It was on a subway one day in April, while I was working at. The American Museum of Natural History in New York, that this book had its inception. The subway car wasn't crowded yet with the 5:00 p.m. rush, but many seats were already filled. What a fascinating collection: the coiffured lady in front, the red-haired down and out over near the door, and the Wall Street executive swaying with one hand on the hang-loop and the other clutching a folded New York Times. My, mind was nowhere just marking time people watching. There was a beautiful, delicately featured young woman across from me. Her hands were hardly wider than her slender wrists, and her neck was thin and fragile in appearance as a milk white china vase. I recall thinking drowsily how poorly she would have fared back in those prehistoric days when hard skin clothing was softened by human teeth and kindling was hacked with a blunt stone where were her beautiful kind then? My mind went on dreamily when suddenly I heard a loud commotion in the next car; then our door slid open with a thunk. There was a pause of disbelief; then we reeled in disbelief. Women cowered against the walls, some dropping out of sight behind the seats. The petite girl across' from me swore and looked faint. The men grimaced and shook their heads, but no one spoke intelligible words.
The figure who had just entered the car swayed in a slight crouch, arms half outspread with elbows out. His eyes were wild, shrouded in thick, scowling brows. All he wore was an old pair of army surplus combat boots. His black scalp hair and beard fanned out in a curly, oily mess. Either he had been sleeping in a coal bin or he had not bathed for months. His skin was knobby, rough and matted with hair. He had a big erection, purple and persimmon colored, that slapped against his belly every couple of steps as he quickly strutted down the aisle, walking with feet and knees spread to accommodate the lurching of the car. He opened the door at the other end and just as unbelievably as he had appeared, he disappeared.
It was as if the "early man" reconstruction from the museum had been jettisoned ahead into time. He had done nothing, injured no one, but for an instant he had startled - no, terrified - us all.
My wanderings ended abruptly as the train came to a gritty halt, jarring my senses back into consciousness it was my stop. Walking, down the busy platform I couldn't shake that dream. What if it had really happened? What is there in society that would have created such a response to his appearance? 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. Most of the research and popular books about human behavior have dealt mainly with gestures and "body language" and have avoided the delicate subject of the organs of communication themselves. 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. A recent breakthrough, however, has occurred in the interdisciplinary field of "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.
We have always believed that the elaborate decorations of many species evolved primarily as lures to members of the opposite sex. This is in part true, but in a different way than we once thought. For example, have you ever watched a male peafowl display in the spring? It is one of the most remarkable sights in nature. The huge tail is lifted into an intricate fan many times larger than, the cock himself. Iridescent blues, greens, and bronzes flash. Wings are held to the side and rustled in a long hiss. But the most interesting thing is the numerous "eyes" that are directed toward the front. Those on top look downward, those on left look to; the right, and vice versa. So a peacock displaying directly toward you reveal eyes spread all around the periphery, each watching you like the stare from a picture that seems to follow you around the room. But the backside of this striking display is as drab as the sole of a shoe. Strangely enough, the peacock usually displays outward from his female; the gaudy plumage he reserves for the view of other males.
Not unlike the girls who prefer the football captain, the peahen is attracted to the peacock's dominance. Like the letterman's sweater, the cock's tail fan functions to gain stature among males, which in turn attracts the females. Tail fans and letter sweaters are, in a way of speaking, a threat device used to intimidate competing members of the same species. This theme carries through the majority of animal ornamentations. The once puzzling array of spots, splotches, stripes, manes, ruffs, dewlaps, elaborate tails, crests, plumes, gaudy color patterns, wattles, inflatable pouches, combs, throat patches, tufts, beards, and many other ornaments seem in their own way to be devices to aid in the display of threat. For when the essentials of animal communication are distilled, the prime ingredient communicated is social state: one’s internal sense of social position and what is expressed to others.
All areas of the body are not equally important as clues to an individual’s social state. There are communication "hot spots," specific body areas with sights, sounds, and smells of obvious prominence, some of which run through all species while others are quite species specific. This book focuses on those "hot spots" which appear in human beings, and how they became that way.
Social ornamentation generally centers on these zones of information. Sometimes it magnifies and supports the signal, in other cases it shrouds the signal and changes its value. So it is with some of our own features. Not too surprisingly, herein lies the key to understanding what we are doing when we groom and decorate ourselves to regulate our social impact. Why do we snip and shave the hair, paint on artificially raised brows and exaggerated lashes, redden the lips and powder the skin, stocking the legs, and scrub away our natural oils? We’ll pursue the biology behind these traditions in some detail.
Picture yourself beginning a new job, with a company you admire and would like to remain with. You may spend a significant part of your life in this office. Your future co-workers are watching you - not intently, but with inquisitive glances - and you are observing them. Though your contacts are superficial and your exchanges contain no "real" information ("We're glad to have you with us. . . and over here we have Mrs. Fox . . .How do you do," etc.), your and their social computers are going wild with information processing mostly beyond voluntary control or even conscious recognition. Facial lines, color, carriage, accent, movements, expressions are all recorded.
And should it not be so? These people are now important characters in your world and you in theirs. You will be intimately involved in each other's values and lives. Your social state will take on a new form relative to them and theirs to you. The communication of all these things will not be gross - it may be imperceptible. But, by necessity, people are all blue ribbon, Grand Prix class people watchers. People-watching is required to remain socially alive today, and in the distant past to remain physically alive.
