Desmond Morris, Who Looked at Humans and Saw Apes, Dies at 98

There is a particular kind of courage in saying the obvious. In 1967, when Desmond Morris published The Naked Ape, the obvious thing he said was this: human beings are animals. Not metaphorically. Not as a rhetorical provocation. As a zoological fact, to be examined with the same dispassionate interest one might bring to a study of the common chimpanzee or the herring gull.

The book sold millions. It was translated into dozens of languages. It was controversial in exactly the way that books about sex and aggression and status tended to be controversial in the 1960s -- which is to say, loudly, in newspapers, and mostly by people who had not read it. Morris died Monday at 98, at home in Oxford, survived by his son Jason, who described his father's life as "a lifetime of exploration, curiosity and creativity." It is a good description. It is also the kind of description that barely scratches what the man actually was.

Morris trained as a zoologist at Birmingham and Oxford. He curated mammals at the London Zoo. He hosted Zoo Time, one of the stranger and more instructive television programs of the 1960s. But he was also, with some seriousness, a surrealist painter -- a friend of Joan Miro, a student of the tradition that believed the unconscious was a country worth mapping. His late book The Lives of the Surrealists collected what he knew of that world, and it read like the account of a man who had been taking careful notes for decades.

What interests me, sitting with the news of his death, is not the controversy or the sales figures. It is the consistency of the curiosity. Here was a man who looked at a gorilla's behavior and then looked at a boardroom meeting and found the same structures. Who asked, without sentimentality, what we were. Who suspected the answer was not particularly flattering, and said so plainly.

We live in a moment that has some difficulty with plainness. Perhaps that is why Morris's books -- The Naked Ape, Intimate Behavior, The Human Zoo -- still read as slightly bracing. Not because they are correct in every detail -- science does not work that way -- but because the posture they adopt, the willingness to be unsentimental about one's own species, remains its own form of honesty.

He was 98. He painted until the end. What more, really, do you ask of a life?