Exploring the Spectrum' Life Story Interviews Desmond Morris ...

NATIONAL LIFE STORIES ‘Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum’ Life Story Interviews Desmond Morris Interviewed by Paul Merchant C1672/16

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The British Library

National Life Stories

Interview Summary Sheet

Title Page

Ref no:

C1672/16

Collection title:

Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum’ Life Story Interviews

Interviewee’s surname:

Morris Title: Mr

Interviewee’s forename:

Desmond Sex: Male

Occupation:

Ethologist, writer, broadcaster, artist

Date and place of birth:

24th January 1928, Purton, Wiltshire, UK

Mother’s occupation: Father’s occupation: author

Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): 15/12/15 (tracks1-2). Location of interview:

Interviewee's home in Oxford

Name of interviewer:

Paul Merchant

Type of recorder:

Marantz PMD661

Recording format :

audio file 2 WAV 24 bit 48 kHz 2-channel

Total no. of tracks

2 Mono or stereo: Stereo

Total Duration:

2 hrs.42 min. 33 sec.

Additional material:

Copyright/Clearance:

OPEN

Interviewer’s comments:

Dwesmond Morris Page 1

C1672/16Track 1

[Track 1]

In the autobiography, which we’ve just been talking about, you tend to recall particular including

traumatic events that happened in childhood.

Mm.

So… And they’re very well described. And so, what I wanted to get a little bit of today is, more of the

sort of, everyday life that isn’t there.

Yes.

So, one of the sort of traumatic moments is the plane crash for example, the traumatic plane crash and

so on.

Yes.

So, I wonder whether you could tell me more about sort of, the more ordinary, everyday time spent with

your father as a child that you remember.

Yes. I had a very happy childhood. I wasn’t aware of the Great Depression that was going on at the

time, I was too young to, to really understand the terrible times of the Thirties, 1930s. It was a period

for me when, living in Wiltshire, which was very much a sort of farming county in those days, in a

market town in a farming county, my father’s friends were mostly farmers who lived nearby, and, I was

lucky because, they were very kind to me and they let me spend a lot of time, a lot of my time, spare

time, out on the farms going around just looking at things. And I was, without realising it I, I wasn’t

making any kind of systematic study but, I was absorbing natural phenomena, you know, through,

through a sort of osmosis. It was just a general taking in of what happened in nature. And, I was

spending a lot of time in the fields and wandering around the hedgerows looking at, looking at animals

and birds. And I, I found myself very much in tune with the countryside rather than with the town in

which I lived. The town was a railway town, and it was an industrial town that had overtaken and

swamped a small market town. And I, my everyday life, my pleasures in those days were going out

into the countryside and looking at, just, just wandering around, mooching round, not really doing

anything particularly, how can I put it? I didn’t have any goals, I didn’t have any particular aims in

life; I just found the whole country scene there very attractive. And I, I was lucky because, my

grandmother had a lake, it was an old brickworks factory that she had inherited, and, she was very old,

she never went there, nobody went there, it was shut off because it was rather dangerous. And what

had happened was that, where all the, the brick factory diggings had taken place had filled with water

and had now become a lake. And people had put fish in there. And I was able to spend a lot of time

there by myself, nobody else was allowed there. So I had a kind of, private world there. And I, I built


C1672/16Track 1

a raft, I don’t know how I did it, looking back, because I, I don’t think of myself as very good at

constructing things. But I did, I was so keen to get out onto the lake that I built a raft out of old oil

drums. I had four oil drums, one in each corner, and some planks, and I strapped it all together. And

my mother found a removal man who would take this, this contraption down to the lake, put it on. And

I spent… And I, I couldn’t swim. [laughs] So, it was really very tricky. I couldn’t swim, so it wasn’t

a very safe thing to do. Today’s health and safety people would be horrified to think of a non-swimmer

going out, on his own, with nobody else there at all, completely alone, on this raft. You see I was an

only child, and I loved solitude. A lot of children have to be, have to be with people all the time. I’m,

I’m very happy in company, but, I’m also very happy on my own. Which has served me well in my

later life, because of course when you write a book or paint a picture you’re very much on your own.

And, some of my friends are too sociable to spend the sort of time that’s necessary to write lots of

books and paint lots of pictures. So that has served me well. And it started then, because, as a child, an

only child, with this private world, this old deserted brick factory, there was only a chimney left, there

was no buildings left on it, and, and it was full of frogs, toads, newts, fish, birds. And I, I used to get

on my raft and paddle out into the middle of the lake and lie face down on the raft with my head just

over the edge of the raft. You see I didn’t have any… In those days there were no snorkels, this is pre-

snorkel. I don’t think snorkels were invented until, I think sometime during World War II I believe.

Anyway, I was there with my face just above the surface of the water. And I would like there for

hours, you know, just floating around. And during that time I was observing all the fish and their

behaviour. There were pike preying on perch and, and roach, and I was able to watch these activities.

Now I didn’t have any sort of scientific plan, I wasn’t, I wasn’t sort of, analysing things, I was just

simply absorbing them. But as the years passed, the company of animals became increasingly

important, and at home I started to collect all kinds of pets, and I had, not just cats and dogs but, I had

tame foxes, I had snakes, and voles and guinea pigs and all, all kinds of animals. And I was very

concerned about their welfare.

[06:41]

My act of rebellion was actually to refuse to go shooting. Now, you’ve got to remember, this is the

1930s, and, my father gave me a gun, you know, an air rifle, and, you know, it was, it was quite natural

for boys to go out shooting. But it didn’t appeal to me. I, I had already made such a lot of quiet

observations of the animals that they were - they were my friends. You don’t shoot your friends, you

know [laughs], and they had become my friends. And, so, my air rifle stayed and got, actually got -

when I went to look at it one day it was rusty, which, which summed up my feeling about guns. Then

the war came, and during the war of course there were huge food shortages. Now we had a pear tree in

the garden, and these pears were precious because you couldn’t get fruit. I mean it was, it was really

serious this, it wasn’t just, oh let’s have a nice pear. This was a serious food supply. And to have this

pear tree was, was a real luxury. And then the starlings would come and eat the pears. And my father

said, ‘Look, you must shoot the starlings.’ And so, I had to get my gun out, to protect the pears and

shoot the starlings. But I, I hated doing it, but, it was a matter, you know, you had no choice during the

war. And that was the last, and then after that, that was the last time I, after that I wouldn’t have

anything to do with guns. And I couldn’t… A lot of my friends loved angling, they were anglers, and


C1672/16Track 1

they loved catching fish. And I can understand the pleasure of sitting on a riverbank, you know, for an

afternoon just getting an occasional nibble and… It’s a, it’s a nice way to spend the afternoon in the

country. But I knew fish too well, and the idea of putting a hook into the mouth of a fish seemed

appalling to me. I was looked upon as a bit of a, an oddity for this, because of course, all my chums

were fishing and, and shooting, and I, I was rebelling against this quite early on. And I never could

enjoy fishing for that reason, and I still can’t. If I see angling in a film, you know, when the brave hero

is fighting this fish, and I think, what about the fish, you know. [laughs] I can’t, I’m on the side of the

fish. But it’s, you asked about my everyday life, and what I’m trying to do is to paint a portrait of a

boy growing up in an industrial town, spending his time, every, on a bicycle. Oh of course my bicycle

was crucially important, I used to cycle for miles. I could cycle twenty, thirty miles, you know, in a

day, I was very physical and physically active. And I would go out into the country where these farmer

friends lived and they would let me go off on the farm and look around and do what I wanted to do.

And that, that really was, looking back, now, that’s how I remember my childhood. And those are the

things that took hold before anything else. I had absolutely no interest in, in art or in other aspects of

science. I was just interested in, in the behaviour of animals really, and that of course has been a

lifelong obsession of mine. The more cultural things, to do with, with the arts and music and so on,

were, were not registering in my young life at that time; they came much later.

[10:41]

My interest in music was entirely to do with jazz. I was a jazz drummer, and earned my first money

playing the drums in a jazz group when I was fourteen. Because all the adult drummers were away

fighting the war, and so they had to rope in a small boy to play the drums in a, at a dance, you know.

[laughs] And I… So my musical tastes were not, I wasn’t at all interested in classical music, and, I

wasn’t interested in, at that stage, I’m talking in the Thirties now and the early Forties, I wasn’t

interested in art at all. My discovery of art came when I was at boarding school, and, there was a

teacher there who showed me some works by Picasso, and I thought they were extraordinary, you

know. And then I, I found a book in the library which, called The Painter’s Object, edited by

Myfanwy Evans. This is, I’m going back seventy years now and I can still remember it. And in it

there were essays by Max Ernst and other Surrealists, and I, I suddenly got fascinated in, in the, the

Surrealist movement. This, I’m now, what age am I now, fifteen, sixteen, something like that. And at

that stage, art became a second string to my bow. It never removed the first, I mean, the obsession with

animals has been there throughout my entire life, but, and that, that came first. But then… That started

in the 1930s, and in the 1940s I found, I discovered modern art and was absolutely fascinated by the

mystery of it all. And those have been the twin obsessions of my life really.

[12:43]

Other than your father giving you the gun and saying, arguing that you ought to shoot the starlings

after all, can you remember other things done with him? I know that he was injured, and he was ill

when you were younger, but, as far as he could spend time with you, what would you do together?


C1672/16Track 1

Oh. My father was… I loved him, but he was, he was a military, he was always known as the Captain,

it was Captain Morris, and, he had been promoted in the field, and he, he had, his World War I had

been pretty horrific, and he had been severely injured in it, and it took him until World War II before he

died from his, from the injuries he received in World War I. And so, the poor man was a very proud

man, and he was trying to maintain his dignity in the face of increasing illness, you know, and, I was

told he only had half of one lung left, one and a half of his lungs had been destroyed in the war. And so

he had difficulty breathing. And, it just wasn’t in his character to be ill. You know, some people are

sort of, they almost sort of, enjoy illness, you know, they moan about all the… He would never moan

about anything, because he, he was, in temperament he was fit, strong, masculine, you know, and so

on, but, his poor body wouldn’t live up to that. And I, you know, children aren’t as sensitive as all that.

I am now, looking back on it I can see more than I could see at the time, but at the time I was, I was

always aware of the fact that he found physical things an effort. But one thing that we did do, he had a

little car, a tiny little, one of those, oh, I forget what it was now, but it was a tiny little motorcar which

we… And we would go off, there would be a Sunday afternoon where we’d just go for a drive. We

wouldn’t go anywhere in particular, we would just drive around the countryside. And it was, the roads

were comparatively empty in those days of course, it was fun. And, and you would take off. And he

would drive me to the, I remember in particular when he would drive me in this little car down to the

seaside for, for, and that was, that was the, going to a British seaside was a great event. I never went

abroad as a child. And of course when World War II started, I couldn’t go abroad if I wanted to. I

didn’t in fact go abroad until 1949, when I was twenty-one, and I went to Paris, to, to find the

Surrealists. And that was the first time I was able to travel abroad. So… But, seaside holidays were,

were wonderful, and I, I always relished those. And of course, one of the things that I relished

particularly was searching for seashore wildlife, you know, the crabs and, and other creatures I found

on the seashore. And I would take them back to the hotel and then, [laughs] put them in a drawer, and

they would be making scratching noises all night, driving everybody mad. It was… But I, again I was

completely obsessed with the, with the seashore, and the, searching through the rocks, rock pools,

looking for things, for shells and, and crabs. But, you know, that, those are the sort of things I

remember about my childhood. And I remember with my father, I always had… He was very correct,

but very kind, you know, firm, kind, correct, those are the words that come to mind. I don’t remember

him having a great sense of humour, because, I think he was probably in too much pain, poor man. I

just remember him as being, sort of, a role model in the sense of, correct behaviour, you know. You

knew what was correct and what was not correct. And, I once, the only time he was ever cross with

me, I came home from school and I used a swear word. It wasn’t a bad swear word, it was, today, a

very modest one, but it was a swear word, and, and he was very angry with me for that, because it was

incorrect, you know, and so on. And I remember that moment from, whatever it is, eighty years ago.

[laughs] And I, I learnt that, you know, you, you are supposed to behave correctly, in a certain way,

and that there were certain courtesies that you had to perform and certain, social rituals if you like that

you obeyed, that you, you sat at table in a certain way, you didn’t fiddle and, and so on. You know, it

was… But it wasn’t, how can I put it? It sounds like a severity, but it wasn’t. It was simply, the, the

courtesy of behaving well, you know. And that was what I learnt from him.


C1672/16Track 1

[17:59]

My mother was just totally loving, and, and, all I remember her is, you know, she was just, someone

who loved me, and that was unconditional love, and that meant a lot to me too. But of course she had

an increasing burden because of his increasing illness, and, so she was always under pressure. But she,

again, there was never a cross word with her. So I had a, I had a very pleasant childhood, and one

where, I was lucky because, my great-grandfather had been a Victorian naturalist and the local museum

was full of his specimens that he had given to them. And, the attic had trunks in it with, with a lot of it.

I still have some of his fossils and some of his natural history books, and, his microscope which I still

have. And it was that microscope that I discovered that set me off as a really serious student of, of

biology and zoology. So that, that’s, that’s as clear a picture as I can paint of my childhood. It was…

It wasn’t an intellectual childhood, it was, it was more an observational child… I wasn’t so much

concerned with ideas as observations, and, I was getting good at watching, [laughs] which of course is

the title of my autobiography, but, and watching was, was what I did, rather than thinking. I wasn’t a

philosopher, I was an observer.

