deal of time out watching animals. I wanted to watch them. I didn't really want
06:54to catch them. The ones that I had as pets, that was when I was much younger. But as I
07:02got older, I became more interested in looking at animals rather than keeping them.
07:11Studying zoology at university was the obvious next step, except that he was repelled by
07:16the standard animal experiments of the time. Fortunately, a radical new approach was just
07:22beginning to take shape.
07:26The big new thing after the war, in the early 50s, was the science of animal behaviour.
07:34And that came to the public attention with people like Conrad Lorenz, who wrote a best-seller
07:42book called King Solomon's Ring. And with him came a younger associate called Nico Tinbergen,
07:49who was Dutch and who came to Oxford and took up this subject, which was now given a name,
07:55which was now called ethology. And Desmond was one of the first bright young graduates
08:02who did research along those lines in Nico's unit.
08:08What Tinbergen and Lorenz were saying was that every time you see a movement or an action
08:13or a posture or something strange happening in an animal, you have to ask the question,
08:17how does it help that animal to survive? And what caused that particular action? For example,
08:25these little squirrel monkeys, you know, to most people they're just beautiful markings,
08:29but I want to know how it helps an animal to have a black mouth, white eyes, a black
08:34tip to its tail and orange front legs. Oh, and orange hind feet. These are the sort of
08:40questions that you keep asking, you know, and it's not always easy to find the answers.
08:54Maurice started his researches slightly further down the food chain, but there was perhaps
09:15a hint of what was to come. His first published ethological research was on the minutely observed
09:20sex life of the nine-spined stickleback.
09:25Any ethologist doesn't just watch. He will record what happens in a systematic way which
09:31can then be quantified. You count things. You don't just say the animal did this. He
09:38did some fine work. His scientific papers, written in the 1950s and published in the
09:44learned journals, are really very good. I, for years, went on using them in my own tutorials
09:50when I was a tutor, tutoring undergraduates. There were two of his papers in particular
09:56that I always got students to read and make reference to in their essays, both of them
10:03about animal communication.
10:13Human communication was evolving too. The BBC's television monopoly, not least in natural
10:18history programmes, was about to be rudely interrupted.
10:22He's a much bigger animal, actually, than the other one. I don't think I'd have cared
10:26to have tried to pick him off the tree, the scuff of his neck, as I did our little Fritos.
10:31I don't think he's quite as handsome, actually.
10:33I was producing programmes on television, and appearing on television, in a series called
10:38Zoo Quest in the middle 50s, and Granada Television, under a great impresario called Sidney Bernstein,
10:45decided the BBC couldn't have it their own way, and then appointed a bright young Oxford
10:51zoologist to head a unit that was going to do with programmes using the animals of the
10:58London Zoo.
11:00Granada created a whole studio inside the zoo, and they created Morris too, who turned
11:06out to be a TV natural, one of the new medium's instant experts.
11:16I was someone who had been trained to watch animals, and to look at them, and not to interfere
11:23with them. Now I was being asked to hold them in my arms, and the very first programme I
11:27was holding what looked like a cuddly little teddy bear, but actually it had clamped its
11:33jaws onto my arm, and I bled through the whole of my first television half hour. Luckily
11:39it was in black and white, so nobody knew.
11:41He's got very sharp little teeth, and if he caught my other hand, as he just did, I should feel it.
11:47I was bitten by a bush baby, and nibbled by a mongoose, and I messed on by a macaw.
11:55He seems to be disappearing, because, you see, bush babies come out at night time and
12:01whoop! Well, I think I ought to get the robe for Hunchback of Notre Dame at the moment.
12:07Let me see if I can get my jacket off. Where's he gone? There he is.
12:13We were outraged, at least I was outraged, because I thought I had a relationship with
12:17the zoo. And for a bit, both of us, I mean, there was a standoff. Then I thought, this
12:24is absolutely absurd. Why don't I meet this strange young chap who's doing brilliant
12:30programmes? But the authorities didn't want us to meet at all. It suited them that we
12:35should be antagonistic. I can't remember which of us it was that managed to make the
12:41first contact. Maybe it was Desmond. But we met one another, liked one another, and became
12:47firm friends.
12:57For a while, Morris's media and academic careers progressed in tandem. He quickly became
13:02London Zoo's curator of mammals. Under his regime, conditions improved markedly and
13:09breeding programmes were established. The most famous of these provided a little light
13:13relief at the height of the Cold War. At the time, there were only two giant pandas outside
13:19China, Chi-Chi in London and An-An in Moscow. It was Morris who formally introduced them.
13:27To cut a long story short, she arrived there and An-An was very excited and pursued her
13:34and tried to mate with her, but all she did was hit him across the head and send him rolling
13:39over on his back.
13:41Chi-Chi's making for it. An-An's out. An-An's come out and An-An is chasing Chi-Chi. Chi-Chi's running.