The important signals in our social lives take place in a few milliseconds. The glance flicked across the face or darted at the back of someone who has just passed on the street contains reams of information that we use and record, even though we may not be adept at voluntary retrieval and analysis. What we actually vocalize is only the thin mantle of the complex feelings we communicate to others. And what we look for is not superficial information, but information directly relevant to our own social state and our immediate future actions.
We did not come by these abilities in the last few thousand years. From what we can reconstruct of animal history, they were boned to' their, present excellence and precision through many millions of years of failure or success in communicating. In the following pages I am proposing that all of our people-watching is a fundamental biological act shared by chipmunks who are excellent chipmunk watchers, kittiwakes who are excellent kittiwake watchers, and so forth. We all are looking for the same or similar information, though we use different clues. The information is "how does he relate to me?" or more precisely, "how does he influence my social state?"
It may appear peculiar at first that the obvious things that other animals see when they watch each other their color pattern, beards, wattles, and other decorations have received less study than almost any other part of the creature. But the reasons are fairly clear one can't plug in a thermistor or make a serial section slide of a monkey's brilliant blue scrotum to see how the color functions. Rather, someone has to sit around for a long time observing monkey behavior. He must have a backlog of comparative knowledge about genitals as social signals, which we haven't had in the past. In other words, many organs the patterns that strike you first when you look at animals (say lion's mane or a deer's antlers) are social organs. They are not amenable to conventional methods of study in biology the reduction techniques of taking the organ apart and seeing what it is made of.
How do we go about studying our own social signals? Self-analysis is, exceptionally difficult. It's tough to be that objective. "The proper study of man is man," but the comparative approach requires us to look further. The concept that man is an organism and has evolved by the same processes affecting other organisms would never have arisen by studying man alone. The fitting of other organisms into, a biological scheme forced us, secondarily, to include man. It was the comparative anatomists who gave us our first in depth look at man's evolution. Through an elaborate comparison of the living animals and fossils from the past, they have been able to reconstruct how the different organ systems arose, and to some degree why they arose and have been modified into their present condition.
There is often something lost if you study a thing as it is without knowing the history of how it came to be that way. You could examine the human mouth thoroughly in relation to its mechanics, development, or pathologies but you, would miss a lot by not knowing a beautiful story behind its origin in the fossil record. Early vertebrates were gill filter feeders, but in some, the first gill support became modified into a food grasping jaw. Bony plates shifted or were eliminated. Tiny skin scales were brought into the, mouth as hooks to grasp the prey, and became changed into teeth. Their crowns became more complex for crushing and shearing. Harelips were fused and cleft palates sealed. You could never know these things from studying human beings alone.
So there are really two important questions implied by asking, "Why does a biological structure exist?" The proximate "why" pertains to the immediate mechanisms involved; then there is the evolutionary, ultimate "why."
Why does an Alaskan snowshoe hare moult to a white pelt in winter? Physiologists have shown that it is because the hours of daylight drop below a critical length. The hares can be taken into the laboratory and their coat color changed by exposing them to different periods of artificial light. But that doesn't answer, the "evolutionary why." Most people agree that the answer to the latter is that the white coat provides concealing coloration in the snow. The snowy winter environment is the origin of the selection process, and the number of hours of daylight is the proximate control mechanism.
Social organs haven't been easy to analyze on a proximate level; our best approach is to look at their comparative evolutionary history. Comparative ethology is beginning to do our understanding of the evolutionary "why" of human behavior what comparative anatomy did for our appreciation of anatomical history. Comparing the behavior of different animals in the wild is a much newer science and several times more difficult than anatomical comparisons. Incomplete though this analysis is, some general outlines are beginning to emerge - enough to see what an utterly fantastic thing our evolutionary story is.
That story is particularly fascinating because it explains why we look the odd way we do. There are many "ornaments" which functional anatomists have been at a loss to explain moustaches, for example. For really the first time we are beginning to see how our behaviors - our social behavior - so inextricably merges into our appearance and how each has influenced the evolution of social organs - the parts of our anatomy which function mainly as social devices. More importantly, that story can tell us something about ourselves, why we act the way we do and why we wish to look differently.
Smelly armpits and soft red lips are such emotionally loaded parts of our lives that it will be difficult for us to put aside our cultural inhibitions long enough to examine the reasons why they are that way. At the same time, our intimate involvement with signals from our own and others organs gives the reason for their existence a deeper fascination. What do we communicate with dilated irises, graying temples, round butts, underarm odors, and colored penises? The comparative evolutionary approach is especially successful in these areas of behavior where our strong emotional investments make it virtually impossible to look at ourselves in the biological face. These areas are not merely affected by subtle personal biases, but from the very roots of rigid taboo systems relating to the function of these organs.
Before plunging directly into a discussion of particular human social organs and how they work, we should be aware of some basic comparative material from other animals. If we were to start with crotch hairs, balding, long noses, and such, before we had a comparative base, we would be less inclined to believe what follows. If the evolution of human teeth from fish scales seems incredible, then wait until we get to the evolution of things like bonds and high cheekbones.