The paper's Tuesday obituary of Desmond Morris carried the four-week composition of The Naked Ape, the twenty million copies, the twenty-three languages, the move to Malta. Four days on, what the international cycle has surfaced is the part the obituary template tends to crowd out — Morris as a cultural figure whose science was inseparable from his painting, his curating, his television work, and his refusal of the boundary between popular and serious.

The BBC, in its full notice, called him "a tremendous populariser of science." [1] Reuters reached the same register, holding the surrealist painting alongside the zoology rather than relegating it to the personal-life paragraph. [2] The 2022 Redfern Gallery show, "The Last Surrealist," now reads as the closing argument of an artistic life that ran in parallel with the zoological one for seventy years.

The lineage matters for the Features desk. Morris belongs in the company the paper assigns to Oliver Sacks and Ed Yong: writers who refused the choice between scientific seriousness and cultural reach, and whose books, in their decades, taught general readers to look at the world they already inhabited. [3] The Naked Ape did that for evolutionary biology in 1967. It is still doing it.

-- KENJI NAKAMURA, Tokyo