The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals is a book by the
BritishThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe. It is an island country, spanning an archipelago including Great Britain, the northeastern part of Ireland, and many small islands...
naturalist
Charles DarwinCharles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist who realised and presented compelling evidence that all species of life have evolved over time from common ancestors, through the process he called natural selection...
published in 1872, on how
humanHumans are bipedal primates belonging to the species Homo sapiens in Hominidae, the great ape family. They are the only surviving member of the genus Homo. Humans have a highly developed brain, capable of abstract reasoning, language, introspection, and problem solving...
s and non-human
animalAnimals are a major group of mostly multicellular, eukaryotic organisms of the kingdom Animalia or Metazoa. Their body plan eventually becomes fixed as they develop, although some undergo a process of metamorphosis later on in their life. Most animals are motile, meaning they can move spontaneously...
s express their
emotionAn emotion is a mental and physiological state associated with a wide variety of feelings, thoughts, and behavior. Emotions are subjective experiences, often associated with mood, temperament, personality, and disposition. The English word 'emotion' is derived from the French word émouvoir...
s. It was, along with his 1871 book
The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, part of Darwin's attempt to address questions of
human originHuman evolution, or anthropogenesis, is the origin and evolution of Homo sapiens as a distinct species from other hominids, great apes and placental mammals...
s and human
psychologyPsychology is an academic and applied discipline involving the systematic, and sometimes scientific, study of human or animal mental functions and behavior...
using his theory of
evolutionIn biology, evolution is change in the genetic material of a population of organisms from one generation to the next. Though changes produced in any one generation are normally small, differences accumulate with each generation and can, over time, cause substantial changes in the population, a...
by
natural selectionNatural selection is the process by which heritable traits that make it more likely for an organism to survive and successfully reproduce become more common in a population over successive generations...
.
When writing
The Variation of Animals and Plants under DomesticationThe Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication is a book written by Charles Darwin that was first published in January 1868.A large proportion of the book contains detailed information on the domestication of animals and plants but it also contains in Chapter XXVII a description of...
in 1866, Darwin intended to include a chapter including man in his theory, but the book became too big and he decided to write a separate "short essay" on ape ancestry,
sexual selectionSexual selection is the theory proposed by Charles Darwin that states that certain evolutionary traits can be explained by intraspecific competition. Darwin defined sexual selection as the effects of the "struggle between the individuals of one sex, generally the males, for the possession of the...
and human expression which became two large volumes in
The Descent of Man.
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals is a book by the
BritishThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe. It is an island country, spanning an archipelago including Great Britain, the northeastern part of Ireland, and many small islands...
naturalist
Charles DarwinCharles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist who realised and presented compelling evidence that all species of life have evolved over time from common ancestors, through the process he called natural selection...
published in 1872, on how
humanHumans are bipedal primates belonging to the species Homo sapiens in Hominidae, the great ape family. They are the only surviving member of the genus Homo. Humans have a highly developed brain, capable of abstract reasoning, language, introspection, and problem solving...
s and non-human
animalAnimals are a major group of mostly multicellular, eukaryotic organisms of the kingdom Animalia or Metazoa. Their body plan eventually becomes fixed as they develop, although some undergo a process of metamorphosis later on in their life. Most animals are motile, meaning they can move spontaneously...
s express their
emotionAn emotion is a mental and physiological state associated with a wide variety of feelings, thoughts, and behavior. Emotions are subjective experiences, often associated with mood, temperament, personality, and disposition. The English word 'emotion' is derived from the French word émouvoir...
s. It was, along with his 1871 book
The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, part of Darwin's attempt to address questions of
human originHuman evolution, or anthropogenesis, is the origin and evolution of Homo sapiens as a distinct species from other hominids, great apes and placental mammals...
s and human
psychologyPsychology is an academic and applied discipline involving the systematic, and sometimes scientific, study of human or animal mental functions and behavior...
using his theory of
evolutionIn biology, evolution is change in the genetic material of a population of organisms from one generation to the next. Though changes produced in any one generation are normally small, differences accumulate with each generation and can, over time, cause substantial changes in the population, a...
by
natural selectionNatural selection is the process by which heritable traits that make it more likely for an organism to survive and successfully reproduce become more common in a population over successive generations...
.