13:57He doesn't seem to be actually biting hard when he gets up close, so he's just chasing
14:08her around.
14:11People said, well, she's not on heat. And I said, well, she is. And I demonstrated by
14:28putting my hand through the bars and pressing down on her back and she went into the lordosis
14:32posture, which indicated that she was on heat. So she was prepared to respond to me, but
14:37not to An-An. The repeated attempts, eventually An-An even came back to London and it never
14:44worked. They never, ever got together. And this taught me a special lesson about humanised
14:51animals. She'd been reared in isolation, she didn't want to know about other pandas. She
14:58thought of herself as a human being.
15:01This wasn't the first time Morris had demonstrated a knack for mixing serious science, testing
15:06the border between humans and other species, with what from the outside looked like a media
15:11stunt.
15:13The work he did about the wellspring, the fundamental sources of art, by giving paints
15:23to a chimpanzee, which at that time, I mean, was unthinkable and indeed laughable. You
15:29know, painted people would say, ha, ha, ha, who thinks, you know, about chimpanzees painting,
15:34ha, ha. Desmond illustrated all kinds of things by analysing what that chimpanzee, Congo,
15:42did.
15:45So the chimpanzee has the beginnings of an aesthetic sense. And it's easy to see from
15:49this, the primate origins of the art that we observe unfolding in our own human children.
15:58And it had a huge effect. I mean, major artists were very taken by what Desmond did.
16:09Picasso had one of these paintings and he was very excited about it. And when a journalist
16:15went to see him and said, what do you think of a painting? Picasso bit him. It was, I
16:22thought it was a splendid gesture. He left the room and then he came back in like this
16:26and jumped on the man and bit him. And what Picasso was saying in his own inimitable way
16:31was the ape and I are both concerned with art.
16:35Some of Congo's pictures came up for sale recently.
16:39The three pictures were only expected to go for a few hundred pounds. In the end, they
16:44went for...
16:45I shall sell at £12,000. Any more?
16:50As well as his academic skills, the experiment drew on Morris's other life as an artist.
16:56He has exhibited alongside Miro, been collected by the Tate, and the surreal experimental
17:01films he had made with his wife Ramona had helped him to get that first job in television.
17:20Morris's art connected back into science when Richard Dawkins chose one of his paintings
17:25as the cover of his ground-breaking book on evolution, The Selfish Gene.
17:30The publishers and I wanted something sort of surrealist, something that suggested otherworldly
17:37life because the principle of the self is that you can't live without the self.
17:44So rather than have a real animal from this planet, I wanted to have something suggestive
17:50of life in general. The painting is called The Expectant Valley. And you see this great
17:56big animal in the foreground which is sort of bursting with life.
18:01And I wanted to have something suggestive of life in general.
18:05And I wanted to have something suggestive of life in general.
18:10It's in a lovely green landscape and it seemed to me to be totally perfect.
18:17The art world nearly claimed Morris for its own. Having delivered the manuscript of The
18:23Naked Ape, he had embarked on a huge career change.
18:27He left the zoo and took up the post of director of the Institute of Natural History.
18:33He had embarked on a huge career change.
18:36He left the zoo and took up the post of director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.
18:45But then the book came out.
18:55I am writing to the Prime Minister to put a stop to your photographers.
18:58Naked people should not be seen.
19:01It is a great pity that so many people have to find a creative substitute rather than
19:05believe in the only truth we have, the Bible.
19:08Thank you for the warning not to forget The Naked Ape next Sunday. I haven't.
19:12I've cancelled the paper. My children shall not be in danger of reading it.
19:19I suppose it did puncture pomposity about the nature of humanity in a way that wasn't
19:28news to any biologist because that sort of evolutionary view of humanity was second nature
19:34to us. But I think it was so well written, so grippingly written, such a page-turner,
19:40that it probably did discomfort a number of people who didn't like to think of humans
19:47as animals. I mean, it's an extraordinary thing. Obviously humans are animals. I mean,
19:51what else are they? They're not plants.
19:54But nevertheless, it did seem to cause some ructions.
20:00There are 193 living species of monkeys and apes. 192 of them are covered with hair.
20:07The exception is a naked ape self-named Homo sapiens.
20:12This unusual and highly successful species spends a great deal of time examining his
20:17higher motives and an equal amount of time studiously ignoring his fundamental ones.
20:23He is proud that he has the biggest brain of all the primates, but attempts to conceal
20:28the fact that he also has the biggest penis. He's an intensely vocal, acutely exploratory,
20:34overcrowded ape, and it's high time we examined his basic behaviour.
20:40It was enormously important to make this breakthrough of studying people as animals,
20:46which they are, and to start looking at them in the way that we look at other animals,
20:52researching their habits, trying to find patterns in their behaviour.