[19:37]

You’ve said in a number of places, you’ve described the effect that your father’s illness had on your

own religious and political outlook, especially the way that it led to a kind of despising of authority.

What effect did your father’s wounding have on his own religious and political outlook, and perhaps

also your mother’s?

I, as a child I was taught to, you know, when I was very small child I was taught to kneel at the bed and

say prayers before I got into bed. And I did that in my early childhood. And, I was aware that my

mother and father were both Christians, but, they weren’t churchgoers. I mean, I don’t, I don’t

remember. I mean I know when I was very very tiny I would, I went to church, but, my father was so

increasingly ill, and my mother was increasingly busy looking after the small business, and, I don’t

remember ever going to church with them. Funny. I’ve only just thought of that. I hadn’t, I hadn’t

realised that. No, I don’t, I don’t have any memory at all of ever going to church with them. But they

were, they both had Christian ideals, and, there would be a Bible in the house, you know, and… But it

wasn’t, it was, it was mild religion, it wasn’t, it wasn’t intense. They just felt that, the teaching of Jesus

was correct, you know, it was, it was… There was a sort of kindness in it which, which my mother

would enjoy. But, I don’t, I don’t remember any strong religious teaching at all. I was about fourteen

when I decided it was all a lot of nonsense. [laughs] I really… I remember, I remember it because, at

boarding school of course we had religious education, and, a very sweet vicar who was, we used to go

and, he used to give tea to groups of boys each Sunday, you know, and so on, and he was a very sweet

man. All the vicars I’ve known have been very pleasant and very sweet, you know. But, when I was

fourteen I suddenly thought, this is all nonsense. I, I can’t accept this any more. And, I didn’t become a

rebel in the sort of positive sense; it was a passive rebellion. [laughs] You know, I just said, I don’t

buy this any more, I don’t buy all these, these miracles and stories of, of sort of, supernatural

phenomena. I just, I haven’t got… I’m interested in nature, not super-nature. And, I, from that point


C1672/16Track 1

onwards I wasn’t interested. But then, something happened, because, when my father died in ’42 when

I was fourteen… It’s interesting, because, when you are fourteen you don’t, it’s just a sort of,

numbness. I thought, oh well he’s, he’s, he’s not really dead, he’s gone off to some, health farm

somewhere, you know, he’ll be back, you know. And I, you couldn’t, I just couldn’t accept it as a

child, at fourteen. I didn’t go into any sort of, I didn’t go into any kind of mourning or anything, but I

was just, sort of, numbed by it in a strange way. And, his absence was very conspicuous in the house,

because although he had been very ill he was a strong character, and, and I missed, missed his, what’s

the word, sort of leadership if you like, you know, as a small boy, and his company. And, in the years

that followed, I started to write essays, and my mother kept them, and I, I did look at them much later

on, you know, and, and they are pretty weird, because they are full of hatred of authority. Now I

wasn’t, I wasn’t an active rebel, I didn’t join groups or anything; I just, suddenly started to be very

critical of religious and political authorities, and ridiculing them in my essays. I don’t know where that

came from, but I can only suppose that it was a response to, without knowing it, it was a response to

my father’s death. I hadn’t, I didn’t sit down and say, the general sent him off to the trenches to get

half killed; the padres went along to, to, you know, talk to him in a sort of rather pathetic way, and the

Church didn’t try to stop the war, they sent padres out into the field, and supported the war. And so,

politic, politicians, the military, and the, the Church, all those authority figures had suddenly become

my enemies, because… And I didn’t, I didn’t say, it’s because they killed my father. But that is

obviously what it was. But you don’t, I didn’t rationalise it. I didn’t understand it. And, all I knew

was that in my essays, and then a little later on in my drawings and paintings, I was rebelling against

anything to do with authority, cultural authority that is, not, not the authority of my mother or my father

or my friends, but the authorities that were running the world. How could they allow that hideous

slaughter to take place in World War I, you know, and here they were, all over again in World War II.

Now, what I didn’t know at the time was that the Surrealist movement had grown up as a rebellion

against the First World War, and here was I, having the same response to the Second World War.

[26:16]

And, so my, my feelings were anti-war because of my father, and, and anybody who had supported the

war or organised the war became my enemies, because they had killed my father. And so that was, that

was what was going on. But I, I’m giving it, I’m telling it now, in an analytical way, but I didn’t

analyse it at the time. I didn’t… I can see it, looking back I can see what happened. Because I’ve

often wondered, why did I, when I was fifteen, sixteen, why was I suddenly writing essays attacking

religion, or attacking politics, or attacking the military? Where was all that coming from, you know?

And I, I just did it. And it wasn’t until many many many years later that I look back and think, oh yes,

I see what it was, this was me as a child saying, you killed my father so I don’t, I’m not having

anything to do with you. And, I turned against all forms of politics. I’ve never… And that’s stayed

with me. I’ve never had any sort of political life at all, nor do I have any preference for, left-wing,

right-wing, middle-wing, I don’t, I, I have no interest whatsoever. I know… I mean, I know they’re

important, we need people to sweep the roads and prevent inflation and, and, and as far as I’m

concerned, road-sweepers and politicians come into that category of, of organising society as best they

can. But I have no respect for politicians, although the one… [laughs] The awful thing is, although I


C1672/16Track 1

have no respect for religion or politics, every time I meet a country vicar or, or a, somebody who’s got

into politics, they’re extremely pleasant people, and I, I get on very well with them. It’s not a personal

thing, it’s just, it’s, it’s this sort of, diffuse response from my childhood. But, because it’s not personal,

because I’m not rabid in my attacks, I have never campaigned. I’m not a campaigner, I don’t campaign

against. I have friends who do. But I don’t campaign against religion, I don’t campaign against,

political parties or anything. I just, I just ignore them, as best I can, and I devote my life to art and

science, those are the two, the arts and the sciences are what I love, and, I’m not going to waste my

time with things like religion and politics. They can just, go their way, and I’ll ignore them. But, so

I’m not a, I’m not a passionate rebel in that sense, I’m a passive rebel.

[29:07]

Had you any memory of writing the essays when you rediscovered them?

Sorry?

Did you have any memory of writing the essays that you rediscovered, before you rediscovered them if

you see what I mean?

No, I… When I read them again I thought… I mean they were, obviously full of childish errors and

things, but they, they had about them a, an immediacy. There was, there was a, a quite extraordinary,

what’s the word? It’s the expressiveness, they were expressive, they expressed ideas. Muddled, often

contradictory, but, they were, the writing was alive. And that happened when I was at school, and, it

stayed with me. Because, one of the secrets of good writing is to keep it alive on the page. What

happens with so much writing, so many books, you know, you open the book and, and the writing’s

gone dead, because, the person who sat down with his typewriter or his computer, or pen and paper,

because they were writing a book, they, they became sort of overwhelmed by the concept of book

writing, and started to become pretentious and pompous, and, and it all became too clever, you know,

so on. The secret of good writing, for me, is, immediacy and freshness, and the element of surprise. I

was very lucky because as a teenager I was able to spend a lot of time with the Welsh poet Dylan

Thomas, and Dylan was extraordinary, because, he, he was incapable of speaking a sentence that

wasn’t fresh and interesting. No matter what he was doing, even if he was… He would spend a lot

of… Because he knew I was a zoologist, interested in animals, he, he would tell me animal jokes. And

Dylan’s animal jokes were, quite ridiculous, but, they were surprising, there was a sort of element of

surprise in them. Two rhinoceroses are looking at the sunset, and one of them says to the other, ‘Why

do I keep thinking it’s Thursday?’ Well now, I mean… [laughs] This is so, this was Dylan Thomas,

that was, almost word for word. I may have got the sunset added, but I think it was, almost exactly

what he said. And, and two hippopotamus meet. One of them has a baby with her, and the other

hippopotamus says, ‘What are you going to be when you grow up?’ These were the sort of jokes that

Dylan was telling me. And I thought, well they’re not really funny, but, but there’s something odd

about them, there’s an oddity and a kind of fresh… And, it’s not what you expect. And when, our


C1672/16Track 1

mutual friend, who was an old school friend of his, a very short man, and, Dylan said, ‘I shall compose

a hymn to you, because you are so short.’ And… [laughs] And then he, he just started, without

hesitation, ‘Midget which art in Heaven, miniature be thy name.’ And then he went right the way

through, and, ‘forever and ever, Tom Thumb.’ And it was, I just sat there and thought, how can this

man play with words like this? He just, he could, he was like, you know how, you think, how can a

juggler keep all the balls in the air? Why don’t, why doesn’t he drop…? And, and he was like a word

juggler, and he would just take words and play with them. And, I can’t remember a single moment

when he said anything that wasn’t, surprising, you know, the use, his use of words, and he just couldn’t

help it, it had become the way he spoke. And so that… And I learnt a lot from him, I learnt about,

playing with words, and, and that left a mark on me as a young, as a teenager, I was so lucky to have

had that. Because… And I was even luckier with my professor at college, because he was brilliant

with words as well, a wonderful writer, and… So I, I was lucky, I had some good exposures to, to

people who cared about the use of words. And I realised from those very early school essays of mine

that, I had already got this idea of looking for the surprising phrase, looking for the phrase that, or the

sentence, which makes somebody say, ‘Woah, what was that?’ you know. Trying to avoid clichés,

trying to avoid the obvious, and trying to , above all trying to avoid clever pretentiousness, which

infests so much writing.

[34:27]

‘A monkey with a diseased brain’, that was one of the phrases that you discovered in the essay. Do you

have any sense of why, where that phrase might have come from? Why a monkey with a diseased

brain? And an associated question is, would you have used the phrase ‘human species’ in those

essays, do you think?

Well, yes. I was very surprised to find that, at the age of, whatever it was, fifteen, something like that,

that I was referring to the human animal as, the human species as a monkey with a diseased brain. This

was of course, you’ve got to remember that, I was, at that age, being bombed. [laughs] You know, I

mean there were bombs falling. And, you learnt that if the, the noise of the bombs, ‘wa, wa, wa’, if that

got louder they were coming towards you, it was a stick of bombs being dropped towards you. And

then, then you got under the kitchen table, into the metal cage there which, which was reinforced. And

my mother would push me into that for safety, if the ‘wa’ was getting louder. But if it was getting

quieter, you knew the bombs were being dropped away from you, and that was OK. But then the next

morning I would go down to the, I’d be walking down town, and on the town hall there would be these

sheets of paper recording unclaimed body parts from the previous night’s bombing. These are the, this

is the context in which I spent my early teenage years. And, you have to sort of, it’s difficult today,

you know, because people haven’t, they’re lucky they haven’t experienced that, but, but if you are a

child growing up where all this is happening, and where you know that when you grow up you’re

expected to go and kill people, I mean that was what… and, and when at school, in the morning

prayers, the beginning of the day, the morning assembly, the headmaster would read out the names of

the, of last year’s sixth formers who were shot down in their Spitfires the night before, the day before.


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And, and you know, you, you get, you get the list of names, and these had all been shot down in their

Hurricanes and Spitfires the previous day. And, and you knew… And I was already being dressed up

in the uniform, preparing me for the… And, and you knew that if the war went on long enough, you

were going to be shot down in your Spitfire. So this was the, this was the context in which I was

writing these essays. And so, when I wrote about human being as monkeys with diseased brains, it

showed two things. It showed, one that I was already thinking in terms of animals, I was already, as

I’ve explained, obsessed with animals, so that, I was looking at human beings as, as primates, calling

them monkeys, and the diseased brain meant that, unlike monkeys that were just sitting in the treetops

eating fruit and nuts, here we were, and as far as I could tell, the sole aim of grown-ups was to kill one

another. So, monkey with a diseased brain wasn’t that, it wasn’t as odd at that moment as it might

sound today. But what it did do was, it showed that even at that very young age, when I was at school,

I was thinking of human beings as an animal species. Which of course is what became an obsession of

mine later in life.

[38:18]

Do you remember when you were first aware of the theory of biological evolution by natural selection?

That would be at… Yes. I was very lucky, I had a very good biology teacher, a brilliant man, I mean

he was… And, you know, evolution wasn’t, there wasn’t any doubt about it. I mean today people start

questioning it and so on, but… But, as far as my teaching was concerned, evolution was a fact of life.

I mean, how else can you explain the biodiversity of the planet? And, so I was, I was already a

complete out-and-out evolutionist during my, my childhood. And I was, I was in no doubt about it. I

mean I never and any doubt about it, and, I never have had any doubt. You know, I’ve never sort of,

I’ve never sat down and thought, ooh, was Darwin right? you know, I mean it just seems to me to be so

obvious, so basic, that, I’ve, I just accepted it. But I was lucky, because I did have an extremely good

teacher who… What made him good was that he always made you find out the answers to questions.

He didn’t tell you things. He would say, you know, ‘How does, how does a toad find its way home to

its ancestral pond?’ And, I said, ‘Well I’ve seen a lot of them squashed on the road.’ And he said,

‘Well what were they doing?’ And I said, ‘Well, they were obviously coming from the fields going

back to their pond.’ And the road obviously has been built in the last few hundred years and they’ve

been there for millions of years, you know, so they, they still make the ancestral… And then they get

squashed, because they go across the road and cars squash ’em flat. So he said, ‘Well go and study it.’

