Reddit reviews The Naked Ape: A Zoologist's Study of the Human Animal

Hi, r/AskScience! It's my first time here, even though I'm a science enthusiast. Hope this is OK as a top-level reply:

I love the question, and I can think of no better address to it than from Desmond Morris' The Naked Ape. I'll largely be quoting directly since I feel he makes the case best, and I have to warn you there will be a lot of text. Hopefully you'll find it as engaging as I did. Here is some briefing on his point:

Morris describes laughter as a part of our broader evolution towards improved communication, the need for which stems even from the coordinated hunt; the value of which need not be mentioned. This, along with our success with Neoteny (the evolution in a species toward staying in an infantile/juvenile stage for a longer portion of the lifetime, taking juvenile traits into adulthood, and resulting in a longer state of parenthood) would explain a need to communicate more effectively with our mothers (+ fathers + tribes.)

Morris approaches laughter from the closely related topic of crying, (Chapter 3, "Rearing" starting from p. 117:)

> Crying is not only the earliest mood-signal we give, it is also the most basic. Smiling and laughing are unique and rather specialized signals, but crying we share with thousand of other species. Virtually all mammals (not to mention birds) give vent to high-pitched screams, squeaks, shrieks or squeals when they are frightened or in pain. Amongst the higher mammals, where facial expressions have evolved as visual signalling devices, these messages of alarm are accompanied by characteristic 'fear-faces.' Whether performed by a young animal or an adult, these responses indicate that something is seriously wrong. The juvenile alerts its parents, the adult alerts other members of its social group.

Morris describes some things that make us cry including pain, hunger, "some strange and unfamiliar stimulus," Crying evokes a protective response in parents, including the immediate closing of distance and checking the infant for sources of pain. Importantly, "the parental response continues until the signal is switched off (and in this respect it differs fundamentally from the smiling and laughing patterns.)" After further description, he continues,


> I have described this pattern in some detail, despite its familiarity, because it is from this that our specialized signals of laughing and smiling have evolved. When someone says 'they laughed until they cried', he is commenting on this relationship, but in evolutionary terms it is the other way around- we cried until we laughed. How did this come about? To start with, it is important to realize how similar crying and laughing are, as response patterns. Like crying, laughing involves muscular tension, opening of the mouth, pulling back of the lips, and exaggerated breathing with intense expirations. At high intensities it also includes reddening of the face and watering of the eyes. But the vocalizations are less rasping and not so high-pitched. Above all, they are shorter and follow one another more rapidly. It is as though the long wail of the crying infant has become segmented, chopped up into little pieces, and at the same time has grown smoother and lower.


> It appears that the laughing reaction evolved out of the crying one, as a secondary signal, in the following way. I said earlier that crying is present at birth, but laughing does not appear until the third or fourth month. Its arrival coincides with the development of parental recognition. It may be a wise child that knows its own father, but it is a laughing child that knows its own mother. Before it has learnt to identify its mother's face and to distinguish her from other adults, a baby may gurgle and burble, but it does not laugh. What hapens when it starts to single out its own mother is that it also begins to grow afraid of other, strange adults. At two months any old face will do, all friendly adults are welcome. But now its fears of the world around it are beginning to mature and anyone unfamiliar is liable to upset it and start it crying. (Later on it will soon learn that certain other adults can also be rewarding and will lose its fear of them but this is then done selectively on the basis of personal recognition.) As a result of this process of becoming imprinted on the mother, the infant may find itself placed in a strange conflict. If the mother does something that startles it, she gives it two sets of opposing signals. One set says, 'I am your mother- your personal protector; there is nothing to fear,' and the other set says, 'Look out, there's something frightening here.' This conflict could not arise before the mother was known as an individual, because if she had done something startling, she would simply be the source of a frightening stimulus at the moment and nothing more. But now she can give the double signal: "There's danger but there's no danger'. Or, to put it another way: "There may appear to be danger, but because it is coming from me, you do not need to take it seriously.' The outcome of this is that the child gives a response that is half a crying reaction and half a parental-recognition gurgle. The magic combination produces a laugh. (Or, rather, it did, way back in evolution. It has since become fixed and fully developed as a separate, distinct response in its own right.)


> So the laugh says, 'I recognize that a danger is not real,' and it conveys this message to the mother. The mother can now play with the baby quite vigorously without making it cry. The earliest causes of laughter in infants are parental games of 'peek-a-boo', hand-clapping, rhythmic knee-dropping, and lifting high. Later, tickling plays a major role, but not until after the sixth month. These are all shock stimuli, but performed by the 'safe' protector. Children soon learn to provoke them- by play-hiding, for example, so that they will experience the 'shock' of discovery, or play-fleeing so that they will be caught.


> Laughter therefore becomes a play signal, a sign that the increasingly dramatic inter-actions between the child and the parent can continue and develop. If they become too frightening or painful, then, of course, the reaction can switch over into crying and immediately re-stimulate the protective response. This system enables the child to expand its exploration of its bodily capacities and physical properties of the world around it.


