The Bald Ape

The Bald Ape

Desmond Morris christened us “the naked ape” in his 1967 book The Naked Ape.[1] His reason was that we are hairless compared to other apes; that is what marks us out from them. But this is wrong, because we are neither hairless nor naked. We are not hairless because we have a lot of hair—all over as well as in the obvious places. Our body hair is just finer and less visible than that of our ape relatives. You might say we are less hairy than them, but we are not hairless; by that standard non-human apes would be naked compared to polar bears. Further, being hairless is not the same as being bald: the palms of the hand are hairless, but it would be odd to say they are bald. To be bald is to have no hair where hair normally exists. A snake is not bald, or an elephant, or an ant, or a stone. We are hairy apes with some hairless body parts, but we are not bald (unless contingently on the head). We are fairly hairy animals prone to going bald on top. Are we naked in the ordinary sense? Of course not: we wear clothes. Our ape relatives are naked because unclothed; we are the non-naked ape. So, should we be designated “the clothed ape”? Well, that is not quite right either: some of us are clothed some of the time, and some of us are never clothed; and we existed as a species before we invented clothes. And isn’t it correct to say birds are clothed in feathers and polar bears in fur? The concept of clothes is not defined clearly enough to apply only to us, let alone all of us (are shoes clothes?). No one is ever fully clothed (except perhaps astronauts and Eskimos). We cannot then be defined by our outer covering or lack thereof: we are not defined by being hairless or naked or bald or clothed. Whether we can be singled out from other apes by any other distinctive characteristic remains a moot point—perhaps the ability to misdescribe ourselves.[2]

[1] This book made a big splash when it appeared and the idea of the naked ape captured the popular imagination. I first read the book in 1969 and re-read it recently. It stands up well.

[2] It is very tempting to want to find an observable trait that sets us apart from animal creation, but as good Darwinians we should eschew such an ambition. There is continuity not discontinuity. Beware the discrete mind! Is there an unobservable trait? It isn’t easy to find any such trait: some people cite language, but this trait is shared by other communicating species. If we say “language as humans have language”, we face the retort “That’s like saying we have eyes as humans have eyes”—a trivial tautology. It also implies that before language evolved humans were all of a piece with other animals. Kinship is the rule not transcendence.