And so, I… And he encouraged me to go out at night, which, you weren’t allowed out of school at

night, but I got special dispensation. And I, I went… Sorry. [coughs] I was lucky, I got special

dispensation to go out at night to study toad migration. And I wrote a paper about it in the school

natural history magazine, my first scientific paper. And, I won’t bore you with the details but, I’m very

pleased to say that, we still don’t know how they do it. [laughs] Because I’ve, I’ve followed that up

since, and, a lot of research has been done on it, but the homing ability of animals is still one of the

great mysteries, and it’s fascinating. I mean, the ability of so many species to find their way home,

without any obvious clues, is, is quite extraordinary, and, it’s something that we still don’t fully


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understand. We’re getting there, we’re getting there, but it’s, it’s a wonderfully complicated piece of

animal behaviour. And so that’s how it started, and that was my first. But he encouraged me, against

the rules. You see what I liked about him was that, we weren’t allowed to go out at night, but, you

can’t study nocturnal migration of toads, because they only migrate at night, unless you go out at night.

So he got to the headmaster and said, ‘I’ve got a pupil who wants to go out and do this study,’ and I

was given that permission. And that meant a huge amount to me, because it meant that he was

prepared to bend the rules to help me understand animal behaviour. And, he was a wonderful man,

and, made a huge difference to me. He was my zoology teacher. My botany teacher was equally good,

because he introduced me to a lot of modern writing, and it was through him that I met, and I still have

the books I bought of Auden and Isherwood and, Eliot and the modern poets, and that, that, again I was

just fascinated with the way that Auden used words. And, it was, again, it was somebody who

embodied the element of surprise in his writing, and that’s what I loved. And so, I was just very lucky

in that respect. I didn’t have any encouragement with my painting unfortunately at school. In fact,

rather the opposite. I was told that, you know, Surrealism was, was nonsense and that, you know, why

didn’t I get down to some serious sort of, still lifes and landscapes and things, you know. So… But

that didn’t stop me, I was already off and running with, with my Surrealist imagery, and started work

on that when I was about fourteen, fifteen. And so that was running side-by-side with my scientific

studies.

[43:20]

Thank you. Could you, could we go now to Birmingham, to the degree.

Mm.

And, could you tell me about the content of your zoology degree, including those aspects of it that, I get

a sense in your autobiography, you might not have approved of or enjoyed, because they were ways of

studying animals that were not for you.

Yes, I… Well you’ve got to remember that, when I had finished school, although the war was now

over, conscription was still occurring, and I was called up to do two years’ service in the Army. Now,

bearing in mind my feelings about, about my father and the war and so on, you can imagine that I

didn’t particularly relish this prospect. And the first year in the Army was, for me, probably the worst

year of my life. The only good thing about it in retrospect was, it made me incredibly healthy and fit,

because of course there was all this physical training that went into it, and, and I became very strong

and physically fit. So that was the only, about the only good thing. The second year I had, I had

managed to learn the way around, how to get on in the Army, and I managed to get a job as a lecturer

in fine art at an army college. And that second year was wonderful, because, here was I, I was only,

still a teenager, teaching art. And I taught art for a year. And, it was, it was a wonderful period for me,

because, it was a time when I learnt so much about the art world. And I, I wanted to, I really wanted to

become an artist at this point. The animals and the art were the two twin obsessions, and I never lost


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either of those obsessions. However, at that stage, I was a young Surrealist artist and that’s what I

wanted to do. Unfortunately, after the war nobody was interested in Surrealism, and, and I couldn’t

sell a single painting of mine, not one. And it was clear that I couldn’t make a living at it. And, when I

came out of the Army, I was either going to go to art school or go and study science at university, go

into zoology. And it was a toss-up which I was going to do. And I thought, well, if I do zoology, I can

do all those wonderful drawings under the microscope, I’ll be, I’ll have a microscope and I can do…

And I, I’ve got notebooks full of all the drawings I did. And I, [laughs] I actually went to do a degree

in zoology primarily to do drawings under the microscope. I wanted to do all these drawings, and I

wanted to learn about all, the shapes of organisms, to help me with my, my painting. And I was still at

Birmingham when I had my first London exhibition with Miró, Miró and I had a show together at the

London Gallery in 1950 when I was still at university, and, I was very very serious. But again I

couldn’t sell my paintings, that was the trouble. I only sold two, and Miró sold none. So, it was a bad,

[laughs] it wasn’t a very successful exhibition. But for me it meant a great deal, to have a London, my

first London exhibition, while I was an undergraduate at Birmingham University studying zoology.

And, and my professor was a bit nonplussed by this, but he was a brilliant man, he, I was very lucky, he

was a young professor and he was, it was Peter Medawar, who later got a Nobel Prize, and his brain

was at its zenith when he was teaching me. And he was also, he was intrigued by the fact that I had

asked his, I once went to him and asked for his permission to, to go and give a lecture on the biology of

art at another university, and he thought, hello, what’s this? You know, he… I, I just thought I had to

ask his permission. But clearly, it shook him a bit that one of his students was lecturing at another

university. [laughs] And of course, I had already been lecturing in the Army you see, and I had been,

had army… So, so I was older than the typical undergraduate, and much more experienced than the

typical undergraduate.

[48:04]

But, what happened was that, what happened was that I was seduced by the brain of this professor into

becoming a serious zoologist. I had… In my first year, when I was having this exhibition in London.

So I, I was really there to do the drawing, I was interested in animal shapes, and, and I, I went there

really, I thought it would be more interesting than going to an art school. I’m not interested in drawing

a bottle on a table, you know, and, still life and so on. I’m, I’m interested in animal shapes. And so…

But, this approach of mine was, changed, my direction was to change purely and simply because of the

extraordinary brain of my young professor. He, he reminded me, in a strange way, of Dylan Thomas,

because he was a wordsmith, he loved the use of words and he loved surprising you with a phrase.

And, his, his writing was brilliant, absolutely brilliant, and I learnt a lot from him again about how to

write surprising, simple language and not, not to sort of show off with fancy words, how to get

complicated ideas expressed in a simple way. It’s not easy. And, simplification without distortion

became my little sort of key phrase. Because it’s, it’s so easy when you simplify to distort the truth as

a scientist, and, and I, I wanted to learn to simplify things without distortion. And that became a

driving force in me, thanks to him, thanks to his teaching. So by the time I had finished my degree

there I had become, I was still painting, but, zoology had suddenly become serious. It wasn’t just

enjoying animals now, it was now serious study, and I wanted to become a serious student of animal


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behaviour. But, because of my background there was no way that I was going to do experiments on

animals. I never have and never will. I, I don’t attack people who do it, but I couldn’t do it. I, animals

were my friends from my childhood, and, there’s no way I was going to experiment on my friends, I’m

sorry, you know. And, and that was a problem, because of course, experimental studies were a basic

part of zoology, and, I don’t know, I, towards the end of my, when I was getting my degree, I thought,

what am I going to do? Because, I, I cannot experiment on animals; I’m an observer, I’m a watcher, I

like to watch animals, I like to learn about them by simple, direct, analytical observation, that’s what I

want to do, and I’m damned if I’m going to start experimenting on them, it’s just not right. I mean it’s

not, not, not something that’s in my way of thinking. And so, I was at a loss.

[51:30]

And then, Peter Medawar, my professor, took me to a lecture. He, he had spotted that I was interested

in animal behaviour, and he said, ‘Well you must come to a lecture by a Dutchman called Niko

Tinbergen, and he’s giving a talk over in the medical department now, I’ll take you over.’ And he took

me in his car, drove me over there, which is, you know, not a thing professors normally do with their

students. And I was very flattered by this, you know. And he drove me over to this lecture, and we sat

by-by-side and listened to this one-hour talk by Tinbergen on the subject of comparative ethology,

which was a new way of studying animal behaviour that had developed in Holland and Germany before

the war, and was now having a resurgence after the war. And, Tinbergen had left Holland and come to

Oxford to set up a school of animal behaviour. And what I, in that one hour, it was like a religious

conversion for me [laughs], because, in that one hour I knew what I wanted to do, this was it. I had no

doubt any more, it was instantaneous. As soon as I came out of that lecture I said to Medawar, I said,

‘That’s what I want to do.’ And he said, ‘Well, if you get a First, you can go to Oxford and join his

group, I’m sure I can arrange that for you, because he’s looking for people.’ And this meant I really hit

my, my third year, because I had been painting and doing lots of other things, making film, making

Surrealist films, and I… [laughs] So, I had to do three years’ work in my last year, and, I just managed

it, I just managed to get my First. But I had to work like a slave. And I, I actually collapsed at the end

of it, I was so exhausted. But I, I was so determined to get, to join Tinbergen’s group, because, what…

His, his rule was that, you don’t have to experiment on animals in order to understand animals. It’s no,

it is no good putting a rat in a cage and studying that, because, a rat is a burrowing animal, and if a rat

doesn’t have a burrow, it isn’t a rat. You put a rat in a cage and it’s not an animal any more, it’s just a,

a specimen, you know. And the only way you can study rat behaviour is by watching them, if they

have a life in a burrow where they, where they breed and so on. You have to study the animal’s

behaviour in its natural setting. And if you don’t either go into the field to study it or in the laboratory

you have to recreate the natural world of the animal. And, you have to build a huge aviary where you

can, where the birds can live naturally, or huge fish tanks where the fish can live naturally. And, he

said, what you do is, quantified observation. That was his, the essence of Tinbergen was quantified

observation, that you don’t just watch them, you score, you count, you, you check variations in

frequencies. And you can do simple tests, not, not laboratory experiments, but you can do simple tests,

like, showing them a mirror, so they see a reflection of themselves, or something like that, you know.

So that you can, you can… and you can make dummies and models to see if they respond to them. So,


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in other words, what appealed to me was that here was a way of a serious scientific method for

studying and quantifying animal behaviour with the minimum of interference to the lives of the

animals. And that, that sold me, that was it. And, I worked like a slave. I got my First, and I got to

Oxford, and joined his group, and I was one of the first members of his group in Oxford.

[55:22]

What do you remember of Peter Medawar saying about relations between science and religion? You

talk in the autobiography about, you mention his demolishing of psychoanalysis for example. But, what

about his, what about the discussion, if at all, of science and religion, as your professor in that degree?

I don’t remember religion ever, during my scientific period at Birmingham when I was an

undergraduate I don’t remember religion getting a mention at all, in any way. I don’t think it came up,

I don’t think it was in the orbit of, of our thinking. I did later, when I came to Oxford though, my

professor there, a lovely man called Alister Hardy, who was religious, and, and he believed that you

could be a… He didn’t see any clash between Darwin and the Church, and he started a religious

studies group here. He wanted to, he wrote a book called The Biology of God, and he was interested in

looking at religion. He was trying to reconcile religion and biology. And I, I, I was so fond of him, I

never argued with him. I mean I, I, he would talk to me about this, and… And, [laughs] he was so

sweet, and such a lovely man, that I, I hadn’t the heart to say, ‘Look, I think this is a load of rubbish,’

you know. So I just, I just, went with it, you know, I let him, let him talk to me about it. But he, he did

try to persuade me that you could have an amalgam of, of biology and religion, and that they weren’t at

loggerheads with one another. But I… And I just didn’t argue with him, because I was so fond of him,

you know. And his biology was so interesting, so wonderful, he was a wonderful biologist, and a

brilliant brain, but he just, he had this strong religious feeling, you know. I could never see how the

two could be reconciled, but he could, you know.

What was Niko Tinbergen’s view of this?

Niko was, was a, an out-and-out atheist. Not… When I say that, it makes it sound as though he was an

activist, but he wasn’t. He just didn’t… He just, he just thought that… He met the Archbishop of

Canterbury once and he said, ‘Horrible man, horrible.’ You know, he hated the Church. I don’t know

why. But, he had, of course, had an extraordinary life, because, he had been in a concentration camp

and… He’s the only person I know who was voluntarily in a concentration camp, because his great

colleague was a German professor who, once he found out that his old chum was in a concentration

camp, arranged for him to get out, and he wouldn’t go, because it meant betraying his friends, you

know. And, he was a remarkable man, Tinbergen, and a brilliant, brilliant teacher. But he, he took, I

think because of what had happened to him, and, how he had, his family had been starving through the

war, and, they had a terrible time in Holland, terrible, and I think that’s why, there were too many

memories there, so that’s why he left and came to Oxford to get away from it all and start afresh. But

he, he was, I was just so lucky because I had another brilliant teacher, and a man who, again


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encouraged me in, in my more unusual ideas. He didn’t, he didn’t try and sort of, narrow me down,

he… He said, there are two kinds of scientists, there are spreaders and diggers. The spreaders are

keeping, they’re looking for all sorts of different ideas in different contexts, and seeing how they relate;

the digger takes one subject and digs deeper and deeper and deeper into that subject. And it’s true that

some of my colleagues spend their entire lives on one species. I had had over sixty species by the time

I had finished my doctorate, and was fascinated by, every time I found a new species, and I still am, if I

meet a new species, it, it gives me an enormous thrill. So I’m a spreader and not a digger in that sense.

[1:00:14]

Could you take us on a tour of the, I think it was the Department of Zoology and Comparative

Anatomy…

Yes.

…at this time. Take us on a tour of it, describing sort of, what it looks like, but also, who’s there, if you

can sort of… We know Tinbergen’s there, we know you’re there, we know Alister Hardy’s there as

head of department.

Yes.

