By Desmond Morris.
Was anyone else influenced by this book?
Made me an atheist.
How so?
I read it when I was ridiculously young, like ten years old or so. I had a voracious and strange appetite for sociobiology as a child. It was interesting, but probably didn’t have the same influence on me as, say, reading The Female Eunuch did at thirteen. Yikes.
I believed his description of how as social apes we had to create a god.
Moving thread from IMHO to Cafe Society.
Read it several years ago. Only part I remember is how human beings have the largest penis of all primate species.
Never read it. I read another book by him called The Dawn Warriors, which I recommend.
Morris had many other good books. If you ever have a chance check out Gestures, which he co-wrote.
The Moral Animal by Robert Wright is also good
I’d like to read more about the evolution of religion. I have heard Darwin’s Cathedral is good, but haven’t gotten it yet. Dennett’s ‘breaking the spell’ is also supposedly decent.
One of the first books I ever owned. I became an atheist around the time I read it but I’m unaware of any causality.
I think any good argument I’d have read for atheism from age 13-15 would’ve turned me, but coincidentally I didn’t read any, and I ended up figuring it out for myself at 16. Now all the good arguments sound like they’re just repeating stuff I thought of independently, so they either bore me or make me mad that I don’t have a book deal :).
Great book. Totally fascinating. I think people would get along much better if they were more aware of our ape ancestry. It’s important to celebrate our differences, but we shouldn’t lose sight of our common bonds.
At the end of the day we really are just highly developed monkeys.
It’s an interesting read, but it’s also a forty year old exposition of a pretty active field, so I wouldn’t necessarily take its contents as gospel. You also have to keep in mind the standard disclaimers about Morris–he’s not good about differentiating his own and other’s ideas, and he’s prone to portraying controversial theories as truth.