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

"For me, this is a book that demonstrates the misogynistic lens through which some male biologists have viewed the past. Morris routinely and repeatedly peddles the view that women have evolved to be monogamous, stay-at-home caregivers while men have pushed up human intelligence through their actions as hunters and providers. As we know now, this is most probably not how things happened. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It’s certainly not how modern-day hunter gatherers tend to live. The lesson for me in all these books is that our understanding of the past is always at the mercy of the present. We can’t help but project our biases and assumptions into the distant past. I’m just finishing a new book about race science, which will be out in summer 2019. In some ways it’s a similar beast to gender, but of course race research within biology is considered taboo and the history is incredibly dark, so it is very much more political. Race is such a slippery concept and yet it feels so real. My challenge has been to get to the heart of how and why scientists try so hard to make it real."