But, if we are, if we went back there now but it was then, what would we see happening around you?

Well it was, what I loved about it was that Hardy loved animals. I mean he asked me to build a huge…

Because he knew I was, I had that same… So he and Tinbergen both loved animals and were

interested in animals. And so… I mean living animals. And so, you know, he wasn’t interested in old

bones and things, he was interested in the living animal. And, and he asked me if I would arrange to

have a huge aviary put on top of the department, which I did, it was an enormous aviary in which we

keep all sorts of birds. And, and in the corridor… He said, ‘I want people to see animals, there are not

enough animals in this department.’ And so, he had a whole range of fish tanks and, and reptile tanks

that he put into the corridors. And, the, the whole department was, thanks to him, you know, was alive

with animals. I think if you went into the department today you would be hard put to find one, I

haven’t been for some time, but, the tendency now is to, is to, is not to surround yourself with animals,

but in my, my laboratory was packed with animals. I mean I had, I built aviaries for my bird studies,

and I had huge fish tanks for my fish, and, it was, it was absolutely crammed, I had about, oh I don’t

know, fifty fish tanks and half a dozen aviaries in my, I had a big laboratory, I was very lucky. And, it

was, it was a wonderfully sort of, kind of chaotic, chaotic in the sense that, it was the opposite of

disciplinarian. You were encouraged to think freely and to, to do whatever you wanted to do in terms

of study. And I, the result was that I, I didn’t stick to just my, my doctoral thesis was on one species of

fish, but I also had lots of others, and birds as well. And, it was, it was a wonderful department,

because, we had, there was, you know, afternoon tea was where everybody got together and argued and


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talked and so on, and, and it was full of, of people with interesting ideas and, and contradictory ideas,

and, it was, it was, it was the… There was something sort of, [laughs] ramshackle and chaotic about it,

but it was full of thought, and new ideas were bubbling up all the time, and I, it was a lovely period for

me.

[1:03:22]

Some strange things happened. The strangest thing that happened was when [laughs], Alister Hardy

said – this was just after the war don’t forget, Alister Hardy said, ‘Desmond, the Emperor of Japan is a

marine biologist, that’s his private obsession,’ Hirohito of course. ‘And his son Akihito, Prince

Akihito, is coming to this country.’ Very worried, because of course a lot of anti-Japanese feeling after

the war, you know. ‘And, he has asked to come and see our fish studies here in Oxford, because his

father has asked him to see what’s being done in the way of fish research.’ And Hardy said, ‘I’m afraid

you’re it.’ [laughs] You know, because I was the one doing fish studies. So I said, ‘Well what do you

mean, I’m it?’ He said, ‘Well I, you’ll have to, you’ll have to have a visit from Prince Akihito.’ So, I

said, ‘Well all right, you know, but I mean, I’m, the place is covered in, in tanks of fish and, nets, and,

food for the fish and everything.’ Sort of, you know, it wasn’t, it wasn’t very, it wasn’t a very beautiful

laboratory. [laughs] Anyway, so, he said, ‘Well it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. He wants to see

some fish.’ So, that afternoon they arrived [laughs], and, Akihito and his interpreter sort of came in

with Hardy, and they were followed by some bodyguards who were obviously armed, and they were

followed by a lot of people with rolled umbrellas from the Foreign Office, and then there were other

professors. And by the time they had all got into my laboratory, where there was no room anyway

because it was all full of tanks now, Akihito and I were squashed up against the tank in the far corner of

the laboratory, and, and all these other people, they couldn’t allow me to be alone with him in case I,

you know, they didn’t know what, you know, they had to protect him. So we had all these, all these

bodyguards and Foreign Office people and professors there. And we were squashed, I mean there

wasn’t an inch. And, so Akihito… And, you know, Japanese do not like to have close proximity, they

don’t even shake hands, they just bow you see, no touching, and there we are squashed up against this

tank. And it happened to be the only tank that was completely empty. [laughs] And in the bottom of it

was some stinking mud, which I was about to change, and put some new, some specimen in you see.

And, [laughs] and Akihito sort of looks at this and says something in Japanese, and his interpreter says,

[with accent] ‘Prince Akihito want to know what happening in this tank. What research is going on

here.’ And I looked at this empty tank with this stinking mud in the bottom, and I, I said, ‘Please tell

Prince Akihito that in this tank we are maturing the substratum.’ And, so he told him this, and he said,

‘Oh, oh!’ And… And that… [laughs] And then they all retreated, and that was it, that was his visit.

And it was one of the most ludicrous… I mean, you know, the Goon Show wasn’t in it. But he was a

very sweet man actually. And, he’s now Emperor of Japan isn’t he, yes. So… [laughs] I don’t know

if he remembers that moment in his life, but I remember it very vividly. [laughs]

[1:06:50]

And, it was, those are the sort of silly memories I have of the, of that time. But it was, it was

freewheeling, it was, it was messy, it was chaotic, but it was full of ideas and new ideas and… It was a

department consecrated to new ideas, and that was what was so wonderful. And humour was allowed


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to take a role. Because when we had a conference there, Tinbergen said, on the last night of the

conference, ‘I want to have an entertainment for the… We’ll have had a serious, heavy conference,

we’ll all be… On the very last night I want you to…’ He knew, he knew I’d been making some

Surrealist films, so he said, ‘Could you do some sort of strange event?’ And so, with a couple of

friends I built a psychohydraulic machine, which was a way of ridiculing a particular theory of, that a

German had developed on, called psychohydraulic mental processes, which was, which was a theory

we had all rejected. He used as an analogy the idea of tanks with water going down different pipes and

so on as an analogy for what happened in the brain, and it just didn’t work, you know. So we built a

psychohydraulic machine, which was an enormous machine, and it, it had all kinds of ridiculous

operations, and we… [laughs] It also, there were balloons filled with water which were attacked by

darts, and the whole of the front row of all these German professors were getting drenched with water.

And it was, it was a ridiculous evening. But at the end of it all Niko said, ‘Well you know, I don’t

think the theory of, the psychohydraulic theory is going to survive the evening.’ So humour did in a

bad theory, which, which was again somehow, [laughs] I can’t see it happening in the more sort of,

sober departments of zoology today.

[1:09:06]

What was the balance of male and female staff and male and female undergraduates in the department

at that time?

In our department there was no bias. There were about equal numbers of… Because, women were

attracted to, to this form of animal behaviour study as well as men, and we had, I think we had about

equal numbers, looking back on it. Maybe sixty-forty per cent, sixty per cent men, forty per cent

women, but that, it was that… And, there was no, the funny thing about it was, all that mattered was,

whether you had a good idea, or whether you had got some good observations; it didn’t matter what

gender you were. Gender wasn’t, wasn’t important in that respect. It never… When you get, when

you get down to serious scientific research, gender just doesn’t enter into it. It just depends on whether

you have good ideas or not, and whether you are prepared, as many of these young women were, to go

and live on cliff tops looking at sea birds or something, you know, they, they would…. And, I, I

think… In fact, later on when we moved on to the phase of studying primates in the wild, they were

almost all done by women, you know. So, there was no, there was no sexism in, in the scientific world

at all. It was, it was all down to whether you had good ideas or not.

And so that conference, that ethology conference for example, there would have been a mix of male and

female academics there?

Yes. Oh yes, yes, yes. There were some very important female ethologists as well as male ethologists.

There was, there was no… You know, I’ve never even thought about this, it just didn’t, didn’t crop up.

There was never any, any sort of, bias that way at all. And that of applies… There’s something

strange in my other life, in the art world, there are more male artists than female artists, and I’ve never


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understood why. There have been some brilliant female Surrealists. But, for some reason or other,

when it comes to visual arts, men have dominated it, even where there hasn’t… Not because of any

sexism, but, because after all, I mean if you’re an artist, you show your work and that’s it. And, you

know, there have been major female artists in the Modern art movement. But they never quite, in the

visual arts they have been dominated by males, and I don’t know why. I find that very odd, very

strange. Because, what people don’t realise is that most prehistoric art was done by women. I mean,

when I wrote a book about Bronze Age art, and, I referred to the artist as she and got into all sorts of

trouble with the archaeological… The archaeological world is rather sexist I think. And, and I, I said,

‘I’m sorry, the evidence is that these, this early artwork, this early Bronze Age artwork, was made by

women,’ and I won’t bore you with the detail as to why, but I, I didn’t make that up, I mean, it’s based

on a lot of evidence. And, and I got into trouble for that, because, archaeology does seem to me to be

rather sexist, in some areas anyway.

[1:12:57]

Thank you. Would you be able to now tell me about your memory of some of the content of the

controversial issues in animal behaviour that were discussed, first in the seminars at London Zoo, and

then on the TV programme Life in the Animal World?

Mhm.

I wondered especially if you have any memory of debates about controversial arguments, you know,

within evolutionary biology in those, in either of those sites.

Let me think back to that period. [pause] Contro… [pause] Arguments that were taking place…

[pause] Yes, it’s… I’m having to cast my mind back to...

No it’s fine, yes.

…to, a long way back. [pause] The first, the first major clash in the study of animal behaviour that I

got involved with was between the ethologists and the psychologists. The two groups… You see the

department of… The ethologists were all studying behaviour in the zoology department, and they were

zoologists who studied animal behaviour. But there was another group altogether, the animal

psychologists, and they were in the psychology department. So you’ve got two groups studying animal

behaviour, one under the aegis of zoology and one under the aegis of psychology. And, they were

chalk and cheese. And, indeed we… The ethologists were new, new boys on the block, because

psychology, animal psychology had been around a long time; animal ethology was comparatively new,

back in those days, in the early Fifties, late Forties, early Fifties. And what was happening was that, we

were upsetting the animal psychologists who felt we were intruding on their territory as it were. And,

we developed a sort of, it wasn’t a nasty hostility, it was a sort of, joking hostility really whereby we

would say, you know, ‘You don’t know anything about animals. You study rats in cages and things.


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How on earth can a white rat in a cage tell you anything about animals?’ You know, it just tells you,

things which have no meaning at all, you know. And we were very critical of their studies. And they

looked upon us as just a bunch of, of bird-watchers or, you know, not interested in serious analysis of,

of behavioural concepts, but just wanted to muck about with animals. So, so we had this antagonism

between us. And, now of course, being rational about it in retrospect, both sides were doing something

of importance, the, the ethologists weren’t just messing about with animals, they were doing quantified

observation, and making studies of types of behaviour that hadn’t been studied before, in particular

things like animal displays. Prior to the ethologists, if a bird started to do a dance, or bobbed its head

up and down, it was just said to be, having a bit of fun or something. You know, people didn’t take it

seriously. But we as ethologists said, look, all these animal displays have to be explained, you can’t…

Why are the birds swaying from side to side, or ruffling up their feathers, or whatever it is, why are

they doing these extraordinary displays? And these ritual displays became a centre of analysis which

had never been looked at or contemplated by the, the rat psychologists. Rats were just there to be

studied from the point of view of, do they run faster if they’re fed more food, or what… You know,

that kind of thing. And, so, we had a completely different direction that, we were interested in

reproductive behaviour, in fighting behaviour, in feeding behaviour, in display and courtship and all

those things. The rat psychologists were interested simply in, in what would affect the maze-running

ability in a rat and so on. So, there was a, there was a big difference between them.

[1:17:57]

However, that was at Oxford. But then when, when I went to London Zoo, and I went there because I

couldn’t study primates in Oxford, there wasn’t the facility for it, and I said to Tinbergen, ‘Look, I want

to study chimpanzees,’ and he said, ‘Well you’ll have to go to the zoo.’ And so I did. And, there

wasn’t a research post there, only a post for studying, for running a film unit. Well, I had made films

and so that was what I did. And I, and then I got dragged into television, which I hadn’t intended to do,

but I was asked to do it, and, unfortunately that went too well [laughs], because it meant that I was on

the air every week for eleven years, and it, it… But I… And I was there to do serious scientific

research, and now I was, you know, chatting on television. But, but at least I had an audience, an

average audience of two million people, mostly children, who were listening to me talking about

animals. And, I never talked down to them, I always tried to put into, each programme I tried to sneak

in one biological concept without anybody noticing. [laughs] So I would explain, camouflage or

countershading or, or, some, some aspect of animal behaviour which, I had to, I had to put it in under

the guise of popular television. I couldn’t become academic. But I managed to… And, and quite a lot

of the children who saw those programmes, later on went on to become zoologists, and they would tell

me in later years that that’s where they first started getting interested in animals. So that was, it was

important but it wasn’t what I wanted to do. I wanted to do animal research.

[1:19:45]

And I eventually did manage to get a group of research workers around me at the zoo, and we, we had

meetings then, weekly meetings, at which we did have, as you said, some very lively arguments. But

this was, these were all arguments to do with… It wasn’t, it wasn’t argument to do with, they weren’t

fundamental arguments; they were arguments over small points. I mean… I’m trying to think of


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something. For example, when, there would be an argument about, if you were going to study an

animal in the wild, if you wanted to attract the animal, and you put food out for it, was this valid or

not? And one argument was, yes you can put food out for the animal, because then it attracts them and

you can then observe the animal. But the other argument was, no, you’re disturbing the feeding

behaviour of that animal, so you… And the same argument comes up in anthropology where you are

studying a human tribe, and, you know, there’s a child with a disease and you’ve got the medicine in

your knapsack. What do you do? You know. The human being says, give the child the medicine.

