Evolution’s Expressions

Stassa Edwards calls Darwin’s 1872 work The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals “the most accessible of Darwin’s books”:

Far from a dry scientific text, it’s rich with colorful anecdotes drawn from theater, painting and, of course, photography. In it, he argues that man’s emotional expressions—his smiles, snarls, and frowns — are the result of natural selection. If facial communication stems from natural selection, then man must share it with other mammals. “With mankind some expressions, such as bristling the hair under the influence of extreme terror, or the uncovering of the teeth under that furious rage, can hardly be understood,” he wrote, “except on the belief that man once existed in a much lower and animal-like condition.”

Darwin looked to photography for evidence, which led him to the work of James Crichton-Browne, a neurologist who photographed the mentally ill:

The mentally ill, as Victorian mores held, were emotionally uninhibited and unconstrained. Unable to conform to social norms, the insane were hardly concerned with the suppression of emotion required by the cultured and the sane. To Darwin, Crichton-Browne’s photographs represented something more useful than marketable trinkets. The raw emotion of the inmates at West Riding Lunatic Asylum was primitive, more authentic, and certainly closer to man’s evolutionary ancestors. Crichton-Browne’s project, his interest in capturing the true look of mania, proved a valuable discovery for Darwin. …

Darwin found in Crichton-Browne a fellow scientist sympathetic to his theories and ready to expound on his observations. The correspondence between the two men is colorful…. Though Crichton-Browne refers to very few of his photographs specifically, his letters flesh out the otherwise vacant personalities captured by his camera. In a single letter, he describes the “hilarity” of sexually perverse women; the “remarkable lachrymal secretion” of “melancholics, who sit rocking themselves rhythmically backwards and forwards”; and “a stereotyped smile” of “many idiots and imbeciles who are constantly smiling and laughing, who are ‘pleas[ed] with a rattle, tickled by a straw.’”

(Image: Woman Suffering from Chronic Mania, c. 1869, by James Crichton-Browne, via Wellcome Library, London)