This book is about the strangest animal in the world – the animal that’s reading these words and the animal that wrote them: the human animal. Because we’re so used to being human, and to living with humans, we sometimes don’t notice what a peculiar creature we are. As a corrective, I want to begin by looking at our species from a new perspective. This perspective might initially seem somewhat alien to you… but so it should because that’s the perspective we’ll be using. We’ll be looking at our species through the eyes of a hypothetical, hyperintelligent alien – an anthropologist from the planet Betelgeuse III – as it visits the Earth on an intergalactic Beagle and studies us “as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.” But this isn’t just any old hyperintelligent alien. It’s a gender-neutral, asexual, asocial, amoral, areligious, and amusical alien. It is, in other words, a stranger to many elements of human life that are so familiar to us that we simply take them for granted. And that’s why its perspective is useful. The alien’s uncomprehending eyes will make the familiar seem strange, waking us to aspects of humanity that we normally overlook and which are so deeply ingrained that we don’t even notice require an explanation.