But, if you do, you’re disrupting the tribal life, because, you are actually bringing something into it

which is actually changing the thing you are studying. And this is a big moral issue for

anthropologists, as good scientists they’re supposed not to interfere at all with, even if a ritual is an

unpleasant one, and they’re watching an unpleasant ritual, some scarification of the skin or something

which they think is, shouldn’t be done. But what do they do? If they interfere, then they are changing

the culture that they’re studying. And that was the sort of, very important moral issue with field

anthropology, but it also applied to some extent to field studies of primates where you, you know, you

couldn’t help wanting to interfere to help in some way, but you shouldn’t really do that. So that, those

were the sort of things we would have debates about. That’s just one example, but there were… It

wasn’t that there was… I mean, I remember once somebody said, you cannot study vocalisation of

monkeys in captivity; you have to study it in the wild. And, and someone said, ‘No no no, if you’re in

the wild you cannot quantify, you can’t… You’ve got to have the monkeys in a cage to study all their

vocalisations.’ And then the argument would develop that, yes, but, those monkeys in the cage where

you’re studying their vocalisation, you’ve got a natural setting for them, but you’re feeding them. And,

the result is that they are not suffering the stresses and strains in the wild. They’ve got no predators to

start with, so they’re not on the alert for predators. They are, they’ve got a cosier lifestyle. And, what

happens then is that that affects the vocalisations. And we said, well… And a friend of mine who had

gone out to Panama to study in the wild said, ‘I’ll tell you what it does. In the wild there are fewer

vocalisations; in captivity you get more, and I’ll tell you why,’ he said. Because what happens is that,

there are juvenile vocalisations, noises which the little ones make, and there are adult vocalisations.

But in captivity, because you are feeding them, they become, they don’t lose the childlike vocalisation,

because they’re still, you are their parent, you are giving them the food, so even when they’re adult

their relationship with you as the feeder who brings the food is such that that extends their childhood.

And therefore, what you get in captive monkeys is a combination of juvenile and adult vocalisations in

the adults. In the wild, they stop behaving like juveniles because they are up against predators and all

the stresses of wild life. And so, these were the sort… I’m just giving you an example. It’s that sort of

debate as to, you know, whether or not it was valid to, to make a study in captivity, even if you

attempted to create a natural setting, because, if you studied it in the wild, things… And in fact, more

and more animal behaviour studies were done in the wild, and the setting-up of captive groups to study

animal behaviour has declined, and now what we have is, we have of course much better technical

equipment now to study in the wild, compared with the sort of primitive technical things we had in the

old days. And so, today animal behaviour studies are done increasingly in the wild state where you do


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not get any of the distortion. But of course in those days, you know, in order to be close to the animals

we had to, we had to do captive studies, but we had to be aware of the dangers of that.

[End of Track 1]


C1672/16Track 1

[Track 2]

Could you tell me now please about your reluctance to write The Naked Ape. So, that is, to tell me

more than you do in the autobiography about the gap between having the idea and writing it, why were

you reluctant to write it?

Yes. Well, I suppose the key point about my development over my long life has been that, I was

unusual in that, as a zoologist I wanted to study the human animal. You see, all the people who had

been studying human behaviour were, psychoanalysts, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, you

know, they were other disciplines. Zoologists don’t, normally, study human animals. And I felt that,

having worked my way up, I started out with, under the microscope as a child, and I worked my way

up that family tree, and, I had gone from fish to birds to mammals, and had reached chimpanzees, and

the next obvious step was to go to humans to do… [clearing throat] Excuse me. The next obvious

step was to go to humans and apply the same principles that I had applied with animals. Now, the key

here was that, I couldn’t talk to the animals When I studied, fish or the birds, I had to do it

observationally. I just had to watch them. So I thought, well supposing I impose on myself that same

restriction with humans. In other words, all the other scientists who study humans talk to them and

interview them and, listen to them and so on. And I, I thought, not, I’m just going to watch them. I’m

going to watch humans, as if I’m looking at a species that I don’t know. It’s difficult for me, because I

happen to be human, and I have to somehow or other, create a mindset in which I am looking at the

human species as though I am from another planet and I’m, I’m looking at them just as I would at an

antelope or a giraffe or a mouse. And, it just happens to be that the species under my study at the

moment is the human animal. And, this of course meant that my approach was different, was unusual.

I mean, zoologists just didn’t look at human beings in this way. And I was interested in human

behaviour in the sense of human activity, not, I wasn’t interested in what people were thinking, I was

interested in what they were doing. It was, what do people do as opposed to what they say and what

they think and, and so on.

[03:19]

So, if I was, if I turned on the television set and there was a politician making a speech, I would turn

the sound off, and I would watch his body language. And I wouldn’t listen to his words, not that I ever

have with politicians, but I mean, in this case I deliberately would, would switch the sound off and just

watch what happened. Now, it was a difficult discipline because of course, I was able to talk to people,

and it was very difficult not to. But, part of my reluctance to do this was because, I felt it was… Well,

I suppose one’s always reluctant to do something nobody else has done. You know, it was, it was an

original idea to look at humans as animals, and to just observe them, and to record what they do, and

not think about what they’re saying, and it was, because nobody had done it, I felt maybe I shouldn’t be

doing it. [laughs] You know, you sort of feel, well, if it’s so obvious to me that this is something to

do, then why hasn’t somebody else don’t it? And I think it was simply because of, of pigeon-holing.

Zoologists get pigeon-holed, you know, they, they study fruit flies, and there’s a whole discipline for

studying fruit flies, or, or some other kind of animal, you know. And you, you get, you get pigeon-


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holed into that, and so you become an entomological zoologist who only studies insects, or you become

a, a marine biologist who only studies the oceans and so on. And, if you are going to study humans,

well surely that’s the business of sociologists and psychologists and, and psychoanalysts. Isn’t that

what they’re supposed to be…? Yes, but they are not using our method, they’re not using the

ethological method of observation, of quantified observation. And, what I started to do was to use

zoological methods for studying human beings.

[05:27]

Now, you asked me why I was reluctant to do this. I think it’s, because it was a bit, it was a bit scary,

because as I say, nobody had done this, and I knew, I knew that I was going to be attacked by all these

other disciplines. [laughs] What does he think he’s doing? How can he talk about our subject? You

know, I’m a psychoanalyst, I’m a psychiatrist. He can’t talk about human behaviour, he’s a zoologist.

Let him go and look at his bugs. I don’t want him looking at humans, that’s our business. And so there

was a territorial dispute here you see. And I was intruding, I was invading on other territories and…

And I thought, if I do this, if I write a book about human behaviour, as if I’m writing about a fish, or a

bird, I will be in terrible trouble, and all the other disciplines will attack me, and… And so that held

me back a bit. But, a young publisher was so keen, and he said, ‘Nobody’s done this.’ He could see

that it was a first, nobody had done this before. And, and he pressured and pushed and pushed all

through the Sixties, until eventually, in 1966 I, I said, OK, OK, I’ll do it. And I sat down, and I wrote

The Naked Ape in four, I only had four weeks in which to write it. And, I had to write it at, at boiling

point, I mean I was sitting behind, my typewriter actually got hot [laughs], I was typing… Because,

one of the advantages I’ve had, and this is something that I always sort of… Actually today it’s

changing, but, you see, when I was a child I could type before I, almost before I could write. My father

gave me a typewriter, because he was a, he was writing stories and he had a typewriter. And so, he

gave me a typewriter so I could type. And I, I could type fast, as fast I could say, well faster than I

could think actually. It was, it was… Sometimes the keys jammed, I was typing so fast. And, I

always said, when I came to, when I was an undergraduate and everybody else was sort of, laboriously

writing in longhand and I was typing all my essays, so that the, [laughs] I was popular with the teachers

because they could read what I was writing. And I hated doing exams because I had to use longhand,

and I wanted to take a typewriter into the exam but I wasn’t allowed to. But, you know, learning to

type is something which should be taught to every child. But nowadays of course with keyboards it’s

getting, it’s changing, because, poor old typewriters have had their day, and now of course with

computers, children are learning to use keyboards much more than they used to. But, that meant that I

was able to write very quickly, and it was necessary, because I think if I had had longer to think about

it, I’d have, I’d have been scared of what I was doing. But it… So it was written at an incredible pace.

I had got all the ideas together before, I knew exactly what I wanted to say, and each chapter was

exactly the same as if it was a… You know, I had chapters on feeding, fighting, mating and so on.

They were the same headings as my thesis on fish. And I divided human behaviour up just as if I were

looking at another animal. And I wrote it, I didn’t use the word human in the book, there’s no, the

word human doesn’t appear in the book, anywhere. And I used the name Naked Ape because, I wanted

to give it a new title so that people could see their species in a new way. And, to my utter


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astonishment, the book became a bestseller. I thought… I was attacked of course by, by

anthropologists and psychiatrists, they all sort of… It was, it was to be expected, I was invading their

territory, and I don’t blame them for attacking me, I mean, who is this zoological upstart who’s talking

about human behaviour? And so of course I came in for a lot of criticism, but, but people in general

responded to it, because, it was an honest book. I simply wrote… And I also wrote it, learning from

wordsmiths that I had encountered, I wrote it in a simple language, there was nothing technical in it at

all. I kept it into… Somebody once said to me, ‘You know, I, I never read a non-fiction book until

read The Naked Ape, and, and I could read it just like a novel, because I could understand every word,

you know.’ And I said, ‘Well that’s a great compliment.’ And I, I intended people to be able to

understand every word, I went to a lot of trouble to avoid any sort of technical jargon. And that of

course got me into trouble too. [laughs] But, it worked, and people read it, and people responded to it

and, and people would say to me, ‘I understood a bit more about human beings from this book.’ And

that meant a lot to me. And of course it went on to become, I checked it the other day, it’s number

eighty-one in the top 100 bestsellers of all time, and that gives me an enormous feeling of pleasure, that

it is, it was that successful.

[11:01]

It, it had another advantage, that it changed my life, because of course, now I didn’t need to work any

more, and I, I went off to live in the Mediterranean and I, while I was there I said, now, I am going to

make a detailed study of human behaviour. The Naked Ape was really only a sort of, an aperitif. Now

I want the main course. And, the main course was Manwatching, in which I made a study of what is

now known as body language; I mean body language is, is nowadays a common parlance, but it wasn’t,

didn’t exist in those days. And I, what I did was, I’m still doing, is, I decided that, as a zoologist, I

should do what every good ethologist does, and that is, a human ethogram. Now an ethogram is what

you do, if you’re an ethologist and you’re studying animal behaviour in that discipline, the first job,

and this what Niko Tinbergen always taught us, is to do an ethogram, if you’re coming to a new species

you’ve not studied before. Now the ethogram is a list of every action that the animal performs, and you

have to describe it, you have to say what causes it, and you have to say what function it has. And that

you do first and foremost. Once you’ve done that, then you can start your investigations. But you’ve

got to, if an animal stands on its head, or wags its tail, you’ve got to find out, you’ve got to describe the

action of standing on its head, or wagging its tail. I’m making this up of course, I mean, but you know,

these are… But, you have to describe the action, and then you have to say, well, when does it wag its

tail? You know, what… Well actually, that is, wagging the tail is very interesting, because cats and

dogs both wag their tails, but they wag their tails under different circumstances. And you have to then

figure out, what is it that makes a dog wag its tail? Oh, it’s pleased. No, it’s not as simple as that. It’s

not as simple as that. A dog will wag its tail in fear as well as when it’s pleased to see you. And the

angle of the tail when it’s wagging has different signals. So, you know, and then you start to get in…

Now, what I did was that, I mean I had done this with my fish and my birds, I had done ethograms and

described all their actions. Now I was going to do it with humans. And to my astonishment nobody

had done it. There are plenty of dictionaries of words. We are sitting in the house in which the Oxford

English Dictionary was written, and, that was a fantastic labour of, which went on for years and years


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and years, assembling every word in the English language into one huge dictionary. And there were

lots of dictionaries, I have a collection of dictionaries now, since I live in this house, but, there was no

dictionary of human actions. It had never been, and it still hasn’t been done [laughs], because I haven’t

finished it yet. What happened was that I decided that I would do a human ethogram, and I, I set up a

laboratory – not a laboratory, an office, where I had a wonderful assistant, and together we started to

name every human action. Now you might say, well why name a human action? Surely… Yes, there

are a few things we do which have names. A wink has a name, you know? But, there are a lot of other

actions that we do. Most of the actions we perform don’t actually have names. We talk about folding

our arms, or crossing our legs, or gesticulating, but these are very… What I wanted to do was to give

every human action, every movement, every posture, its own name, describe it, and say when it

occurred and what message it had, and what function it had. And, I started on this, and, it was going

very well when, [laughs] and I’d been doing this for years out there, and then, my publisher came out

to see me and he said, ‘How far have you got?’ And I said, ‘I’ve reached the eyebrows.’ And he said,

