animal management

Animal Management

A few days, in an oblique reference to our overcrowded island, I

thanked the author of The Human Zoo. He was born eighty years ago

today. As a populariser of science, someone who brought the immense

timescale of evolution down to simple schoolboy comprehension, Desmond

Morris was a giant of the twentieth century.

He has immense detailed knowledge and scientific qualifications, he

even studied under the genius Niko Tinbergen and published nearly

fifty scientific papers. However in his popular books he sometimes

oversimplified his arguments with the broad brush strokes of a trained

artist. Some of those arguments have been refined and adopted into

today's acknowledged facts, others are still contentious to this day.

But his single basic point was blindingly obvious yet fundamentally

enlightening - if we accept that human beings are animals, then much

is explained.

After a few years of engineering, I studied management at college. And

I still remember sitting in lectures about management theory, some of

it based on serious psychology experiments, some of it based on solid

economic statistics, and some of it just the buzzword bullspeak that

still resounds today. Normally I read the recommended books and did

the recommended work. But one time, and it was just the once, in a

graded essay about the definition of an organisation, where I was

expected to discuss leadership concepts of "common goals and shared

consciousness" (I can't believe I even vaguely remember that), I

dropped in a line that said that we should also explore how some ideas

from the Naked Ape could help to define and explain organisational

behaviour.

That line got a big red question mark next to it. My university was

fairly unusual in facilitating cross-disciplinary migration, we were

encouraged to drop into lectures in totally different departments if

we found interest there, but my idea did not come from any lecture. To

credit my tutor, he did not completely rule out my suggestion, but he

strongly emphasised that if I wanted to make such points in future

then I should back them up with proper academic references instead of

popular paperbacks.

But I stuck to books from the management library for the rest of the

course, and indeed through my career. Meanwhile Dr Morris has

continued to educate and entertain on the page and on the screen while