When writing
The Variation of Animals and Plants under DomesticationThe Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication is a book written by Charles Darwin that was first published in January 1868.A large proportion of the book contains detailed information on the domestication of animals and plants but it also contains in Chapter XXVII a description of...
in 1866, Darwin intended to include a chapter including man in his theory, but the book became too big and he decided to write a separate "short essay" on ape ancestry,
sexual selectionSexual selection is the theory proposed by Charles Darwin that states that certain evolutionary traits can be explained by intraspecific competition. Darwin defined sexual selection as the effects of the "struggle between the individuals of one sex, generally the males, for the possession of the...
and human expression which became two large volumes in
The Descent of Man. After completing work on the proofs of
The Descent of Man in January 1871, Darwin started on another book, using left over material on emotional expressions.
Darwin noted the universal nature of
facial expressionA facial expression results from one or more motions or positions of the muscles of the face. These movements convey the emotional state of the individual to observers. Facial expressions are a form of nonverbal communication...
s in the book: "...the young and the old of widely different races, both with man and animals, express the same state of mind by the same movements."
He became diverted into making extensive revisions to
the Origin of SpeciesCharles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, published Thursday, 24 November 1859, is a seminal work of scientific literature considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology. Its full title was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in...
, then in the spring of 1872 Darwin pressed on with
The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, pointing to shared evolution in contrast to
Charles BellSir Charles Bell was a Scottish anatomist, surgeon, physiologist and natural theologian. He was the younger brother of John Bell , also a noted surgeon and writer.-Life:Bell lived and studied in Edinburgh, where he got his medical degree in 1799...
's
Anatomy and Physiology of Expression which claimed divinely created muscles to express man's exquisite feelings. Darwin drew on world wide responses to his questionnaires, hundreds of photographs of actors, babies and "imbeciles" in an asylum, as well as his own observations, with particular empathy for the grief following a family death.
The proofs, tackled by his daughter
HenriettaThe Darwin–Wedgwood family was a prominent English family, descended from Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood, the most notable member of which was Charles Darwin. The family contained at least ten Fellows of the Royal Society and several artists and poets...
and son
LeoMajor Leonard Darwin , a son of the English naturalist Charles Darwin, was variously a soldier, politician, economist, eugenicist and mentor of the statistician and evolutionary biologist Ronald Fisher.- Biography :...
, needed major revision which made him "sick of the subject, and myself, and the world". It was to be one of the first books with photographs, with seven heliotype plates, and
MurrayJohn Murray was a British publishing house, renowned for the roster of authors it has published in its history, including Jane Austen, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Lord Byron, Charles Lyell, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Charles Darwin.-History:...
warned that this "would poke a terrible hole in the profits".
The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals proved very popular, selling over 5,000 copies.
A second edition was published by Darwin's son around 1889. It did not contain several revisions wanted by Darwin, which were not published until the third edition of 1999 (edited by
Paul EkmanPaul Ekman is a psychologist who has been a pioneer in the study of emotions and their relation to facial expressions. He is considered one of the 100 most eminent psychologists of the twentieth century. The background of Ekman's research analyzes the development of human traits and states over time...
).
Although
Konrad LorenzKonrad Zacharias Lorenz was an Austrian zoologist, animal psychologist, ornithologist, and Nobel Prize winner. He is often regarded as one of the founders of modern ethology, developing an approach that began with an earlier generation, including his teacher Oskar Heinroth...
in 1965 said Darwin could be seen as a "patron saint" of
ethologyEthology is the scientific study of animal behavior, and a sub-topic of zoology....
based on this work, ethology has generally focused on behavior, not on emotion.
See also
- Friedrich Gustav Jakob Henle
Friedrich Gustav Jakob Henle was a German physician, pathologist and anatomist. He is credited with the discovery of the loop of Henle in the kidney. His essay "On Miasma and Contagia" was an early argument for the germ theory of disease...
, whose book figures 2 and 3 are borrowed from
- Laughter
Laughter is an audible expression or appearance of happiness, or an inward feeling of joy . It may ensue from jokes, tickling, and other stimuli. Inhaling nitrous oxide can also induce laughter; other drugs, such as cannabis, can also induce episodes of strong laughter...
- Gelotology
Gelotology is the study of laughing and laughter, its effects on the human body, and of medical abnormalities of laughing. It is also the psychological and physiological study of laughter. The word is from the Greek gelos, geloto meaning laugh, laughter, laughing...
External links
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