20:55Because when we're in the thick of it, we don't analyse them in the same way.
21:00The whole business of standing back and saying, let's analyse what we do in the same way
21:06that you do when you're watching animals, is an enormously important move to make.
21:11And the popularity of the book shows that people were very interested in seeing things that way.
21:16It was my intention to elevate human beings to the level of the animals I admired so much.
21:23And when I called human beings animals, it was meant to be a huge compliment.
21:30But unfortunately, a lot of people didn't take it that way.
21:35His academic colleagues, some of them, thought it was outrageous.
21:43They thought it was unjustified.
21:45They thought that human beings were too complex to be analysed in this kind of way.
21:52And, of course, some of it, being Desmond, was outrageous.
21:58I mean, Desmond delights in being outrageous.
22:02Among the more eyebrow-raising suggestions were that we never really grow up,
22:08that religion is just an echo of a biological tendency to submit to an alpha male,
22:14and that only humans have orgasms.
22:17And there was his extraordinary theory about breasts.
22:21What are breasts for?
22:23Well, he argues that they are not for lactation at all.
22:27Rather, they are for... They're sexual signals.
22:30They are, in fact, just echoes of the buttocks.
22:33And I remember at the time thinking that this was just ridiculous and over-the-top
22:37and completely unconvincing and just an example of adaptationist thinking gone mad.
22:44If the male of our species were already primed to respond sexually to these signals
22:49when they emanated posteriorly from the genital region,
22:52then he would have a built-in susceptibility to them
22:55if they could be reproduced in that form on the front of the female's body.
23:00And this, it would seem, is precisely what has happened,
23:03with the females carrying a duplicate set of buttocks and labia
23:07on their chests and mouths, respectively.
23:10But I read it recently again, just the other day.
23:13I thought, you know, the argument that he gives is actually very persuasive.
23:19It's subtle. He draws on comparative evidence.
23:22The gelada baboon does this, the mandrill does that.
23:26He discusses lactation and just how useless breasts are at lactation,
23:30you know, how infants choke on female breasts
23:35and how actually they should be completely redesigned to look like a chimpanzee's breast.
23:42And now, perhaps having a better appreciation than I did when I was younger
23:47of the kinds of arguments that can be drawn to make an evolutionary inference,
23:54I have to say, yeah, that he's probably got it right.
23:58Maurice seems, or seemed, to be taking issue with how human we were
24:02as opposed to distinct from the apes.
24:04And he's sort of stopping and looking back
24:08and comparing our behaviour as well to other species who are like us.
24:12And I think that is probably why he has made enemies,
24:16because this does go against the message of various religions.
24:20And also, as he points out, our romantic view of ourselves
24:25as heartfelt, wonderful, noble beings.
24:28To think that we're only a couple of steps away from picking fleas off each other
24:33is not exalting, really, is it?
24:40Alongside the prurience of the general public
24:43and the alarm of organised religion, there were more considered objections.
24:47If someone asks me, are there any gains at all from thinking of humans
24:51as animals, scientific or otherwise,
24:54I really have to think long and hard to think of a single one.
24:58The whole point about humans is that they are so different from animals
25:04in all the important respects that the attempt to suggest
25:10that we are simply operating in the same way as animals
25:14is really just missing the whole point.
25:17The point is that human beings have self-consciousness and they have language.
25:23And that has meant that from around about 10,000 BC onwards,
25:27they have gone in a completely different direction from all previous species.
25:32We are so different from animals that concentrating on the similarities,
25:36which of course exist, seems to me to really not be the most important point.
25:42The most important point, it seems to me, the least important point.
25:47For all the shock of the new, Morris was really only rejoining an argument
25:51which had already been raging for over a century.
25:55Ever since Darwin, we have known that we are descended from apes,
25:59but Darwin himself said very little about the subject.
26:03And so every generation since 1859 has had to ask the question,
26:11how are we related to apes?
26:13Has had to reinterpret that question in the light of new evidence.
26:21And Morris, he did it for the 60s.
26:25This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius.
26:30Age of Aquarius.
26:35Aquarius.
26:40Aquarius.
26:44What really accounts for the particular way in which his work took off
26:49is the fact that it's published in 1967,
26:52that the book's rather obsessive concern with sex, procreation,
26:58the reduction of human nature to a series of animal urges,
27:04is part, paradoxically enough, of that decade's cult of self-fulfilment.
27:10It's not so much an assertion of freedom for human nature,
27:14but it's a very reductivist view of human nature that we have.
27:18Take any wide variety of human beliefs, urges, desires, ambitions, he tells us,
27:25and they can all be reduced to a certain set of simple, simplistic animal urges.
27:36What happened in the late 60s, early 70s, of course,
27:39was tremendous individualism suddenly became very fashionable.
27:43People wanted to drop out, find themselves,
27:46and not be part of a tribe, not be part of a species, if you like.