‘Are you going up or down?’ And I said, ‘Down.’ And at that point he panicked and said, ‘Well I’ve

got to have a book!’ you know. So he persuaded me… You see I wanted to produce this huge

encyclopaedia of human actions. Still do. [laughs] And, I had assembled by now three, about 3,000

actions that people do. I’m not talking about operating implements, I mean operating a piece of

equipment is, is just one action; there may be thousands of different implements. But that’s, that’s one

action. I’m talking about the body language that occurs naturally without instruments and equipment

and things being involved. Just what the body does when people are together. In other words, it’s

really to do with visual communication between people of a kind that they are subliminally aware of,

but not analytically aware of. Because, until I started that study, nobody had analysed different

gestures; nobody had sort of, talked about the difference between a palm up and a palm down, display,

and things like that. So that I was… And, you know, I, how many ways can you fold your arms, how

many ways can you cross your legs, how many gesticulations are there, how many symbolic gestures

are there? And I, I started this study out in the Mediterranean, and Niko Tinbergen came out to see me

and said, ‘Look you must come back to Oxford and make this into a more detailed study where you can

do research, have a research team.’ And he got me a research fellowship here, and I came back to

Oxford, and, and then with a team of people we, of colleagues, we visited twenty-eight different

countries, analysing body language, differences in different cultures, and mapping, which is called the

gesture maps project, and we mapped the distribution of different gestures, which don’t follow

nationalist, national lines, they, they have their own distribution. And, and we were mapping gestures

all over Europe and the Mediterranean. And, and we published a book on that. And it was… And I

also published Manwatching, a book about body language. But, my real aim, to produce an

encyclopaedia of human actions, it was too, it was just too difficult, and, it never did get published:

well, I never finished it. I am still today working on it, and I will still today, I’m still collecting

examples of, every tiny facial expression, body posture. And that, that is something that I do, every

week I am sort of adding a few more details to my collection. But, whether I shall ever publish or not,

I don’t know. But certainly it has been a lifelong obsession of mine to, to study human activities, and

to study, not what people say but what they do. And, it’s, it’s a fascinating study, and it’s, it’s led me


C1672/16Track 1

in… And, I have now, in order to make it, I have travelled a lot. You see when I first began this study,

I hadn’t travelled around the world very much. I knew Europe and the Mediterranean, but, I hadn’t

done a lot of travel. And, and someone said to me, you know, ‘You’re too biased towards European

body language. You’re supposed to studying the human animal. Well, that’s not just Europeans. You

know, what about people in the rest of the world?’ So, I, I said, ‘You’re right.’ And from that point

onwards I began to spread my studies around the world, and I, the other day somebody asked me how

many countries I had visited, and I counted them up and it was 107. Which is a lot of travelling. And I

have in fact, over the last thirty, forty years, travelled extensively, and, I have now been able to make

studies in different countries. And, wherever I go I’m on the lookout for new gestures and new human

activity, actions. And, I still have… Whether I will at the, I shall be eighty-eight in a few weeks’ time,

whether I’ll ever get round to completing my great dictionary of human actions or not, I don’t know.

I’d like to, but it, it is a daunting task. And if I don’t do it, somebody else should do it, because it’s

something that has not yet been done.

[19:59]

Now, in your autobiography and elsewhere you’ve covered very well the reaction to The Naked Ape in

America, which you experienced through a sort of publishing tour there.

Yes.

And by the reaction to it, I’m not speaking now of the reaction of the human sciences but the more sort

of, the popular reaction to it, a kind of moral reaction, that sort of thing.

Mm.

You also covered the reaction to The Naked Ape in Malta very well, especially through your friendship

with the author and the banned books list and so on.

Yes.

But what was your experience, please, of the reaction to it in Britain?

There were two, two main reactions to The Naked Ape. One was, and the one I liked, was the one,

somebody would say to me, ‘You’ve actually helped me to understand human behaviour a bit better

than I did before, you know, you’ve actually opened my eyes to, looking at human beings in a different

way.’ That was the response I was looking for. And I got a lot of that. But I also of course got the

opposite response which is, this is a vulgar way of reducing humans to animals. And I said, well I’m

sorry, but, [laughs] the word reducing doesn’t apply, because I, I respect animals as much as, any

species of animals as much as human beings. And I, I think, what I have done is, I have elevated

human beings to the level of animals, not reduce them to that level. But that was of course the other


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criticism that I had. Some people were… And it was particularly true of people who were interested

in, non-observational studies, you know, where, people who are interested in political theory, or, or

philosophical debate, they were, they sort of said, well, observation is just such a crude thing; what we

are concerned with is, is the inner workings of the brain, and so on. And I said, ‘Yes, but I am

concerned with the outer expression of those workings.’ [laughs] And, I think that’s just as valid.

And, so that, I did have to face, obviously, a lot of criticism of that sort. But, a lot of people, I was

surprised by how many people just said, no, this gives us a new way of looking at people.

[22:30]

What was the response in Britain, do you remember, and this might be experienced on sort of

promotional work in Britain or perhaps correspondence that you got in relation to the book, what was

the response to the, the arguments about the evolutionary origins of religion in particular in that book?

Funnily enough, that didn’t seem to, I didn’t get a lot of response to that. The response was more… I

remember one critic said, ‘You don’t seem to understand that human behaviour is to do with

institutions, and, and organisations, that’s what human behaviour’s about.’ I said, ‘Well yes, that’s,

that’s another, that’s valid, but it’s not what I’m talking about.’ ‘Well you should have talked about it.’

You see that was… I don’t remember any particular response to my religious section of the book. It

didn’t, there didn’t… I mean people either accepted it or, or they just simply ignored, you know, I

mean if they were religious they would have ignored it, and if they weren’t, they accepted it. I didn’t, I

didn’t get involved in… Oh there was… Yes, now there was one occasion, there was one occasion

when… There was one occasion when, I was in Canada actually, it wasn’t in this country, it was in

Canada, and, I was asked to appear on a television programme. And, I was interviewed by a man who

was sitting in front of me, like this, and he said, ‘Right, now we’ve had our discussion about The Naked

Ape. Now we’re going to open it up. And, just turn your…’ And we had to swivel our chairs round,

and a curtain was drawn back, and behind the curtain there was a row of priests, vicars and, clergymen

of various kinds. [laughs] And they’d all been sitting there behind this curtain listening to this

discussion. And, and he said, ‘Right.’ Because he wanted an argument, he wanted a fight you see, and

he had tried to stir up… And he said to one, a rather nice vicar, he said, ‘Now, what do you think about

all this?’ you know, so on. And, and he said, ‘Well I would just, I would just like to ask Desmond

Morris if he feels that human beings have a soul.’ So I said, ‘Well, I think that, humans and other

species of animals are basically the same, so can I ask you a question? Do you think a chimpanzee has

a soul?’ And the poor man, I felt sorry, because he was such a nice man, and I suddenly realised that, I

had forced him into a situation of either sort of saying that, as the Bible does, that animals are brute

beats of no understanding, and, and forced him into a situation where his, his flock would think he was

horrible towards animals [laughs], or, he had to admit that animals had souls, which would upset his

clergy friends. So, I put the poor man in a terrible situation by asking that question. And I could see

him squirming and worrying. So in the end he said, ‘I think the chimpanzee has a very small soul.’

[laughs] Bless him. It was so sweet. You know, but I, those were the sort of things which we had, and

I, I was… You know, I didn’t, I didn’t feel badly towards these, these people. I mean they, they do a


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lot of wonderful work, you know, they help people in trouble and so on. I’ve got, I’m not a

campaigner against, against country vicars, for heaven’s sakes. But I, I just think it’s a pity that, sort of

supernatural phenomena which were really fairy tales told to an earlier generation, earlier culture, are

still being, you know, people are still, intelligent people are still sort of accepting these fairy tales of

miracles and, and things, as, as valid truths, when in fact they are, they are things that we should treat

as, as important fictions and not, not take literally, you know, and, and… But I don’t, I’m not prepared

to campaign against them. I just, find it sad that the supernatural is sort of…

[27:04]

You see, it all, it all comes down to the fact, as I explained in one of the books, I can’t remember

where, that, the moment we had a language that involved the past tense and the future tense, as

opposed… You see animals talk in the present, all animal communication is, is done in the present

tense. If I go, ooh! it’s the mood I’m in now. It’s, it’s, I’m not saying that I was in an ooh! mood

yesterday, or in a ooh! mood tomorrow. I’m saying I’m an ooh! mood today. And, if I’m in at a!

mood, that’s a different mood. But it’s the mood I’m in now. And so when an animal goes ‘a o ou’, I

know that these are signals, vocal signals, vocal communication elements, that are telling one, the

animals telling one another, what mood they’re in at the time. Now we, once we developed verbal

communication, which was such an extraordinary thing to do, and is one of our really unique features,

we then actually invented a past tense, so we could talk about history and what happened in the past:

animals couldn’t give a damn about what happened in the past, and we could talk about the future, and

what may happen tomorrow. And, again, animals don’t think about tomorrow in that sense. So,

thinking about tomorrow had a terrible effect, because it meant that we started to realise and to discuss

the fact that we were going to die. Now, dying is something that switches off everything, and is a

terrible thing to face. And, whenever an animals is threatened with death it develops some sort of

defence mechanism, and our defence mechanism was the afterlife. We, we created this idea that there

was an afterlife, and that meant dying wouldn’t be so bad. And we protected ourselves against these

concepts of death, which came out of the future tense that had come into our, our language, by creating

an afterlife. And, and all the ancient cultures you find this. I mean Egypt is riddled with it, I mean,

[laughs] the whole of Egyptian art is concerned with the afterlife pretty well. And, and the afterlife

became so important because it was the protection against the horror of everything stopping with death.

And, now I don’t know whether there’s an afterlife, I have no idea whether there’s an afterlife. I mean

I, as a scientist I cannot tell you whether there’s an afterlife or not. I think it’s unlikely. I’m not saying

it doesn’t happen because, that’s a piece of, sort of atheistic bigotry. We don’t know whether there’s

an afterlife, that’s the simple truth, but it seems highly unlikely to me that there is one. And, I therefore

found that, I was in sympathy with people who wanted there to be an afterlife, I could understand…

You see the afterlife is a comforting thought, the thought that you’re going to actually be able to go on,

and it, it comforts people when they’re dying. I don’t have that advantage unfortunately [laughs], but it

is comforting, and I’m not going to attack it. I’m just… But as a scientist I have to try and explain it,

and I explain how it began. Now, because I explain why we did it, because as an animal we needed to

defend ourselves against concepts of dying, because we introduced them through the future tense of our

language, that doesn’t mean to say that I’m making statements about whether there’s an afterlife or not,


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I’m simply explaining how we came to that conclusion that there’s an afterlife. And, if you ask me

personally, I don’t think there is one, but, I don’t know. And, and so therefore, I, my attitude isn’t

aggressive where religion is concerned, it’s, I try to explain it. It’s explanatory. And I try to explain

how other religious concepts have been developed, and how they have helped people who, who have

had them. That’s, to try and explain religion is not the same as, as being aggressive towards it, it’s a…

Somebody said, ‘Yes, but you’re explaining it away.’ Well I’m explaining away parts of it, yes. I’m

saying that a lot of stories are really just, fairy tales that are dressed up as facts, and… But I, I, I

haven’t campaigned, I’m, I’m not interested in that, and, in the house you will find examples of

religious art which I enjoy; even though I’m not religious, I find religious art very beautiful and, and it

doesn’t mean to say that I am going to start attacking religious art because it’s, it’s based on religious

ideas. If it’s beautifully painted, that’s, that’s fine by me.

[32:17]

Thank you. Would I be right, though, judging from the book, that the reaction, any negative reaction to

The Naked Ape on religious grounds was more marked in Malta and in America than it was in Britain?

Yes, that’s certainly true. In Malta there was censorship in, back in the Sixties, of, not just The Naked

Ape but of, Stendhal was on the list [laughs], for example. There were a lot of, anything that didn’t,

that caused the slightest controversy was, was banned. It’s changed now of course, but… And in

America it depended where you were. I mean in Dallas, I was being interviewed and I was asked,

‘Have you ever seen a chimpanzee evolving?’ was the question I was asked. [laughs] And, you know,

which showed a total lack of understanding of evolution. But, that was the exact quote, the words,

‘Have you ever seen a chimpanzee evolving?’ And, you wouldn’t get that question in New York, or

Los Angeles, but you would get it in Dallas. I mean, there are two Americas, you know, and, there’s a

very sophisticated America in, in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and then there’s another, more

homespun America, elsewhere. And, I, I did give a talk in one of these more homespun cities, and, and

it was a very sweet audience, and they all, you know, applauded after I finished my speech. And then

they all queued up, and I, I thought, why are they lining up in front of me like this? And each one of

them came up, said, ‘Thank you for your speech,’ and gave me a religious pamphlet. [laughs] And

then moved on, and the next one came up, ‘Thank you for your speech.’ They were very polite, you

know, and gave me another religious pamphlet. And I ended up with this pile of religious pamphlets.

And the last little old lady came up to me and said, ‘Thank you for your speech,’ and, and I looked at

this pile of pamphlets, and I was looking a bit… So she said, ‘Oh don’t worry,’ she said, ‘you’re not as

bad as the one we had last week. That was Jane Fonda, she was much worse.’ [laughs] I thought…

And they were so sweet about it, you know, but they, they just, you know, they just couldn’t accept any

criticism of, of all the biblical stories as absolute truth rather than as, as parables.

[34:55]

Thank you. Now one key argument in The Naked Ape is that, however much our brain size and

complexity means that humans are a cultural ape, even a space ape, patterns of behaviour established


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in evolutionary history show through, still shine through, and affect our civilisation, and that

civilisations will only prosper if they don’t clash with these more basic urges. Did you, in 1966, feel

there was a danger that that was happening? Is that part of writing the book?

