Desmond Morris

I knew, I knew.

Everybody on the board knew recession was coming.

As a child growing up during World War II...

It occurred to me that human beings were a very odd species because, as far as I could tell, when you grew up, what you had to do was to blow one another to pieces.

So I became more and more obsessed with watching animals.

And to cut a long story short, I spent the next 20 years of my life as a zoologist studying animal behavior.

But then, having gone from fish and birds and insects to mammals and eventually to chimpanzees, I decided that I ought to have a look at this rather strange species, human being, and I thought, shall I try something which is a little bit outrageous, but I'm going to try and look at people in exactly the same way as I look at other animals.

In fact, my thesis when I was at Oxford had chapter headings which were just exactly the same as the chapter headings in The Naked Ape, except that my thesis was on the stickleback.

And now I was studying the human species, but I had the same chapter headings.

And I treated human beings exactly as I treated sticklebacks and looked at their reproductive behavior, their feeding behavior, their fighting behavior, and so on.

I thought this was an objective way of studying human beings.

I was, in my mind, elevating us to the level of my beloved animals.

But other people took a rather dim view of what I was doing and thought I was denigrating human beings by reducing them to the level of animals.

And so I was astonished at the reaction to this book.

I couldn't believe the anger it caused.

I'd called us naked apes not to insult us, but simply because if I was looking at this species for the first time,

And I said, what on earth is it?

Then, obviously, it's rather like an ape, but it's got no fur on its body, so I called it the naked ape.

It was a logical step to take.