"At twenty a man is a peacock, at thirty a lion, at forty a camel, at fifty a serpent, at sixty a dog, at seventy an ape, at eighty a nothing at all." BALTASAR GRACIAN
By Alex P. Vidal
NEW YORK CITY -- The book that makes some of us feel embarrassed about our animal selves rolled off the press in the year when Bolivian guerrilla leader Che Guevara was captured; and when The Beatles released the album "Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band."
The year when one of the Iloilo Mountain Tigers' longest-serving members known in Iloilo today as "Mr. Bean" was born.
I'm referring to Desmond Morris' sensational worldwide bestseller, The Naked Ape, described by Saturday Review as "a startlingly novel idea, brilliantly executed."
No less than Morris himself, the author, who formerly was the Curator of mammals at London Zoo, admits that in dealing with the fundamental problems of the naked ape, "he realized that he ran the risk of offending a number of people."
"There are some who will prefer not to contemplate their animal selves. They may consider that I have degraded our species by discussing it in crude animal terms," writes Morris.
"I can only assure them that this is not my intention. There are others who will resent any zoological invasion of their specialist arena. But I believe that this approach can be of great value and that, whatever its shortcomings, it will throw now (and in some ways unexpected) light on the complex nature if our extraordinary species."
SCIENCE
Morris explains that his book was intended to popularize and demystify science.
"There are one hundred and ninety-three living species of monkeys and apes," Morris alleges. "One hundred and ninety-two of them are covered with hair. The exception is a naked ape self-named Homo sapiens. The unusual and highly successful species spends a great deal of time examining his higher motives and an equal amount of time studiously ignoring his fundamental ones. He is proud that he has the biggest brain of all the primates, but attempts to conceal the fact that he also has the biggest penis, preferring to accord this honor falsely to the mighty gorilla. He is an intensely vocal, acutely exploratory, over-crowded ape, and it is high time we examined his basic behavior."
"To read Desmond Morris on the sex habits of the naked ape is disconcerting, to say the least" observed the Saturday Review. "Here the detail is specific and clinical...and the naked ape comes out of it looking very animal indeed...you read on with the mixture of discovery and embarrassment...an enlightening, entertaining, disturbing, discomforting, ego-shrinking experience."
CREATURE
The book tells about man as "a creature who can write immortal poetry, raise giant cities, aim for the stars, build an atomic bomb--but he is also an animal, a relative of the apes--a naked ape, in fact."
The Naked Ape, serialized in the Daily Mirror newspaper and has been translated into 23 languages, depicts human behavior as largely evolved to meet the challenges of prehistoric life as a hunter-gatherer (see nature versus nurture). The book was so named because out of 193 species of monkeys and apes only man is not covered in hair.
Morris made a number of claims in the book naming man as "the sexiest primate alive".
He further claims that our fleshy ear-lobes, which are unique to humans, are erogenous zones, the stimulation of which can cause orgasm in both males and females.
Morris further states that the more rounded shape of human female breasts means they are mainly a sexual signalling device rather than simply for providing milk for infants.
EVOLUTION
He also attempts to frame human behavior in the context of evolution, but his explanations failed to convince academics because they were based on a teleological (goal-oriented) understanding of evolution.
For example, Morris writes that the intense human pair bond evolved so that men who were out hunting could trust that their mates back home were not having sex with other men, and that sparse body hair evolved because the "nakedness" helped intensify pair bonding by increasing tactile pleasure.
Morris criticizes some psychiatrists and psycho-analysts that "have stayed nearer home and have concentrated on clinical studies of mainstream specimens. Much of their earlier material, although not suffering from the weakness of the anthropological information, also has an unfortunate bias."
Sexually the naked ape finds himself today in a somewhat confusing situation, Morris explains.
"As a primate he is pulled one way, as a carnivore by adoption he is pulled another, and as a member of an elaborate civilized community he is pulled yet another."
"Men can not afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature directly, but only with the side of his eye. He must look through and beyond her." HENRY DAVID THOREAU
By Alex P. Vidal
What is the future of man?
Imaginative naturalist, Dr. Loren Eiseley, admits in The Immense Journey there were days when she finds herself "unduly pessimistic" about the future of man.
"Indeed, I will confess that there have been occasions when I swore I would never again make the study of time a profession," she explains. "My walls are lined with books expounding its mysteries, my hands have been split and raw with grubbing into the quicklime of its waste bins and hidden crevices. I have stared so much at death that I can recognize the lingering personalities in the faces of skulls and feel accompanying affinities and repulsions."
She says one such skull lies in the lockers of a great metropolitan museum. It is labeled simply: Strandlooper, South Africa.
LONGER
"I have never looked longer into any human face than I have upon the features of that skull. I come there often, drawn in spite of myself. It is a face that would lend reality to the fantastic tale of our childhood," Eiseley adds. "There is a hint of Well's Time Machine folk in it--those pathetic, childlike people whom Wells pictures as haunting earth's autumnal cities in the far future of the dying planet."
Yet the skull has not been spirited back to us through future eras by a time machine, according to her describing it as "a thing, instead of the millennial past. It is a caricature of modern man, not by reason of its primitiveness but, startlingly, because of a modernity outreaching his own. It constitutes, in fact, a mysterious prophecy and warning."
For the very moment in which students of humanity have been sketching their concept of the man of the future, that being has already come, and lived, and passed away, explains Eiseley.
CURIOUS
"We men of today are insatiably curious about ourselves and desperately in need of reassurance. Beneath our boisterous self-confidence is fear--a growing fear of the future we are in the process of creating," she explains. "In such a mood we turn the pages of our favorite magazine and, like as not, come straight upon a description of the man of the future."
She suggests that the descriptions are not pessimistic; they always, with sublime confidence, involve just one variety of mankind--our own--and they are always subtly flattering.
"In fact, a distinguished colleague of mine who was adept at this kind of prophecy once allowed a somewhat etherealized version of his own lofty brow to be used as an illustration of what the man of the future was to look like. Even the bald spot didn't matter--all the men of the future were so bald, anyway," Eiseley writes.
SCHOLARS
In the minds of many scholars, she points out, a process of "foetalization" is one of the chief mechanisms by which man of today has sloughed off his ferocious appearance of a million years ago, prolonged his childhood, and increased the size of his brain. "Foetalization" or "pedomorphism," as it is termed, means simply the retention, into adult life, of bodily characters which at some earlier stage of evolutionary history were actually only infantile. Such traits were rapidly lost as the animal attained maturity, she observes.
"If we examine the life history of one of the existing great apes and compare its development with that of man," Eiseley explains, "we observe that the infantile stage of both man and ape are far more similar than the two will be in maturity."
At birth, according to her, we have seen, the brain of the gorilla is close to the size of that of the human infant. Both newborn gorilla and human child are much more alike, facially, than they will ever be in adult life because the gorilla infant will, in the course of time, develop an enormously powerful and protrusive muzzle. She says the sutures of his skull will close early; his brain will grow very little more.
BRAIN
By contrast, she adds, human brain growth will first spurt and then grow steadily over an extended youth. Cranial sutures will remain open into adult life. Teeth will be later in their eruption. Furthermore, she elaborates, the great armored skull and the fighting characters of the anthropoid male will be held in abeyance.
Eiseley says modern man retains something of his youthful gaiety and nimble mental habits far into adult life. The great male anthropoids, by contrast, lose the playful friendliness of youth. In the end the massive skull houses a small, savage, and often morose brain.
"It is doubtful whether our thick-skulled forerunners viewed life very pleasantly in their advancing years," she observes.
