Maschler was transfixed. <\/p>\n
He sent Morris a monthly telegram for years, begging him to write it. It was finally done in a month of frantic scribbling and, when complete, caused eyes to pop.<\/p>\n
The Naked Ape was an overnight sensation, eventually selling 20 million copies.<\/p>\n
It applied Darwinian logic to human activity – including fighting, feeding, comfort and sex. <\/p>\n
Copulation, Morris claimed, was not mainly about producing children. It was, he insisted, more to do with cementing the pair bond “by providing mutual reward for sexual partners”.<\/p>\n
We were, he said, “a very sexy ape”.<\/p>\n
He had taken a job running the Institute of Contemporary Arts but, now fabulously wealthy, he quit.<\/p>\n
He ignored his mother’s advice to bank the money, bought a 27-room villa in the Mediterranean and thoroughly enjoyed himself – sailing in summer and writing in winter.<\/p>\n
Back home, his book was proving controversial.<\/p>\n
Some disliked his dismissal of religion as a biological tendency to submit to an alpha male.<\/p>\n
Feminists were furious with his portrayal of men as “risk-taking” hunter-gatherers who drove human evolution, while women sat at home in the cave.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Maschler was transfixed. He sent Morris a monthly telegram for years, begging him to write it. It was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":541332,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-541331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=541331"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541331\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/541332"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=541331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=541331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=541331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}