Well what had happened was that, most of the studies of human behaviour had looked at learning and

influence of the environment. And, there was a general view at the time that, human beings, when they

were born, were a tabula rasa, a blank canvas on which experience wrote everything. So the idea was

that, you know, you take a child and you teach it and it learns, and everything it does is dependent on

its environmental teaching. And there were no inherited characteristics, at all, that was the extreme

view. Compared with, say, a bird, where, or many species, where we know that they would do

elaborate displays which they had never seen before. I mean when, when a particular fish or a bird

became mature and it would reach reproductive age and it would start to perform courtship dances, it

had never seen a courtship dance, so, it couldn’t have learnt them. And there were many cases where

elaborate patterns of behaviour were performed without any sort of prior training or knowledge or, or

experience or teaching, from parents or from adults, and it was clear that in those cases there was an

inbuilt set of genetic instructions, or suggestions, and that this meant that, as the, the animal didn’t just

develop a pair of eyes and a pair of ears and a, a tongue and, but it also developed patterns of

behaviour. And these patterns of behaviour would have affected its reproductive activities, its

courtship activities, it’s fighting, its, its, and all, all its parental care and all the rest of it. Now, to me, it

seemed extraordinary that, [laughs] the human species would lose advantages of that kind, to have

some genetic instructions, in terms of behaviour as well as in terms of anatomy. I mean nobody can

argue about the anatomy, that, that is clearly genetically determined. We can, we can become muscle

builders, we can become puny, we can become musclebound. We can change the extent of our

musculature, but it’s the same muscles, and if you analyse the muscle, it doesn’t matter whether you’re

Arnold Schwarzenegger or, or a wimp, you will have the same muscles, it’s just that they get more

heavily developed in one case than in another. So there’s no argument about anatomy being

genetically inherited, but behaviour surely, that’s all… And that was, that was where I was coming

from, zoology, and this is why I was, had a different approach. I would say, look, why on earth would

one species throw away all the advantages of having genetic suggestions about behaviour? So I argued

in The Naked Ape, and this was one of the most controversial parts of it actually, was that, that we do

have these genetic… I said, don’t let’s call them instructions or orders, let’s call them suggestions,

genetic suggestions, because, after all, a nun can go through life without any sexual behaviour at all, so,

the suggestion, genetic suggestion in her case that you should reproduce and have children has been

ignored, has been overruled by her, her lifestyle. So we are capable of having a completely celibate

life, even though we have a powerful sex drive.

[39:16]

And, and so I’m not saying that we are forced to do these things, but, we do all have genetic

suggestions that this is, this is the way we are. And one of those suggestions is that we’re competitive,

and another suggestion is that we’re cooperative. And, one of the things that’s been overlooked is the

intensely cooperative nature of the human species, because we could not possibly have survived in


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primeval times without a huge amount of cooperation between individuals. And that cooperation

wasn’t just passive, it was active cooperation. If we hadn’t had active cooperation, we wouldn’t have

become hunger-gatherers, and we wouldn’t have been a successful species. And, one of the things that

tends to get overlooked, because of course, newspapers and television newsreels, they all focus on the

horrors of life, you know, there’s been another killing, there’s been another torture, another slaughter or

whatever, and, and these of course are the exceptions. The reason why they’re news is because they

are not typical human behaviour; they’re atypical behaviour, they are the, the freak moments in human

behaviour, which, out of the sort of six or seven thousand million of us, just a handful are doing these

terrible things. And so… And those terrible things become news, and so people start to say, the

human species is a murdering, torturing, rapist species, and it’s nonsense. Those are the exceptions,

and 99.99999 per cent of human beings get up in the morning and have a peaceful day, and they’re

cooperative and helpful and friendly, and they do not murder and rape and torture. But, the newsreels

never discuss those people. [laughs] They never say, ‘Mr Smith got up and had a very friendly day

today, and he helped somebody who had fallen down in the road and picked, helped him,’ you know.

They don’t do that. They only talk about the man who got a machete and went round hacking people to

pieces. That’s the way the news works, and it is giving us a totally distorted picture of human

behaviour. And if you look at human behaviour as a whole, we are the most extraordinarily helpful,

cooperative, friendly species, who’s so friendly and cooperative that we can actually live in unnatural

circumstances in big cities. A big city is totally wrong for human species. That’s why I wrote the book

called The Human Zoo, in which I explained that we, we get excited by the big city but we also suffer

from it. And, we are a tribal species, we evolved as a tribal species, living in small groups, and that is

where our nature is, and we try to create a natural tribal group within the big city, our friends and

colleagues and so on, and we make up a little tribal group within that city. We’re not like ants in an

anthill, we, we have thousands of interlocking tribal groups within the big city. But, I do, I do think

that people should re-examine human behaviour in terms of what happens most days to most people,

and not, as we tend to do with the news, what happens to the freakish exceptions, which distorts our

view. So, people do seem to think that the human species is, is, you know, as I say, a murdering, rapist,

torturing, horror story, when in fact that is extremely rare. It does happen of course, but it’s extremely

rare, and is not typical human behaviour. And I am, my studies of human behaviour have tried to look

at, at typical human behaviour and say what people are really like and not what you see in the

newsreels, or the headlines.

[43:13]

Did you see it, in 1966 did you see the human beings coming to know their nature better, did you see

that in any way as a, a way to counter the things that you’re, you and other people are obviously

worried about at this time, and they come up in the book, the sort of, Cold War, nuclear weapons, over-

population, to what extent did you see your way of understanding human beings as actually useful in

attempting to ensure that the balance between biology and culture was set at the right level in the

future going forward?


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Well I think… Yes, understanding the balance, to use your phrase, the balance between biology and

culture, this is, I think this is terribly important. Because of course, although I was emphasising the

genetic factors and the biological aspects of human behaviour, of course… And somebody said to me,

you know, ‘You’re ignoring cultural learning and…’ And I said, ‘No I’m not. I mean, do you think I

don’t know about that? That’s ridiculous. I am just focusing on something that’s been ignored in the

past. And, the underlying biological tendencies that we have are important to understand, because it

will give us a better chance of understanding what kind of animal we are. And, I think that, you know,

to understand that, teaches us a great deal about ourselves. You see you couldn’t have a war if you

weren’t cooperative. Because, soldiers don’t kill because they hate the enemy; they kill because,

they’re helping their friends. You… The soldier is a cooperative individual who is cooperating with

his, with his chums, and, and that’s what’s important. If we weren’t co cooperative, you couldn’t get

people to go to war, you know, it wouldn’t, they would say, ‘No, I’m not going to do that.’ It’s, it’s a,

cooperation is a double-edged sword. It means you can make people into sort of, North Koreans if you

like on the one hand with a dictator telling them all to jump and when they all jump together… Or you

can have it as, in its best form, where people are being incredibly helpful to one another when they’re

in trouble. So, understanding human cooperation and competition and the need for, ego displays and

all these things, it, it’s, it is important to try and help humanity. I’m just trying to explain people as

best I can as a zoologist and say what kind of animal they are, and then it’s up to them what they do

with it of course. I’m, I’m providing the information, and trying to set the record straight. I think the,

there is… You know, what we have to understand is, how easy it is for this behaviour to be distorted

and carried astray, so that we get into unpleasant forms extremism, and, you know, I think if you

understand the human being as an animal, you can understand those sort of trends more easily.

[46:33]

And how have we done since 1967? You did say that there was a good chance that mankind will have

wiped itself out by the end of the century. It didn’t do that, but how, how is it going do you think?

Well I mean there’s always that risk, because we are… You see one… Just to take one example.

Somebody asked me if I needed to revise The Naked Ape, and I said, only one word, actually it’s not

even a word, it’s a number, and that is the number, I quote the number of people, there were 3,000

million people I think alive when I wrote The Naked Ape, and now there are six or seven thousand

million. So in other words, the human population has doubled since I wrote The Naked Ape. And, that

is, that is a serious problem. Because it can’t go on like that. That will eventually, if that continues,

and there’s no sign of that trend changing, if that trend continues into the future, you know, follows the

same graph so to speak, we will eventually destroy ourselves, because, the planet is a small planet and

it can’t take it. It may take 1,000 years for this to happen, it may take 100, I don’t know, but, the fact is

that, you see, as a biologist I look at population control mechanisms. Now, there are many different

kinds. There are… For example, people sort of say, if we didn’t have fox hunting, the country would

be overrun with foxes. This isn’t true, because the foxes were here long before hunters, and they, they

control their populations very well. If foxes become over-populated, a specific mechanism occurs.


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Some of the vixens stop breeding, stop coming into heat. Only the… If there are some dominant

vixens and some, some subordinate vixens, the subordinate ones stop breeding. And so, there is a, a

reproductive interference mechanism with foxes, and there is with mice too, you never get a house

overrun with mice, there’ll only be a few families of mice living in different parts of a house. And

that’s because of the Bruce effect. Now Bruce was a zoologist, I knew her, she was a remarkable

zoologist, and she discovered that, if a female mouse who is pregnant, if she smells the odour of a

strange mouse that isn’t in her family, she reabsorbs her embryos. The embryos go into reverse, and

she becomes un-pregnant. A mechanism which mice have but humans don’t. I mean of course,

[laughs] if humans had that mechanism, you can imagine, that would stop our breeding very rapidly,

because we’re so many of us you see. But the point about it is that, that a house mouse keeps its

population down by having a breeding restriction mechanism built into its genetic make-up. Now for

some strange reason we don’t have this. I say strange reason because you, you would think… I think

it’s probably that we, in primeval times we were so thin on the ground, you know, we hadn’t, we

haven’t really developed it yet. And the result is that, no matter how crowded we become, we still go

on breeding. And, we do not have a mechanism that, of the kind that foxes have, or mice have, or,

different species have different, different mechanisms. But those, those breeding control mechanisms

that have managed to keep populations of other animals stable, don’t seem to apply to humans. And, it

is odd. You see now, if you study only humans you don’t think it’s odd, you know, you think, this is

not… But you see when you look at, when you compare us, that’s what I like to do, I like to compare

us with other species, when you compare us with other species, then, the fact that we do not have a

breeding control mechanism, is very peculiar. And… But the only one we have is, well, I suppose,

global warfare reduces population but not a lot. Disease, a pandemic disease, that’s probably the

biggest controller. There have been… The Black Death and, and various other pandemics like that,

have reduced the population considerably. And eventually, when we reach a point of over-population

to a degree where we start to become stressed, and the stress will interfere with our immune system,

and then we will start to succumb to diseases, and eventually, I think it’s an epidemic that will finish us

off. I don’t think weapons, well, there’s always a risk of that, but I think, I think in in the end it’ll, if

we, if we go on over-populating, it will be, an epidemic will, will strike us down. And, it won’t, it

won’t eliminate us, there’ll be a few dessert nomads will survive, and then they’ll start breeding again.

And our population may crash and civilisations may vanish, as they have in the past, but, eventually

there will be some people tucked away in corners who will survive. And, and then we’ll be back again.

I don’t, I don’t think… I think it’s un… Unless, unless we are… You see we, we don’t have any

genetic control over weaponry. Weapons are artificial, and as long as we could only use our fists, we

weren’t in any sort of, serious trouble. But the moment we had, we had serious weaponry, that was

something, we didn’t have any, we have no protection against, genetically, we don’t have any sort of,

any biology to protect us from nuclear weapons, and, and, there is still a serious risk of that. But I, at

the moment we seem to have got that under control. And, as I say, we are a very creative, very, have a

high level of curiosity as a species, very high level of curiosity, we’re a very creative species and we’re

a very cooperative species, and those are the features that I think mean that we will, with any luck, and

you need a bit of luck, solve our problems, and reduce the, the monstrous freaks who, who rape and


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torture and plunder and, and you know, all of that, which will I think, I hope, become increasingly rare,

though it, it does seem to keep rearing its head.

[53:32]

Could we now, in the last few questions, go to your return to the Oxford department, after your time in

Malta?

Mm.

And could you talk about any changes in the kind of zoology that was taking place in the kind of people

around you? And could you also get to a point where you explain why, say, a piece of your art ended

up being on the cover of The Selfish Gene? So I think there’s some sort of connection between you and

Richard and,, and the publisher Michael Rodgers, who’s written a book. So, but first of all, the

department, how was it different from the department that you had been in as a younger…?

