TV Review : ‘Animal’ a Brilliant Look at Being Human

As zoologist Desmond Morris remarks in his brilliant six-part series, “The Human Animal,” he doesn’t mean to be provocative or even controversial when he places humans within--not apart from--the animal kingdom. He is only doing his job as a zoologist.

Morris knows, though, that ever since his seminal book, “The Naked Ape,” he has been an arch-enemy of Christian fundamentalists and various anti-evolutionists because he has articulated the case for evolution to the widest possible audience. Thus, unlike other not-so-best-selling scientists, Morris is seen as a dangerous man by those in the movement against science.

“The Human Animal” will only increase Morris’ standing, as it sums up the last 30 years of his research with cogent analysis and superb filmmaking care of directors Clive Bromhall, Vanessa Berlowitz, John Macnish, Mike Beynon, Martin Weitz and Graham Booth. While detailing our essential animality, Morris develops a view that actually heightens the sense of human greatness, while stressing that many of the fine things in all of us are fine things in all animals.

Arriving in the United States on The Learning Channel six months after its BBC premiere, Morris’ tele-opus comes slightly trimmed and sanitized for supposedly prudish Americans. Several shots of male frontal nudity (particularly in the fourth episode, “The Biology of Love,” airing Jan. 29), a few of female frontal nudity (especially the series’ striking opening scene of a nude couple walking in a modern city crowd) have been cut, altered or otherwise toyed with. It’s all especially silly considering that the series is primarily concerned with how biology and society are linked. This society, it seems, doesn’t like too much biology on the airwaves.

Nothing, though, gets in the way of Morris’ key strategy, which is to observe and learn about humans from a zoological perspective. Amassing a catalogue of every kind of gesture, some specific to one spot on the globe, Morris tells us how he became “a man-watcher,” developing the now-assumed notion of body language.

Sunday’s opening episode charts some of his discoveries, such as the subtle difference between a “yes” gesture in northern and southern Italy, or the varieties of handshakes. A lovely montage of “baton gestures”--our unconscious habit of emphasizing words and beats of a sentence with hand and arm--and fascinating footage of complex gesture codes in horse racing and football are the kinds of moments that lift this series far above the usual science television stuff.

Unlike some more abstract corners of science, Morris’ ideas are often dramatically amplified by the image. Episode four’s filmed sequences of courtship, from innocent to erotic, help explain why we are unique among animals in our need for a long, intense mating period, leading to a long child-rearing period (described in the fifth episode, “The Immortal Genes,” airing Feb. 5). Bypassing moral suasions, Morris presses nature’s own case for male-female pair-bonding, the child’s need for two parents and the major risks of promiscuity.

This is the surprise salvo to all of Morris’ religious critics: Even before religion, biology wanted to make us faithful and monogamous.

* “The Human Animal” begins at 7 p.m. Sunday on The Learning Channel and continues Sundays (except Jan. 22) through Feb. 12.