It is equally baffling, not to mention ironic, that the classical view of emotion is based on the very essentialism that Darwin is famous for vanquishing in biology. The classical view explicitly labels itself as “evolutionary” and assumes that emotions and their expressions are products of natural selection, yet natural selection is completely absent from Darwin’s thinking on emotion. Any essentialist view that wraps itself in the cloak of Darwin is demonstrating a profound misunderstanding of Darwin’s central ideas about evolution.
