Customer Reviews

The Human Zoo: A Zoologist's Study of the Urban Animal (Kodansha Globe)

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A common metaphor for the modern megalopolis is the concrete jungle. According to Desmond Morris this is a mistaken image. The big cities don't look anything like a jungle where we would be able to live in peace with our nature. The urban human lives more like a zoo animal separated from his/her roots and presenting all sorts of distorted behavior unnatural to the species.

Human evolution toke place over millions of years. During most of the time we lived in small tribes as hunters and gatherers. Civilization is new. We are not fine tuned to it yet. As the author states "In a village all the neighbors are personal friends or, at most, personal enemies; none are strangers. In a large city many people do not even know the names of their neighbors."

This impersonal environment fosters all kinds of negative attitudes towards our peers such as violence or indifference as if someone who you don't know walking down the streets were from a different species, some kind of an animal, or, what's worse, not alive at all; an object or one more number to be added to the statistics.

In a gigantic community the odds of anyone becoming a dominant individual are too dim. Almost everywhere with the new political atmosphere any individual can reach a very high position in his community just based on his merits. But democratization of access to power also democratizes the frustration of not getting there. For one dominant individual on a human zoo there are millions of frustrated would be leaders lost in the rat race. And they all know that they failed because they didn't have what it takes.

To alleviate the frustration we subdivide our community in intricate overlapping sub communities of the approximate size of the primeval tribes. This sub communities offer new opportunities for leadership. You can see uniformed tribes going around on their Harley Davidsons, playing golf or listening to Rap music on their boom boxes. What is important in those cases is not the sport, music or transportation but the chance to belong to a small, well defined and regulated group in which the chances of becoming a dominant individual are bigger.

The human zoo is a superb book that analyses one by one the many aspects of urban life such as the paradox of solitude on an overcrowded place, dominance mimic versus status symbol, and of course the rewards of living in an exciting environment where just about everything is possible. Desmond Morris background in zoology allows him to draw many parallels between human and other animals' behavior like he ten commandments of dominance valid for baboons and presidents or the hazard mimic used by harmless black and yellow insects that look alike dangerous wasps.

Desmond Morris' human behavior trilogy: The Naked Ape; The Human Zoo; and Intimate Behavior is a must read for anyone interested in human nature. They are all 5 star books.

Leonardo Alves - January 2001

Like Desmond Morris's _The Naked Ape_, this book is an old friend of mine. The second volume in his well-known trilogy (the third is _Intimate Behavior_), this one makes a compelling case that modern cities are less like "jungles" and more like zoos.

Other animals, Morris says, don't behave in the wild the way humans do in cities. But the sort of erratic violence and heightened self-stimulation in which we find modern humans engaging _does_ have a counterpart in the rest of the animal world: animals do act that way . . . in zoos.

Essentially, Morris's claim is that many millions of years of evolution have equipped us for life in small communities in which everybody knows everybody else and there's enough room for us to move around without klonking into each other all the time. We are not, in short, adapted to the modern metropolis, and that's why "city folk" are so danged weird. And our misattribution of our maladaptive behavior actually gives the jungle an undeserved bad name.

So what's a naked ape to do? I don't know that the intervening years since this book was first published have generated a whole lot of solutions. I guess that's, um, life in the big city.

But as with so many problems, just being aware of the problem is at least half the solution. As with Morris's other books (especially _The Naked Ape_), it's profoundly helpful to step back and see ourselves as one biological species among others (whether or not that's _all_ we are).

Okay, maybe that's not all we are; maybe the fact that we _can_ thus step back from ourselves is the single most important fact about our species. If so, that makes this book more valuable, not less.

So think of this book (and Morris's others) as a way to give your "I" a little distance on your "me," if you know what I mean. And yes, that does mean that I'm recommending a couple of books on evolutionary anthropology as helpful to your spirituality.

