“The Blind Watchmaker” (1986).
 
The zoologist Desmond Morris has a secret life as a Surrealist painter. It’s a career he has quietly followed alongside his better-known day job as a scientist and author of books like The Naked Ape and The Human Zoo.

Morris has been a Surrealist artist for over seventy years. In his early twenties, he exhibited with Joan Miró. He managed to sell a couple of paintings while Miro sold none. Inspired by Dali and Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, Morris made two Surrealist films with his wife Ramona called Time Flower and Butterfly in 1950. When he failed to sell any work at his third exhibition, Morris made the sensible decision to study zoology at the University of Birmingham in 1951. He went on to earn a doctorate for his work on the reproductive behavior of the ten-spined stickleback.

But Morris never gave up on his passion for art. By day he was a zoologist, by night he quietly continued to paint. He even managed to bring his two passions together during an investigation into the “picture-making abilities” of chimpanzees. Morris exhibited a selection of the chimp’s colorful canvases at the ICA in London.

At a party in the 1960s, Morris met publisher Tom Maschler. He told him Maschler about his idea to write “a zoology of human beings and not even use the term human beings”:

Instead I’d write it as if I was an alien who had come to this planet and seen this extraordinary ape which doesn’t have any fur on its body.

It took Maschler three years to get Morris to write this book, which eventually became The Naked Ape.  Published in 1967, The Naked Ape has been translated into 23 languages and has never been out of print.  It made Morris rich and incredibly famous.

When he published his follow-up book The Human Zoo in 1969, Morris was wealthy enough to take time out and concentrate on his career as an artist.
 

The books that made Desmond Morris world famous.
 
Morris’s Surrealist canvases depict strange fleshy elongated figures which he calls “biomorphs.” He claims these biomorphs and his interest in Surrealism were inspired by three key events in his life. Firstly, the gift of a microscope that allowed him to see the strange microscopic world around us. Secondly, a medical book containing illustrations of intestines. Thirdly, an incident in his childhood when he saw war dead laid out on tables in a mortuary, their entrails unfurled, their bodies torn to pieces. Morris notes his painting “The Sentinel” harks back to this memory.
 
See some of Desmond Morris’s paintings and an excellent documentary on his art, after the jump…
 

I have to admit the question of why humankind is so hairless compared to most other mammals has crossed my mind, but it never occurred to me that Science itself would not actually know:

For most of the past century it was assumed that the problem had been solved. Raymond Dart, the anthropologist who recognised the significance of the famous Taung baby’s skull in 1924, began promoting the idea that while the apes’ ancestors stayed in the trees, our ancestors moved onto the open plains. There the males became hunters, got overheated in the chase, and shed body hair to cool down.

The problem with that theory is that no other mammal has resorted to this method of cooling down. Hair insulates animals against the sun by day as well as against the cold by night. The hominid females are not thought to have become overheated hunters, so they would merely have suffered the downsides of hairlessness - being cold at night, more prone to abrasions, and having no fur to provide a handhold for infants to cling to. Yet they ended up even more hairless than the males.

Dart’s solution, while the front-runner for more than 50 years, failed to win everyone over. In 1970, Russell W. Newman from the US Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine argued in Human Biology that hominids could never have evolved on the plains with their “unique trio of conditions: hypotrichosis corpus, hyperhydrosis, and polydipsia”. In other words, too little hair, too much sweat, and a need to drink little but often. Newman’s paper ran counter to contemporary beliefs and was largely ignored.

William Montagna, the most indefatigable student of primate skin of his generation and then at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center, regretfully reported in 1972 that after years of research his investigations had “failed to explain the unique feature of man’s skin - his almost complete nakedness. We are left with the major objective… unattained.”

And it keeps going. Many intelligent people and big name scientists have come up with plausible sounding theories and they all get shot down, sooner of later. The fact is, they really don’t know!

Speaking of Naked Apes, here is zoologist Desmond Morris interviewing Kate Bush on his BBC talk show in 1980:

New Scientist: Why are we the naked ape?