27:51And I think a lot of people just plain didn't like the idea
27:54that, in a way, our world is more mapped out for us by our genes
27:59and by the fact of living here than we like to think.
28:05There was more than one kind of 60s revolution.
28:08In the social science faculties of the newer universities and polytechnics,
28:12and even in government, the dream was of a new, forward-looking society.
28:18I think the truly fascinating question about the naked ape
28:21is why on earth it took off in an environment,
28:25in an intellectual environment,
28:27that was completely against everything it was saying.
28:32History is being made here today.
28:35Here, on one sheet of paper,
28:38are stated the aims of a modern society
28:43that has put the class war behind it.
28:46It wasn't at all what socialists or the sort of, shall we say,
28:51progressive culture that dominated thought at that time wanted to believe.
28:56It contradicted the overwhelming conviction
29:01that nurture was all-important, that environment was all-important,
29:05that the world had been changed,
29:07that we were going to change poor people into middle-class people
29:12through the education and welfare system,
29:15that the way parents cared for their children was crucial.
29:19All those ideas were the strong ideas at that time.
29:22The idea that we were basically just animals
29:25was not at all the idea of that time.
29:30The dominant theme was the blank slate
29:33on which everything can be written.
29:35The idea was that a baby was born
29:38and virtually everything it did then it learned
29:41and that it didn't carry with it any inborn qualities at all.
29:47As a zoologist, to me, this seemed ludicrous
29:50because what an awful waste.
29:52I mean, if every species I had studied,
29:55every bird, every fish, every mammal,
29:57had a whole range of inborn behaviour patterns,
30:01then why on earth would we throw those away?
30:04It would be ridiculous.
30:05All human beings, wherever I've been in the world,
30:08and I've now visited, I think it's 90 countries,
30:11you see a mother looking at her baby in the same way.
30:15You see lovers gazing into one another's eyes in the same way.
30:19You see the man shaking his fist angrily in the same way.
30:22And all the way around the world,
30:24you'll find that there is a repertoire, if you like,
30:27of inborn actions that we all share.
30:31Maurice could afford to shrug off the criticism.
30:34The fascination and the outrage translated into spectacular royalties.
30:40It was almost like I was a lottery winner or something,
30:43and I said, now I know what I can do.
30:45I can go off to the Mediterranean and paint.
30:47And for the next five or six years,
30:49I lived in Malta and Cyprus in the Mediterranean, and I painted.
30:55He and Ramona bought a 35-room villa,
30:58entertained generously, got on with some procreation of their own
31:02and generally enjoyed the high life.
31:04Maurice painted in the summer
31:06and added a couple of sequels to The Naked Ape in the winter.
31:10But his lively mind was never going to be satisfied like this indefinitely.
31:15He became fascinated by the variety of gestures and postures
31:18he saw all around him in this Mediterranean culture
31:22and started to collect and catalogue what we now call body language.
31:29CROWD CHANTING
31:35Here in the Mediterranean, about seven years ago,
31:37I was sitting talking with a friend,
31:39and I was pointing out to him the way in which people behave.
31:42I said, look at that woman over there.
31:44She's folding her arms in a rather unusual way.
31:47And that couple over there, the way they're gesticulating
31:50could only come from this part of the world.
31:52And the way that old lady is clasping her hands.
31:55And as I was talking, he said, you know,
31:58you look at people the way a bird watcher looks at birds.
32:02And I said, yes, I suppose, in fact, you could call me a man watcher.
32:07MUSIC PLAYS
32:22Everywhere I went, I was finding that there were these body postures
32:26and gestures and actions which I could classify.
32:29And my publisher came out to see me and he said, how's it going?
32:32Because he was hoping I was going to write another book.
32:35I said, it's going fine, I've reached the eyebrows.
32:39And he said, are you going up or down?
32:42And I said, down.
32:44And at that point, he panicked.
32:55You've got a whole system of hand movements which accompany speech.
33:00But they don't just reflect my emphases,
33:04they also indicate something about the mood that I have as I speak.
33:09And that is done not by the rhythm,
33:12but by the posture of the hand as I gesticulate.
33:15For example, there is the imploring hand, the calming hand,
33:20the precision grip hand, the power grip hand,
33:24there's the hand scissor gesture, and so on.
33:35I'll try and explain some of them using action replay.
33:40There's one called the moustache twiddle.
33:43There it is.
33:45It's a relic of the time when men preened their waxed moustaches
33:48as a sign of arousal.
33:54And that is a local gesture, meaning, you're crazy,
33:57you have a tiny brain, small enough to hold between my thumb and forefinger.
34:03And in a moment, you'll see the gesture of making a scar on the cheek,
34:07meaning he's artful, crafty, a scar-carrying member of the gang.
34:11A lot of people thought it was demeaning,
34:15that anybody should so cynically look at another human being
34:21and be so cool
34:25as simply to put down what he did with his hands.