After reading The Naked Ape, I was driven to read this next installment of the "human trilogy" by D.M. I found that it delved even further into the methods to our "civilized madness." Morris brings to light the true effect of civilization on our species. This book effectively explains the stresses and effects that our cities have placed upon our animal nature. I recommend this book to any person who is interested in human behavior. I believe it takes the eye of an ethologist to separate bias from interpretation. Morris accomplishes this swimmingly as he attaches biological meaning to even our most spiritual behaviors.

We are so embedded in our modern cities and modern way of life (digital communications, home deliveries, grocery stores...) that almost nobody stops to think if we behave as "normal" homo sapiens. Well, here is Dr. Morris telling us we don't. Yeah, every now and then we hear about someone saying we are living in sin, the end of the world is near, anarchy rules and stuff like that, this book has nothing to do with that (and I'm not criticizing any ideology, just demarcating an important diference). This book contains serious opinions of a highly educated scholar whose specialty has trained him to look at details we normally don't pay attention to, and Dr. Morris makes interesting correlations between behaviour manifested in animals (specially apes) in captivity and with humans in big cities. It is always refreshing to read original opinions based on serious studies by intelligent individuals with different mental models, highly recommended reading.

why we do what we do, why we feel the way we feel are the topics of many good books today but this excellent book takes the questions at hand and approaches them from a unique perspective. Edmund Morris, a zoologist, uses his years of study with animals in an unnatural environment, the zoo and compares their actions to those of their ancestors, humans who are living in an unnatural environment as well. This book is extremely relative to the times, and gives wonderful insights as to why we live in a world with escalating tensions among countries, races etc.. If the reader allows her/his mind to be as creative as the author who wrote this book the possibilities to make improvements in ones life and in the world at large are endless. (The author sites Jane jacobs and her excellent work The death and life of Great American Cities which I would also highly recommend)

Desmond Morris does what he does best, in plain english he writes about the human animal when in large groups - the evolution of society, the wonders and the flaws. As usual, some of his ideas make the skin crawl but it makes you think about why you do what you do. The section on the ten command -ments of dominance was an eye open when compared to the recent presidential elections. And of course, there's a chapter on sex for those obsessed. ;)

The advent of farming ushered into society a food surplus which brought intertribal trade, which begat towns and the urbanization of the super-tribe, and for the first time each individual no longer knew personally each member of his community. Shifting from a personal to an impersonal society has caused the human animal its greatest agonies for the past several thousand years. As a species we are not biologically equipped to cope with a mass of strangers masquerading as members of our tribe. As a result of the artificiality of the inflation of human social life to the super-tribe level, it became necessary to introduce more elaborate forms of controls to hold the bulging communities together.

And this book is the study of our natural biological tendencies butting up against our unnatural social controls. It is a thoroughly fascinating look at our species as it struggles to adapt to the urban sprawl of the modern age. We are an incredibly adaptive animal, but there is no question we are experiencing growing pains as we adapt to an environment for which our genetic evolution has not prepared us.

If you have read and enjoyed THE NAKED APE as every person should, then pick up HUMAN ZOO and also INTIMATE BEHAVIOR to complete the five-star Desmond Morris trilogy on human behavior.

Reading The Naked Ape you can understand why humans have such physical structure and the purpose why it was designed that way.
Knowing where we come from allow us to know why we are mammals and how we are affected by such fact.

This book is completely absorbing. It begins, where else, but at the beginings of human civilization itself at the site of the first human cities. The journey that Morris brings us on takes us from these humble beginnings to our modern day lives through his shocking and controversial thesis that human beings do not behave like any animal in the wild - but that there are striking similarities between human behaviour and that of captive animals kept in inhumanely-small enclosures. He looks at human behaviour as a quest for status and a desire to fill the time from cradle to grave in a manner not required of animals that have to work and hunt for food, but that is seen frequently in animals held complacent by captivity.

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

A highly accessable treatise on cultural anthropology. As timely in the '60's, when I first read it, as it is today. Actually, it was prophetic.