Yes. Well, when I came back, Tinbergen wanted me to… He, he was very interested in my… He was

very complimentary about The Naked Ape, although some of his colleagues said, said nasty things

about it, but he wouldn’t, he was very defensive, and was very helpful. And he wanted me to come

back here and do more research, and I did, I did some studies in his department on, I was interested in

laterality, lateral aspects of human behaviour, that is, left-handedness versus right-handedness and so

forth; whether you have a left eye, a dominant left eye, a dominant right eye, and all the rest of it. And

I was doing studies of that. And, so he was allowing me to do human studies in his department. Then

he retired. And when he retired, everything changed, and the department became less concerned with

the kind of animal behaviour that interested me, whether it was human or non-human. And, I, at this

stage I found myself less and less involved with the department, and my, my gestural research which

was going on over the world, I was visiting different countries, was with colleagues from the

department of psychology. Because psychology had changed too you see, the old rat psychologists had

been replaced by psychologists who were doing research which was increasingly in my direction, you

know, they were doing studies which, of body language, which were much more in my field. And, and

so that, the team that I worked with on my gesture studies were largely psychologists who, which was

very different from the early days. But psychology had changed, and they were critical of, of maze-

running of rats and all the old rat psychology, they were critical of that, and they were looking, they

were going out actually in the field and studying human behaviour, and they were doing studies that,

that fascinated me. They were looking at, sport, and, and at, music, and, going out and studying the

behaviour of people who were involved with sport and music and so on. And that was, that was

interesting. So, I eventually found that, the Department of Zoology was no longer really going in my

direction, it was… And of course, zoology has changed dramatically in recent years, it’s now much

more concerned with genomes and things of that sort. You won’t find many birds or fish in the

department any more I don’t think. The field studies are still going on, I mean Jane Goodall is still

going on with her studies in the field, and there are very good field studies being done, but it is, very


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much more now, field studies of animal behaviour in Africa and so on is a genre, and there are people

doing some wonderful studies of lions and elephants and things in the field. But, the zoology

laboratories are, are now getting further away from whole animal behaviour. So I, I found myself

working really with an independent group of researchers to do my studies here. And that, that was a

change from the early days. The zoology department was no longer, it was in a new building which

was, lacked any eccentricities we say, and, it was much more sort of, grown-up than the old crazy days

of more childlike approach to creativity which is so, so exciting. But, as, as years have gone, I’ve gone

on writing books. I’ve… What I’ve done is, I have, I have taken specific subjects, like, I mean

everything from Bronze Age art to, association football. I’ve looked at many different aspects of

human behaviour, and with sport, I have, I have tried to analyse what is going on, you know, when a

football game is being played, why is it, why does it arouse human passion, when it’s kicking a ball

about? And, and I, I’ve been able to devise some theories there, developed some theories about the

nature of sport, and how it’s evolved as a form of ritual hunting, you know, which replaced, it’s

replaced the old hunt that we used to have with a symbolic hunt now. And, and again, I was very

interested in the origin of art and how that, how that began, and I did studies of chimpanzee paintings,

and then I studied prehistoric art, and I wrote a book about Bronze Age art, and, and it… So that my

studies have continued but they’ve become, I’ve looked at particular areas of human behaviour and sort

of said, why do human beings engage in sport, why do they engage in art? And, and tried to provide

explanations of this. And, and that’s been very exciting to do, and very rewarding, and that’s that has

filled my years more recently. Although I still, I still write books about animals and I, I’ve just, a few

months ago had a book on bison for example, I’ve just written a whole book about bison, because I was

fascinated by their, their story. And, I, I still divide my time between writing about animals and

humans on the one hand and painting my pictures on the other.

[1:00:30]

My pictures are, a sort of, it’s as if I’m developing… You mentioned the book on, the painting of mine

on The Selfish Gene. The reason it’s there is because of course, Richard Dawkins was writing about, a

biological subject, and he recognised that in my painting I was developing a sort of biological a world

of biomorphs as I call them, biological beings, which were, almost like a parallel evolution, another

evolution that was taking place. My, my biomorphs live on another planet if you like. [laughs] And,

and… But they have evolved over the years, they started in ’47 and they’re still going strong. So

that’s another. And there is a relationship between the painting and the scientific work, because,

although the mental process is different, one is intuitive and the other is analytical, but, when I’m

working on a painting, my knowledge of biological shapes and interactions of shapes is, is underlying

the imaginative scenes that I concoct. You won’t identify, there are no, no particular animal forms

there, but they are influenced by my understanding of, things like, segmentation, cephalisation,

allometric growth patterns, all the things that I know from studying the shapes and development of

animal bodies, I will have that at the back of my mind when I’m creating my own evolution of

biomorphs on my canvases.

[1:02:10]


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The impression you get from Michael Rodgers’ book on the, Publishing and the Advancement of

Science, is that you were, you knew Richard at the time that he was writing The Selfish Gene, is that

right?

Yes.

Because, it says, for example, Richard had been talking to Desmond Morris, who suggested The Gene

Machine as the title, and that sort of thing.

Oh did you hear that? Yes. Yes.

So could you, could you describe that, the relationship between you two? I’m not quite sure where

Richard was at the stage of his career when you knew him, whether he was writing the…

Well Richard’s younger than me. He, he came, he was a later generation here, so we didn’t really

overlap. But he… [laughs] Richard, you know, just as I was nervous about writing The Naked Ape,

Richard was nervous about writing The Selfish… Just as I was nervous about writing The Naked Ape,

he was, had the same sort of nervousness about writing The Selfish Gene. And he came to see me and

we sat and talked about it for ages, and, I said that I thought the word selfish wasn’t a good word to

have in a title of a book, you know, it, it’s not a nice word to have in a title. And I suggested The Gene

Machine, because that’s what he was talking about, it was… But he, he stuck, he, he said, he stuck to

his guns and called it The Selfish Gene, and it worked. And he had a huge success with that book, in

the same way that in an earlier period I had had a success with The Naked Ape. And it was a, it was a,

again, a forthright book which, which set out a biological approach in an uncompromising way. And, it

had a, it had huge impact. He… I had an exhibition of my paintings on in Oxford at the time, and he

went to see it, and unknown to me he spent his, the whole advance for The Selfish Gene on one of my

paintings. [laughs] And that was the one he put on the cover. Because he felt that that sort of, was a

kind of, an evolutionary painting as it were, a biomorphic painting. And, I was horrified when I

discovered he had actually spent all that money on my… But he, he did it without telling me, you

know. So I gave him another painting to make up for it, [laughs] it’s all I could do, because he, he had

already bought it, and the gallery had sold it to him, so I couldn’t really… But that was, I was very

touched by that. And, he, he has, of course, gone on to become famous as someone who is

vociferously opposed to religious ideas, and, you know, he had become a campaigner, which I am not.

I’m not a campaigner. But I, I can understand his, his alarm at the dangers of extreme forms of

religion, and, I’m afraid they’re all around us today, and, the extreme forms of religion, mild forms of

religion may be helpful but the extreme forms that we see. And you’ve got to remember that it’s not

just the Islamic terrorists, it was, not so long ago it was the Spanish Inquisition. You know, it’s like,

every religion has its time when it can get out of control in that way, and the Spanish Inquisition was

just as horrible as, as the, and witch burning and all the rest of it. You know, it’s not, you know, we

tend to think at this moment in time, just of, of the Islamic terrorists and suicide bombers and so on,


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but, if you look back through the history of religion, there have been so many horrific slaughters and

murders and killings and tortures in the name of religion that, you can see why Richard is, is so

vociferous. And, he, he is, his motivation is, whatever people may say about him, who don’t like him,

don’t like it, his motivation is simply that he sees how religious faith can so easily lead to horrific

behaviour, and, and that upsets him. And so he, he speaks out against it.

Do you remember what he was worried about when he came to you to talk about his book?

Oh, just the same thing exactly as The Naked Ape, that he, he was concerned that, he would be attacked

for writing about selfish genes, you know, and saying that this is, this is what was… You know, he, he

had the same worry that I had that he was getting outside the area of, you know, sort of studying birds

and fish and, you know, he was moving into that area. And of course he did. And his work of course

is still controversial. But he’s, he has matured now, and isn’t, doesn’t have the anxiety any more.

[1:07:32]

I’ve only got two more questions, so we’re nearly there. How was his understanding of genetics

popularised in The Selfish Gene like or unlike your own understanding of what you’ve described today

and you describe elsewhere as the suggestion of genes?

Mm. I, well I think, the point is that both his writing and mine, we’re both zoologists you see, and, we

both come from the Tinbergen school of, of careful observation of behaviour. And so we’re both

concerned with seeing human beings as biological organisms, and, as no more than that. A very

exceptional biological organism, a remarkable and unique biological organism, of a quite extraordinary

kind, but still a biological organism. And that’s it. And so, his anxieties over talking about selfish

genes and about genetic selection and so on, that is basically the same worry that I had, though I

wasn’t, I was looking at it at a slightly different level. He was, he was looking at it at the level of the

genes, and I was looking at it from the level of, of the complete human being. But basically, we, we

both had this idea of writing a book that people could read, and, he is a very good writer, and, so few

scientists are able to write in a popular way. I was… I don’t know how he’s managed it, but I know

how I managed it. It was entirely due to television, that, I had to, when I first started television, I had

all my academic training and academic jargon and, dependent clauses that would be applied to every

statement, you know. [laughs] And I, everything had to be balanced and cautious as a good scientist.

And then suddenly I am on television and I’m having to simplify. And as I said earlier, my code of

conduct was simplification without distortion, and that was my, the essence of what I was doing. But

simplification was involved, and I had to, I had to learn to avoid jargon. I had to avoid using technical

terms. I could no longer talk about autochthonous and allochthonous differences, you know. I mean I,

if I suddenly said to somebody, this is, this is , we’re looking here at an autochthonous display, you

know, it wouldn’t work, you know. I had to, I couldn’t use a word like autochthonous or

allochthonous, which were two terms that were being used to describe a behaviour pattern in its

original form or in a transferred form. And I, I couldn’t… So many of the scientific subtleties of this


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debate had to be smoothed out. Because, otherwise people would switch off their television set.

[laughs] So, I was trained, I had a very, I was lucky because my first producer happened to be a very

very good, he went on to become a major theatrical producer later on, William Gaskill, and he was

brilliant. And I was just very lucky to have a young man who was about to go on and become a major

theatre producer at an early stage, and he was learning the ropes of television as well. And he, he

would train me in simplifying, and, after about the first 100 programmes I was beginning to get it right.

[laughs] And, and so that, I had that television training behind me of using simple language to express

myself, and leaving out the technical jargon, and the technical terms. And that’s what I had when I

came to write The Naked Ape. And that’s what helped me to… Now I don’t know how Richard

managed it, but, he managed it without that, because he didn’t do a lot of, he didn’t do television the

way I did. But that was how I managed it. And I had, I had to have that training to get rid of my

scientific jargon. And, every so often when I’ve gone back and done some scientific writing, and I

haven’t had to restrain myself to simple language, it’s really quite, quite pleasurable, [laughs] because I

can, I can express myself in subtle and complex jargon. And that’s, that’s quite, quite pleasant for a

scientist. But I, over my life I have increasingly had to, had to sort of, learn to communicate to a

wide… Well I wanted to communicate. I mean, I didn’t have to, I wanted to communicate. I thought,

behaviour ideas that have come out of comparative ethology as a scientific discipline, are so applicable

to general understanding of what animals do, and why animals behave the way they do, that I am

almost duty bound to try and get those ideas across to people, to give them a better understanding of

animal behaviour, and human behaviour. And that’s what’s motivated me really for, for the rest of my

scientific life. And then when it gets too much I go into my studio and, and allow my completely

intuitive, irrational thoughts to take over for a bit and, and that relaxes, relaxes me, and I can enjoy the

painting, and then I go back and do another brutally objective study of, of behaviour.

[1:13:27]

And having the two parts, almost like two hemispheres of my brain, has been very helpful, because, it

has, they have, I get one brain exhausted and then I go, one hemisphere is exhausted, and I go to the

other hemisphere. So in other words, I’m, I’m doing detailed analytical studies of, of animal

behaviour, or scientific analysis, and when I get exhausted with that I go into my studio, which is next

to my library, and I get into my studio, and there my intuitive, automatic, irrational thoughts come to

the surface, and unconscious imagery starts to develop on my painting, and, and I’m using a totally

different part of my brain. There is a slight difference between the hemispheres, there’s a bias, that one

hemisphere is more analytical and the other is more intuitive. And so, I always argue that my library

and my studio are the two hemispheres in my brain. And I think I’m very lucky to have those two

hemispheres. Most people only have one hemisphere active. Artists generally don’t do any scientific

analysis, and scientists generally don’t do any creative, artistic work. I’m lucky, I’ve had both

hemispheres active throughout my entire life, since, since, well, not early childhood but since school

days anyway. And, it’s that balance between those two things. And, someone said to me, ‘Yes, but,

don’t you think that your intuitive, your development of intuitive thinking, unconscious intuitive

thinking, has sometimes helped your scientific work, and that your meticulous scientific work has

sometimes helped your, the technique you use in your painting?’ And I said, ‘Yes, you may be right,


C1672/16Track 1

there is, there is, there are some crossovers between the two hemispheres, two connections.’ And, it is

true that, even today at the age of eighty-seven, I’ve just done twenty new oil paintings which are

meticulous in their technique, and I think, the reason they’re meticulous is because of that, the other

part of my brain, the scientific part that says, this must be done meticulously. And, so, I use meticulous

technique to create my irrational imagery, borrowing from the scientific part of my brain. And then

when I am in my scientific work, if I have a, a sort of, creative idea for a new title for a book or

something, an unusual title, that may be coming from the fact that my intuitive brain is also active. So

I think, my advice to anyone is to try and lead a double life. If, if you are a scientist, I think it’s a good

idea to develop something, maybe musical, it may not be, it needn’t be visual arts, it could be, it could

be sculpture, it could be pottery, it could be anything, you know, but some sort of artistic activity to

balance and to give a rest to the… Because the more you, if you can give a rest to your meticulous

analytical brainwork, then when you come back to it, it’s refreshed. And, in that way, each activity

refreshes the other one, and it gives it a rest and I can go back to it again. When I finish a series of

paintings I, I need to write a book, and when I’ve finished a book I need to get into my studio. And,

and I, think that having those two forms of creativity have worked brilliantly for me personally, and I, I

would, I would recommend to any young scientist, or young artist, to try and keep, think about the

other hemisphere in your brain, and give it a chance.

[End of Track 2]

[End of Interview]

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