34:30Or her hands, and how they looked, and to categorise that.
34:35Now, it would be wrong to say that nobody had ever thought of that before.
34:39Anthropologists have, and there are some, certainly,
34:43who are using the same techniques.
34:45But Desmond took them and produced a body,
34:50a way of looking at Homo sapiens in toto,
34:55which was comprehensible to everybody
34:58and very revealing.
35:00To ask people what their rituals mean
35:03is to presuppose that they know the answer.
35:06And one of the interesting things about this kind of study
35:10is that we may well be telling ourselves the wrong answer
35:15about why we do what we do.
35:17Or if we did produce an explanation, it would probably be the wrong one.
35:21The point is that you can't presume
35:24that the reason that we do a thing at this deep level
35:28is anything that we're aware of.
35:30And beginning to observe ourselves in a slightly more distant way
35:35is just one part of the process of getting a scientific explanation.
35:41During the intense phase of pair formation,
35:43there's a great deal of head-touching.
35:45We're very defensive about the head region
35:47and allowing it to be touched is a sign of great trust.
35:50Even when walking, head contact still manages to resurface
35:54from time to time as the couple progress in a semi-embrace.
35:59It took Morris and a team of researchers three years
36:02to do the groundwork on man-watching
36:04and its more serious academic version, gestures.
36:07It took about three minutes for everyone else
36:09to think they could do it too.
36:12I think there was a slight fashion,
36:14particularly in the business community not known for their imagination,
36:18for deciding the new phase for body language in the 80s and 90s
36:22was rather than look at you at a job interview,
36:25they'd think, oh, legs crossed, arms folded defensively,
36:28hands wringing, she's not suitable, never mind her degree.
36:32And I think that became silly business speak for a while
36:36until I imagine people saw sense.
36:41The way people sit down, the way people work in meetings,
36:45the way I'm folding my arms now,
36:48and I think, oh, gosh, maybe I shouldn't be folding my arms,
36:51perhaps I'm not being open.
36:54And, of course, now I don't know what to do with my arms.
36:58Anyway, but that's... Thank you, Desmond.
37:04Man-watching, or people-watching,
37:06as the book was more tactfully retitled in later editions,
37:09demonstrated that Morris had lost
37:11none of his unerring instinct for mass appeal.
37:14It brought him back to Britain in triumph
37:17and into the nation's living rooms.
37:23Ladies and gentlemen, Desmond Morris.
37:25Ladies and gentlemen, Desmond Morris.
37:27Desmond Morris.
37:28Dr Desmond Morris.
37:34Nothing and no-one was beyond the range of the man-watcher.
37:40Now, in a moment, you're going to get really cross
37:43and then you use the symbolic forefinger there
37:46where you're clubbing him over the head with your forefinger.
37:51The raised forefinger is used always as a symbolic club.
37:55He's using his forefinger in another symbolic way
37:57as a stabbing device, so it's forefingers at dawn.
38:01The two of you are having a battle, you see, with your forefingers.
38:03He is stabbing you to death with his
38:05and you are about to club him over the head with yours.
38:07But you've now gone back to oral comfort again.
38:11And there's a curious thing. It may come up...
38:15I don't know whether you did a nose touch in here.
38:17There's a nose touch which people do when their inner thoughts
38:20are beginning to break apart from...
38:22There's the nose touch.
38:28There was a touch of old-style vaudeville about Morris and his pomp.
38:32He loved the limelight and the limelight loved him.
38:35But the science behind people watching was every bit as simple
38:39was every bit as serious as that behind the naked ape.
38:43He learnt his lesson well from Tinbergen and Lorenz
38:47and the other ethologists.
38:51It's... And what's marvellous about it,
38:54it comes from their very detailed attention to human behaviour.
38:59That close observation...
39:04..in all its aspects.
39:06And so often it causes them to see things that the rest of us
39:10either take for granted or that we just ignore by virtue of its familiarity.
39:15Oh, and Ritchie got the rebound.
39:17And here's a chance for Reutz. It's a goal for Leeds.
39:20One of the areas of human behaviour that I'd never studied at all
39:24was sport.
39:26I had a very sporty young son and when he reached the age,
39:30I think he was about ten, he started dragging me to football matches,
39:34which I had never been to before.
39:36And the thing I noticed, putting on my scientist's hat,
39:43was the passion.
39:45Clearly here I was seeing some kind of a ritual
39:49which went way beyond any simple sport.
39:54It was like a male longhouse and there was this incredible arena display
39:59and so I thought it would be interesting to study.
40:03Welcome! Welcome!
40:06For the man-watcher today, the football terraces
40:09provide a tribal display as colourful and as impressive
40:13as anything ever encountered by anthropologists in faraway places.
