I still remember the slight intimidation with which I first opened Desmond Morris. I was a college student in the 1980s, full of curiosity but not always equipped for the English books that were beginning to widen my world. Before I reached him, progressive friends had urged me to read Insaan Barra Kaisay Bana.

That was the Urdu translation of a Soviet popular science work How Man Became a Giant, by Mikhail Ilyin and Elena Segal. That book had already nudged me towards questions of human origins, social development and the long story of how humans became what they are.

So, when I finally picked up The Naked Ape by chance at an old book shop, I did so with excitement but also with hesitation. I still have that old book in my collection. I struggled through its English, often reading slowly, sometimes with effort, but from the very first pages I felt that I had encountered a writer who would stay with me for life.

Desmond Morris, who died on April 19, 2026, aged 98, had that effect on many readers. He made human beings seem at once less grand and more fascinating. To the world, Morris was many things at once: zoologist, broadcaster, painter, public intellectual and best-selling author. To millions he was the man who wrote The Naked Ape in 1967 and startled readers by suggesting that, beneath all our culture, manners, institutions and conceits, we remained animals still marked by our biological inheritance.

Desmond Morris, who has died aged 98, was a zoologist, broadcaster, painter, public intellectual and best-selling author. Naazir Mahmood, who first encountered him as a college student in Gen Zia’s Pakistan, reflects on what it meant to find a writer who changed not just what you thought — but how you looked

To television audiences, he was the suave and observant naturalist who could make the behaviour of beasts and men seem equally revealing. To me, and I suspect to many readers in countries far from Britain, he was something even more memorable: a guide to looking at human beings without illusion and without piety.

That mattered especially in the Pakistan of my youth. The 1980s were the years of Gen Ziaul Haq’s ‘Islamisation’ programme, when public life was becoming narrower, more moralised and more prescriptive. Religion was not merely a matter of faith or inward life; it was increasingly made into a public language of discipline, conformity and regulation.

Certain ways of thinking acquired official favour. Certain questions became harder to ask freely. One felt that inquiry itself was being pushed into a smaller room. In such a climate, reading Morris was quietly liberating. He did not begin with what man ought to be. He began with what man is: a social animal, anxious, inventive, territorial, affectionate, vain and never fully removed from nature.

That was part of the shock of The Naked Ape. Morris asked readers to step outside their own species, as if observing it from a distance. Courtship, rivalry, grooming, aggression, status and ritual no longer appeared as purely social or moral phenomena. They became traces of older inheritances, survivals of the animal in the civilised. It was an unsettling way of looking at people and, perhaps for that very reason, it was exhilarating.

Morris did not flatter his readers. He dethroned them. Yet, in doing so, he made them more interesting. The human being in his books was not a fallen angel or a perfect rational actor, but a clever, restless, theatrical primate, forever decorating instinct with culture.

For a young reader like me, that was more than a new idea. It was a new habit of mind. Morris trained one to notice. After reading him, the world no longer looked quite the same. A handshake, a glance, a quarrel, a courtship ritual, a politician’s posture, a bureaucrat’s territorial instinct, a crowd’s nervous excitement: all seemed to contain deeper clues. Even where Morris oversimplified, he sharpened perception. He made observation itself feel exciting. He taught readers to distrust smooth surfaces and to watch behaviour more closely than words.

His influence on me deepened with time. The Human Zoo and Manwatching expanded the field of inquiry and made me, over the years, not only a more attentive reader but also a more attentive observer of society. In journalism, in teaching and in professional life, that instinct remained useful. Morris did not merely provide information; he altered one’s way of seeing. That is a rarer achievement than scholarly precision. Many writers know more. Fewer change the angle of vision through which everyday life is perceived.

Morris himself was a figure of unusual range. Born in 1928 in Wiltshire, he studied zoology at the University of Birmingham and later completed his doctorate at the University of Oxford. He went on to become a distinguished populariser of animal behaviour, a familiar television presence and a serious surrealist painter. In him the scientist and the artist seemed not to compete but to collaborate.

The scientist gave him discipline, evidence and method. The artist gave him irony, spectacle and a sense of the body as performance. He could write crisply because he observed visually. He could speculate boldly because he understood that ideas had to travel beyond the seminar room if they were to matter.

That Birmingham connection acquired a special meaning for me much later. In the early 2000s, when I went to the University of Birmingham for my doctorate, I often felt an odd and private pleasure in knowing that Morris had once studied there too. It was, of course, only a small coincidence. Universities are filled with ghosts of far greater and lesser people. But this one touched me.

By then, Morris was no longer simply an author I had read with difficulty in youth. He had become part of the formation of my intellectual life. To find that he, too, had passed through Birmingham gave that long association an unexpected intimacy. It connected the young student struggling through The Naked Ape in Pakistan with the older scholar pursuing doctoral work in England. It gave admiration a setting, almost a geography.

That is why Morris’s death feels to me more personal than the death of a famous author usually does. He belonged to a generation of public thinkers who could make science accessible without emptying it of seriousness. He wrote books that ordinary readers could enter but, once inside, they found their assumptions challenged. He was provocative, sometimes too sure of himself, sometimes too sweeping in his conclusions, especially on questions of gender and social behaviour. Some of his ideas have dated. Some deserve argument.

But that is not the same as saying he no longer matters. Writers endure not because they were correct in every detail, but because they opened a door that others had not opened in quite the same way.

The writer is a columnist, educator and film critic.
He can be reached at mnazir1964@yahoo.co.uk.
X: @NaazirMahmood

Published in Dawn, EOS, May 10th, 2026