It's Friday, April 24, 2006. I'm Albert Moller, and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

Listeners to the briefing know that I often draw attention to obituaries because often they tell us a story of a life that demands our attention.

And speaking of an obituary that ran just in Wednesday's edition of the New York Times,

here's the headline, Desmond Morris, age 98, who saw the animals at humans' core, dies.

Okay, so he died at age 98. Desmond Morris was a major British figure, a major British author, but he became famous on both sides of the Atlantic for his book, published in 1967 entitled The Naked Ape. He was basically arguing that to understand humanity, you need to understand that there is nothing of the image of God.

There is nothing not produced by evolution. There is nothing special about us. We are just apes that put on clothes.

Okay, that was a very huge best-selling argument back in 1967. As a matter of fact, when I say huge, I mean huge.

More than 20 million copies of the book were sold. In the publishing world, that's astounding.

20 million. That's bigger than the population of many countries. All right. So let's look at what we're talking about here.

Desmond Morris, very

interesting, was a zoologist. I'm sure others have observed this. They just haven't said so,

I think out loud. I'm going to say it out loud. There's something weird in the 20th century

about certain animal zoological and an insect specialists. They tend to be very, very interested in human beings outside

their doctoral research. So, for example, the main profit of the sexual revolution in the

20th century in the United States was a man by the name of Alfred Kinsey, who wrote best-selling books, most

importantly, sexual behavior in the male and then sexual behavior in the female. We now know

that he was himself a sexual pervert, that he was deeply involved in all kinds of just,

well, I'll just say on this program, unspeakable things. Let's just say that he used data, for instance, on boys drawn from pedophiles. And he

knew they were pedophiles. He used the research anyway. It's horrifying stuff. It's a scandal that you

have at Indiana University, an institute that bears his name on that campus. It is one of those things

that should be absolutely unthinkable. Nonetheless, he was an expert in gall wasps. He wrote his

doctoral research on a bug and an insect, but he wore a white, a professorial, like a medical robe or covering in such a way that wearing that doctor's garb in whites, he had the authority of someone who was, you know, a major expert, the authority of science.

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