40:21The most amazing thing about this clapping,
40:24revealed by new research at Oxford,
40:26is that it's synchronised to within one-sixty-fourth of a second.
40:30Not bad for what some people call a disorganised rabble.
40:37Maurice travelled the world, applying his techniques
40:40in an ever-growing, often award-winning catalogue of books and broadcasts.
40:45Was there nothing that could not be explained by evolution?
40:50One of the questions which Maurice's work prompts
40:53is whether all this behavioural diversity that we see in humans,
40:57whether this can be explained in Darwinian terms.
41:00He is really reviving an important claim that Darwin made
41:06in The Descent of Man, where, for example,
41:11Darwin discusses ornamentation among tribespeople.
41:16Why do the Maasai bounce up and down in the way that they do?
41:20Why do people have such ridiculous fashions,
41:23bows through the noses or bustles and so on and so forth?
41:27He says, this is just a kind of a signal
41:31and it's the forces that give rise to it,
41:33the sort of selective forces that give rise to it,
41:36are much the same that give rise to the peacock's wonderful tail.
41:40The great problem with evolutionary theory, as applied to human beings,
41:45is that it presumes that everything about humans
41:49is an expression of something being very adaptive or helpful
41:55back in the primordial swamp.
41:57Now, that's something we can't prove.
41:59So, what's entailed is, you could call it post-hoc functionalism.
42:04What's entailed is saying, everything we see in human beings
42:07must in some way be beneficial to them.
42:10The minute you start to actually think about that,
42:13think of the human beings you know,
42:16and you realise that, of course, an awful lot of things about human beings
42:20are absolutely not beneficial to them.
42:22What's hilarious is the way that Morris' descendants
42:27and his fellow thinkers then scratch around,
42:30desperately trying to come up with, you know,
42:33an evolutionarily advantageous element to this behaviour,
42:37and, of course, they can't.
42:39Or it gets more and more far-fetched.
42:42The fact is that human beings are screwy, you know,
42:46and they're really weird,
42:48and evolution, I don't think, can begin to explain that.
42:54The whole Desmond Morris thesis, I think, spectacularly breaks down
42:58when we try to explain, well, impossible task, really,
43:02why people create beautiful objects,
43:05why they create great cathedrals, for example.
43:08Everything, including spirituality, sense of the numinous,
43:12sense of all the sacred,
43:15everything is reduced repetitively, I think, turgidly,
43:20to social function.
43:22And the emphasis on function, purpose, functionality
43:27is very narrow and very utilitarian,
43:30and excludes, really, from consideration,
43:33vast oceanic depths of human experience.
43:36MUSIC PLAYS
43:44Times change.
43:46In the sharp-suited, aggressive 1980s and 90s,
43:49there were plenty who were quick to read into Morris' work
43:52that what was good enough for the animal kingdom,
43:55red in tooth and claw, was good enough for us.
44:00It's very interesting when you trace the lineage of ideas from Morris
44:04through EO Will, you know, sociobiology, and then Dawkins,
44:09that all these ideas are equating the natural
44:16with the status quo social order,
44:19in which, actually, you must have ranks and you must have hierarchies
44:22and there are going to be winners and there's going to be losers
44:25and there's going to be lots...
44:27Let's have lots of natural history programmes, which very subtly...
44:30Of course, David Attenborough never, for one moment,
44:33would have thought that his natural history programmes
44:36were in any way politically motivated,
44:38nor was Desmond Morris, or certainly not Dawkins,
44:41politically motivated by presenting their view of humans as animals.
44:45But the point is that in the history of political ideas,
44:50it goes back to the late 19th century and Herbert Spencer,
44:54that the right-wing, the neoconservatives, pick up on this idea
44:57and say, hey, this is the natural order of things.
45:00Humans will...
45:02Like you see the lion going and chasing up on the wildebeest.
45:09And that's exactly how it should be.
45:18People have, throughout the decades, twisted Desmond Morris' work
45:22to suit whatever is the fashion of the times.
45:25And in the 80s, with the film Wall Street,
45:28with the terrible Gordon Gekko,
45:30and the idea that it was the thrusting generation,
45:33the mean generation, and that it was entirely natural,
45:36because it was animalistic behaviour
45:38and we were actually meant to be aggressive and not care.
45:42And actually, when you read Desmond Morris properly,
45:45even the most cursory glance will show that, time and again,
45:48he comes back to the reasons why people don't behave like that,
45:53which is because it just simply doesn't work.
45:55And he says that a society that is built on those lines,
45:58it has its own destruction built into it, if you like,
46:02that it just won't survive.
46:04I always envisaged us as being incredibly friendly,
46:08cooperative and helpful, not because we were told to be like that
46:12by religion or by politicians.
46:14They take all the credit for...
46:16It's fascinating the way in which anyone who is involved
46:19in official religion or official politics,
46:21they're the ones who take the credit
46:23for people being good and kind and nice.