> Other animals also have special play signals... The chimpanzee, for instance, has a characteristic play-face, and a soft play-grunt which is the equivalent of our laughter... As chimpanzees grow, the significance of the play signal dwindles even more, whereas ours expands and acquires still greater importance in everyday life. The naked ape, even as an adult, is a playful ape. It is all part of his exploratory nature. He is constantly pushing things to their limit, trying to startle himself, to shock himself without getting hurt, and then signalling his relief with peals of laughter.

There you have it. It gave me a lot to chew on, at least. The next paragraph is also interesting:

> Laughing at someone can also, of course, become a potent social weapon among older children and adults. It is doubly insulting because it indicates that he is both frighteningly odd and at the same time not worth taking seriously. The professional comedian deliberately adopts this social role and is paid large sums of money by audiences who enjoy the reassurance of checking their group normality against his assumed abnormality.

So basically, surprise/fear + 'it's okay' = humor, as reflected in its analogous expression in laughter. What do you think?

PS. If you liked that, you'll like the rest of the book. It's one of my favorites on evolution.

>It's the struggle to give women the same rights and opportunities as men.

Feminism centers around "patriarchy" and such unfalsifiable hypotheses which are completely unacademic and unscientific, and wholly ignore biological, economic, social, and various such developments in favor a simplistic model of "female oppression". The movement has caused more harm than good both in legislation and in perpetuating false notions. If it were solely the idea that men and women ought to be equal, its sole existence as an ism warrants an explanation.

And I had this argument a billion times. As much as I advocate gender equality, feminism is not something I can adhere too. It is not the beacon of all hope that everyone ought to rally around.

Go read a book that isn't written by a feminist or about feminism. The Naked Ape by David Morrison should be a good start. Lets not act like everyone who reads feminist literature instantly becomes converted, as evidenced by the many in academia, notably anti-feminist "feminists" who have considered it to be the worst thing to happen to women.

Check out the book "The Naked Ape". It examines humans as the animals which we are.

Desmond Morris's The Naked Ape.

I'm currently reading The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris, so am naturally an expert on human behavior. (In all seriousness though, it's a fascinating book.)

Anyhow, I was reading the other day that animals (including humans) will often present themselves sexually to a dominant male in order to dampen his aggression toward them. It is typically females presenting to males, but not always. This occurs even among pair-bonded species when both parties know that copulation isn't actually going to take place.

So, early human female bats her eyelashes and dominant male doesn't attack her over stealing a bit of his deer carcass. Modern human female bats her eyelashes and dominant male doesn't give her a ticket for speeding.

A quick browse of my bookshelf and the ones that jumped out at me... some nonfiction, some fiction... some light, some heavy...

The Culture of Contentment by John Galbraith

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Pimp by Iceberg Slim

The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris

Bloom County Babylon by Berkeley Breathed

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

The Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo

Turned On: A Biography of Henry Rollins by James Parker

Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

Beyond that, my most prized book is my hardback Norton Anthology of English Lit (2nd vol - the 'modern' stuff).

Thanks for the trip down memory lane! I'm def curling up with a good one when I hit the hay!

Also read some of the literature on Evolutionary Psychology. The Naked Ape, The Red Queen, and Sex At Dawn are all excellent.

Not redpill specifically, but read Parasite Rex if you want to be totally freaked out. Learn about wasps that literally mind control their prey, and a parasite in cat feces that turns men into violent idiots and women into sluts.

"The Naked Ape" - Desmond Morris 1967
https://www.amazon.com/Naked-Ape-Zoologists-Study-Animal/dp/0385334303

The human ape is the only ape not covered in thick hair. Chimpanzees and orangutans may go in the water but they don't do it as a form of leisure. Orangutans will go to extremes to not get wet.
https://primatology.wordpress.com/files/2008/04/orangutan-tool-use-fishing.jpg

Bonobo aren't afraid of water and will play in it.
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/files/2013/01/01_BZ4zUP.jpg

The big difference is the human ape is the only ape that enjoys being in ocean water. Almost all primates avoid ocean water. The hypothesis is that long periods in ocean water resulted in the human ape losing body hair.
https://geminiresearchnews.com/2017/07/human-evolution-in-the-sea-at-bioko/

The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris is like an owner's manual for a human. I remember reading in the 80s and it changed my view on how to interact with other humans.

http://www.amazon.ca/Naked-Ape-Zoologists-Study-Animal/dp/0385334303

http://www.amazon.com/Naked-Ape-Zoologists-Study-Animal/dp/0385334303/

This may look odd but it makes sense to me, Desmond Morris looks at humans and studies it like any other animal. You can argue afterwards that mankind is not separate from he rest of the animal world after all and therefor not 'special' or 'elevated' but just another inhabitant of the earth doing its cycle.

Yes! I think you may be referring to The Naked Ape! A very interesting book!

http://www.amazon.com/Naked-Ape-Zoologists-Study-Animal/dp/0385334303

We're naked, too. Naked Apes.

this is the explanation I got while reading The Naked Ape

Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan

The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond

The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris