The Ape Wears Versace

People are still arguing with The Naked Ape. Last month, the
Christian Courier published an article “debunking” Desmond Morris’s
popular 1967 book about animal behavior: “The cumulative evidence
forces the honest investigator to admit that man’s ancestry is not to
be found in the savagery of the animal kingdom,” the article declares.
Just about any good used bookstore has at least one battered paperback
copy of The Naked Ape on its shelves, and to look at the
book—it’s thin and often adorned with a satisfying line drawing
of a simian or two on the cover—it’s hard to believe the furor it
caused.

Morris, a British zoologist, wrote frankly about the human being as
an animal, providing enough revelations to humiliate any
self-respecting creationist. Like virtually every book about a
scientific topic written in the vernacular, Naked was attacked by some
scientists as an oversimplification, but no other bestseller has
contributed as much scientific fact to the discourse of everyday
Americans: It popularized terms like “hunter-gatherer” and delivered a
message of messy humility to our snobby species. Whereas many
science-minded books don’t age well—those hosts of chaos-theory
books from the ’90s are now just empty husks—Naked still retains
its ability to inform and surprise. It’s on college syllabi across the
country, and it pops up with alarming regularity in the “favorite
books” section of many people’s MySpace profiles. (There aren’t many
books like that on MySpace.)

The Well-Dressed Ape: A Natural History of Myself, by Hannah Holmes,
continues Morris’s good work. Rather than writing broadly about the
species, Holmes looks in the mirror—literally—and reports
back on the animal she sees. The result is a kind of scientific memoir,
an exploration of the species through deep introspection. It’s also a
creature from an even more rare phylum: a book about its author that
doesn’t give too much information or bore with unchecked solipsism.
Aspiring memoirists would do well to pay attention; Holmes understands
the importance of portraying oneself not as a special case but as a
microcosm of common experience.

Holmes is a better writer than Morris; in the chapter about ears,
she begins: “Reading last evening on the couch I was distracted by a
scratch. A scuttle. The plastery gritching of Mus musculus, the house
mouse.” It’s not far from the “plastery gritching” to Holmes’s ear
itself: “So let’s take a look at this pinnal flap of mine. It’s no
thing of beauty. It’s a bald ruffle of cartilage, immobile as an owl’s
eye.”

She has that rare pop-science writer’s ability to casually drop
facts that makes a reader think again about something so ubiquitous as
to be forgotten like, say, living in tall buildings:

When I hunt for science on high-rise humans, the scant research I
locate has been conducted mainly on college students in dormitories…
While students on lower floors tend to feel their rooms are too small
and insufficiently private, students in identical rooms on high floors
rate their rooms as light, quiet, and spacious. However, there does
seem to be a price for climbing too high. A smattering of studies
suggests that mental health suffers from living aloft. Children
especially show more symptoms of mental illness when they perch in tall
buildings.

Holmes is a chatty, inquisitive guide—she gamely picks apart
her decision not to bear children and eats raw meat to see what it
feels like: “It slithers between the teeth, crushing a little, but then
squirting free. To reduce it to pulp demands minutes, not seconds, of
chewing.” Much of her writing resembles Mary Roach’s breezy,
unflinching style. There is preciousness: “Lions and tigers and cats
(oh my) can’t taste sweetness (oh bummer).” But it counteracts some of
the savagery that Holmes reports, as in the story of the black eagle,
which lays a second egg as an “insurance policy” that at least one
chick will survive. If both eggs hatch, the smaller chick is still
doomed: “Over the course of days, it pecks the sibling bloody, then
broken, then dead. The parents do not intervene.”

Whereas Morris demonstrated that the human being is just another
brute in the animal kingdom, Holmes maintains that we have special
traits: generosity, reason, the ability to eat ourselves to obesity.
Holmes cheerfully pokes holes in one of Morris’s more spurious
allegations, the Aquatic Ape Theory (which suggests that apes returned
briefly to the ocean, and the aquatic life rendered
them—us—hairless and big-brained).

The book is full of ideas that will have a reader looking askance at
a pet cat—or ferrets, starlings, and prairie dogs, for that
matter—and that is exactly as it should be. This book will never
attain the notoriety that The Naked Ape did; in part, Morris’ book is
so well remembered because it blazed new trails for popular science
writing, and Holmes follows in his footsteps. That’s okay. The
Well-Dressed Ape does for its Naked predecessor what a good science
book should: It honors the ground that has been covered by a forebear
and makes great strides forward—a perfect example of
evolution.