46:25It's rubbish. We are, by nature, biologically good and kind and nice.
46:29And, of course, when we overpopulate and we get overcrowded
46:33and we get stressed, like any other animal, we become violent.
46:40The point is, nature does not make the moral decisions for us
46:43and we can't say,
46:45we must stand back and not interfere and let nature get on with it.
46:49Our understanding of nature is understanding the raw material
46:52and if we want to make that raw material act better,
46:56we have got to do as we do in any other part of science
46:59and say, let's understand these creatures we're working with
47:02as well as we possibly can
47:04and then let's invent a kind of society
47:07that will get the best out of them.
47:11At street level, Morris's ideas were absorbed
47:14along with the other lessons of an increasingly media-aware society.
47:18Not just every gesture, but every label, every logo
47:22and who was wearing them was automatically scanned for meaning.
47:28Later works like body-watching, man-watching,
47:32in the late 20th century, in the Morris oeuvre,
47:37does, I think, contribute to the overwhelming feature of our culture
47:43as a spectatorial delight,
47:46when we look at things that go on in the world outside of us
47:51rather than participating in them.
47:54And that quality of the roving eye in Morris,
47:59if I can express it in that way,
48:01is a very important aspect of his appeal.
48:06I think the way that our human-animal behaviour
48:09is evolving with the cult of the celebrity
48:13is actually very interesting.
48:15That's taking Desmond Morris's stage further, if you like,
48:19and actually holding up certain people, celebrities,
48:23and wanting to look at them
48:26and wanting them to do certain things.
48:29There is something animalistic about that.
48:33There is something animalistic about the flocks of boyars
48:37that will assemble around one of these creatures
48:40and then they look not so much like the biggest figure,
48:44but they look like the prey in a sort of a way.
48:49It was an age that was tailor-made for Morris,
48:52if not at least in part, by him.
48:54But for once, his popular touch deserted him.
48:57Some years ago, a Dutchman got in touch with me
49:00and said that he'd got an idea for a television series
49:04and he wanted me to come in with him and do it.
49:07The idea was to put a group of people into a house
49:10and have dozens of cameras watching their every move.
49:14And he wanted me involved
49:16because of my studies of human behaviour, of body language.
49:19He said it would be fascinating
49:21because you could watch the body language of these ordinary people.
49:25And then he mentioned that it was also going to be a game show
49:29in which they were going to be voted off.
49:31And I said, no, I don't really want to go.
49:33I wouldn't mind if it was just a pure study,
49:35but if you're going to start turning it into a game show,
49:38then I'm not interested. Silly me.
49:40Hello!
49:42CHEERING
49:44And welcome to...
49:51THEY SING
49:53Spencer, you have been evicted.
49:55Please leave the Big Brother house.
49:57My luck is up!
49:59Spencer, you have been evicted. Please leave the Big Brother house.
50:02CHEERING
50:04From my point of view, I see reality television shows
50:07in a completely different way from other people
50:09because it gives me a chance to sit in front of a television screen
50:13and watch human behaviour.
50:14Well, I can go and do it in the street, of course,
50:16but with these people, you can follow them through a long period of time.
50:20So it has some value for me.
50:22That doesn't mean to say it's good television.
50:24That's another issue altogether.
50:27Science, no less than television,
50:29had been pushing back its own frontiers.
50:32Breakthroughs in the understanding of how our genes,
50:35our internal blueprints,
50:37are passed on from one generation to the next
50:39had sparked off a revolution in evolutionary studies.
50:44The reason why adaptation happens,
50:46the reason why organisms do what they do,
50:48it's not for the good of the species but for the good of individuals.
50:51Or, even more radically, for the good of the genes they contain.
50:57And somewhere between Morris' The Naked Ape
51:01and Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, that transformation happens.
51:05The Naked Ape prepared the ground in the sense that
51:08it treats the human animal as something that evolved.
51:11And that, of course, is true,
51:14and ever since Darwin, we've known that.
51:18He did it eloquently and in a spirited fashion.
51:23To that extent, he could be said to prepare the ground
51:26for any kind of modern evolutionary approach to humanity.
51:30But the details are rather different.
51:34Morris had, in a sense, ceased to evolve.
51:37Many of his early evolutionary insights
51:39had been superseded by The Selfish Gene.
51:42His careful people-watching had been superseded
51:44by a whole generation of far less conscientious style-watchers
51:48who had, by now, forgotten who started it all.
51:51His books were still selling, but in television terms in the UK,
51:55he had moved from science to light entertainment.
51:59When you're strolling along near the body below,
52:02even with an independent air,
52:04it feels right to have a little dog like this by your side.
52:07I think he's taking you for a promenade, isn't he? He is.
52:10There's a great secret about the poodle,
52:12but I'll be telling you about that later on.
