He was indeed the streaking anathema of our secret past and our hidden present, a personification of unspoken taboos about our loves and hates. That guy in my subway dream had a body like most men, but by letting it go fallow, ungroomed and exposed, it reverted back to the once natural form that we consider vulgar and almost unmentionable. This book deals with those vulgar and taboo body signals of ours which contain important clues to understanding the roots of our behavior. It is also about noble features and, lovely bodies, because there is a basic connection between these different, sets of values the repugnant and the beautiful which go well beyond the relation of opposites. I want to take you on a stroll along the horizon between the familiar, obvious values we share about people's features and the dim underlying, biology of our social organs which pertain to all animals.
Social organs form the essence of our appearance.
They underlie our hourly decisions, values, prejudices, gestures, loves, dislikes, weaknesses and secrets about ourselves and other people. This is not another book about how our evolutionary appearance affects our behavior, but how our behavior affected the evolution of our appearance - how our physical features have developed to alter social communication. Until recently it has been difficult to look at human social organs without generating the wrath of racists, anti racists women's libbers, male chauvinists, prurient cultists anti-pornographists, both the political right and left, as, well as defenders of the Judeo Christian ethic. We all have vested interests in our social anatomy. This study of how some specialized organs originated and function in social communication has enabled us to look at humans in an altogether new and rather startling way.