Skin Game

By Horace Judson

INTIMATE BEHAVIOUR by DESMOND MORRIS 253 pages.

Random House. $6.95.

Ethology--as any schoolboy will tell you with suitable grunts and scratchings--embraces the study of the beast in man. It is the science of atavisms. Desmond Morris is the former London zookeeper who, recognizing this fat ruminant in the wild, turned hunter. He stampeded his quarry over the cliff in The Naked Ape.

He picked its bones clean in The Human Zoo. He burped. He sniffed the air. He sighted, just upwind, a shaggy touch-me-feel-me shambling along. He struck again. This latest book results -- but it is a joyless killing.

Intimate Behaviour is about body contact. Morris proposes that to consider the behavior of man as one among other animals will cast brilliant new light on what happens between people in a handclasp, a copulation, a consoling pat, an encounter group. Such a topic could be a romp and a tickle, and a loving touch; in fact, it's a skin game that's not even skin deep. The pri mal intimacy, Morris asserts, as if with profound originality, is the womb itself. Extracting the baby from there, he drags it through childhood's swaddlings and suckings, catalogues the intimacies of play, courtship, sex and social ritual and their substitutes from pets to waterbeds -- and the only real discovery is how little we learn even from the monkeys. In his first popular book, Morris wrote of "the sexiest primate.'' which made British Critic Brigid Brophy wonder whether he could be meaning some telegenic prince of the church. Now, in Intimate Behaviour, there is far more about the businessman's handshake or the surgeon's scalpel than about the lovers' kiss, and even the lovers' kiss is grimly labored as No. 1 of "twelve typical stages in the pair-formation process of a young male and female." Defying his own boredom, Morris compiles the obvious, the faintly surprising, the wildly pretentious and the erroneous: "Anyone who has enjoyed the exotic luxuries of body intimacies with a tame cheetah, lion or tiger will know that . . . they are patted, not stroked."

"Moving up above the genital region now, we come to the belly, which has two characteristic shapes, flat and 'pot.' " "The dentist usually causes too much stress for his oral intimacies to provide any contact reward."

Such trivia are not redeemed by Morris' pious peroration, calling on "the human animal ... a simple tribal hunter by evolution," to indulge in a "magical return to intimacy." As any ethologist would warn Tribal Hunter Morris, man is the only animal to hunt without hunger, cropping his prey to extinction. .Horace Judson

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.