52:14Hello, and welcome to The Naked Ape.
52:16We're going to have a little walk,
52:18and we're going to have a little chat,
52:20and we're going to have a little chat,
52:22and we're going to have a little chat,
52:24and we're going to have a little chat,
52:26and we're going to have a little chat,
52:28and we're going to have a little chat.
52:30We'll talk about that later on.
52:32Hello, and welcome to the Almonds Road Show from Paris in the Spring.
52:35Everybody thinks about Desmond that he's watching your body language.
52:39He's not. That's a little segment, and that's the whole essence.
52:43He's like an orange, Desmond Morris.
52:45Little segments, art segments, horse-racing segments,
52:48football segments, people segments,
52:50but all in this great Renaissance man.
52:53Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.
52:57You see, and immediately the chimpanzee put its arm round you
53:01and greeted you, and that greeting sound,
53:05oh, oh, oh, oh, is one that you'll hear
53:08whenever chimpanzees are meeting one another.
53:11A lot of people asked why he spent, you know, a great man, a genius,
53:15as I often call him, a genius, wasted time.
53:19I think David Attenborough said,
53:21you spend your time doing something ridiculous, you know, small like that.
53:25But, you see, he doesn't mind about things like that.
53:29This is why he doesn't mind small people.
53:32His message is always that you can always learn something from anybody.
53:37I think here he was, he was a man of the media.
53:40I mean, he was a best-selling author, and is a best-selling author,
53:45and he was then a bigger personality on television than he is now.
53:50And those two things go together very nicely,
53:53and it's difficult to retreat into anonymity.
53:58And the big series which Desmond had made
54:04had more or less come to an end, I think.
54:07He didn't have a natural subject to go on,
54:10and he was sorry, I think, to lose the celebrity that came with that.
54:18What do you think is the typical French dog?
54:22I would say the typical French dog is a bastard.
54:26The bastard? The mongrel?
54:28Yes, the mongrel.
54:36The top dog out of 16,000 entries.
54:39That's quite an achievement.
54:41It certainly is, and so it is for all the organisation with all these breeds.
54:45Very good indeed.
54:47Goodbye until next week. Goodbye now.
54:50The Animals Roadshow and its successors on ITV
54:53kept Morris on screen for ten years.
54:56Eventually, in 1994, he made the series he should have made
54:59of the naked ape in the 1960s.
55:02But although The Human Animal won awards in America,
55:05on the BBC it had to be subtitled A Personal View.
55:11I'm a zoologist, and since man is an animal,
55:14I can see no reason why my work and also in this series,
55:18I shouldn't study this particular species
55:20in the same way that I've studied many other animals in the past.
55:24And the secret is patient observation.
55:35Morris likes to watch, but he isn't a great one for looking back.
55:39When he was offered the chance recently to revise The Naked Ape,
55:43all he did was update the size of the world population
55:46from three billion to six billion.
55:49He continues to enjoy the trappings of his popular success,
55:53spending a lot of time cruising the world with Ramona.
55:57But the scientist in him still wonders what might have been.
56:03If I have any regrets, it's because I have been too childlike, perhaps.
56:10You know, a child loves a new toy, and I love a new project.
56:15I'm always looking for some new aspect of human behaviour to study.
56:20You could say that because people think of me as the body language expert,
56:24that I have become an expert in that field.
56:27But then you see, to me, my regret is that I never completed
56:31my encyclopaedia of human actions.
56:35That's what I should have done.
56:38And I started... I'm still working on it.
56:41I'm still working on it.
56:43And I still have...
56:46I'm still collecting gestures and postures and actions all the time.
56:51I've never stopped working on it.
56:55But I doubt if I'll ever complete it, and that is a bit of a regret.
56:59It may be that his earlier work will yet become his monument.
57:03A younger generation is now beginning to reconsider it.
57:07Should we still study humans as animals?
57:10Absolutely.
57:12Our animal nature never goes away.
57:14And for all that Morris and people like him have done,
57:17we know so little about it.
57:19We're only just at the beginning of the serious social sciences.
57:24I think for a long time they were, if you like, at the kind of Morris level.
57:28People had made a breakthrough into thinking of ourselves
57:32as the kind of thing which was susceptible to scientific investigation
57:36like other things.
57:38But I think until we had the genetic advance on Darwinism,
57:42there was a limit to how far we could go.
57:44What we have to do is actually go back to The Naked Ape.
57:49Read it again.
57:51Go back to not just The Naked Ape but actually to all of Morris' work.
57:55Read it again and look at all those behaviours, those traits,
58:00those peculiarities which he has documented in such exquisite detail
58:05and begin to ask, well, now, exactly how does that work
58:09and where does it come from,
58:11using the tools that have been given us in the new century
58:17by genomics and neurobiology.
58:24Our Desmond Morris night continues with Parkinson next on BBC4.
58:35.