12. Pulling People Toward You

Your Evolutionary Heritage

Silverback gorillas, both male and female, spend a good amount of their day in grooming activities to look and smell good. They bathe in the river, clean and polish their teeth with their nails, and spend hours grooming their pelts.

The gorillas’ emphasis on physical attractiveness—even when they are not mating—serves the purpose of making themselves desirable to each other. The more attractive the gorillas are to each other, the more they stay together as a cohesive unit.

Beauty Attracts

All the universal things we term beauty, that we deem attractive, can be traced to survival. When fruit is immature and useless as seed, it is green and inconspicuous against the foliage. ...

Get The Genius of Instinct: Reclaim Mother Nature’s Tools for Enhancing Your Health, Happiness, Family, and Work now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.