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In fact, Darwin performed what may be the world’s first study of how people interpret and understand the emotions of others, according to a paper published in the April issue of the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences.
The experiment originated from a disagreement between Darwin and French neurologist G.B.A Duchenne. Duchenne believed that every emotion expressed on a person’s face is created by a separate muscle. To support this, he went about the grim task of electrically stimulating participants’ facial muscles and photographing the resulting expression, ultimately producing a set of 65 different plates.
Darwin thought it was much more likely that there were just a core number of emotions expressed by a face, and that these were shared across many cultures and species.
To test this, Darwin and his wife, Emma, set up an experiment in their home: they showed 24 house guests a series of 11 Duchenne plates and simply asked them to describe what emotion they saw in each. Only a handful of the faces received similar descriptions from all participants. Darwin reasoned that these emotions — surprise, fear, disgust, anger, happiness and sadness — are universally understood, and described them in his 1872 book, Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. The rest of the plates, he argued, showed unnatural expressions.
What’s amazing to me is that today’s researchers use photographs showing the same six expressions to learn about the cognitive underpinnings of autism, and to evaluate possible treatments for the disorder.
Of course, these modern experiments have some technological upgrades, such as computerized faces, eye-tracking machines or brain scanners but, once again, Darwin it seems was ahead of the curve.
Carl Zimmer has a knack for writing about things I’ve always wondered about, but never bothered to look up myself.
Like, I wonder why leaves turn colors? I wonder what dogs think about? I wonder how museum-artist types know how to draw accurate pictures of dinosaurs or human ancestors that they’ve never seen in the flesh?
The answer to that last one, as Carl writes in his latest column at the New York Times, is that artists do the best they can with the known scientific facts, and take a bit of creative license with characteristics that are less certain.
For instance, take illustrator Nuka Godtfredsen, who drew the image of Inuk, the 4,000-year-old paleo-Eskimo that made the cover of Nature last month:
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He studied photographs of Chukchi people to give Inuk a face. He also took note of the fact that, despite Inuk’s genetic propensity for baldness, the tufts of his hair were up to eight inches long. As a compromise, he gave Inuk a receding hairline and a mullet.
Detroit’s “splendid decaying monuments are, no less than the Pyramids of Egypt, the Coliseum of Rome, or the Acropolis in Athens, remnants of the passing of a great civilization.”
Some amazingly beautiful, and heartbreaking, photographs of the Motor City, by Yves Marchand/Romain Meffre Photography (tons more on their site):
(Hat tip: Rand)
The latest issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association holds two studies about obesity trends in the U.S. Their basic finding: the rates are slowing down a bit, bit they still ain’t good. Two-thirds of adults, and one-third of children, are overweight or obese.
Obesity, writes J. Michael Gaziano in a related commentary, constitutes the fifth phase of the epidemiologic transition. That’s a mouthful, I know, but he writes a really fascinating (and brief) history of human disease. Here’s a snippet:
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The face of the Mona Lisa is probably the most iconic in all of art. The coy, thin smile, the smooth cheeks, the fatty folds underneath squinty eyes.
This week — in what must have been an extremely entertaining lecture — an Italian doctor said that Mona’s features reveal that she didn’t eat too well. From the BBC (via Spoonful of Medicine):
For Dr Vito Franco, from Palermo University, she shows clear signs of a build-up of fatty acids under the skin, caused by too much cholesterol. He also suggests there seems to be a lipoma, or benign fatty-tissue tumour, in her right eye.
Dr Franco says his medical examinations reveal more than artistic viewings… “The people depicted in art reveal their physicality, tell us of their vulnerable humanity, regardless of the artist’s awareness of it,” he [said].
One afternoon last November, Joe Lucia and the 11 other students in the Islamic Art and Architecture course met in a drab corner of the ground floor of the Walsh Library, the inconspicuous home of the University Archives at Seton Hall University.
A few months earlier, rare books historian Todor Petev had discovered two boxes there, each holding about 20 loose pages from old Islamic manuscripts. Petev selected half that he found particularly interesting — for their age, place of origin, or religious significance — and it was these that his students had come to see. For the ever-curious Lucia, now a junior, the ancient leaves would lead to some remarkable discoveries, and a taste for life as an art historian.
The group sat at tables in the conference room, surrounded by iron busts, ornately framed maps, and carts of dusty books. The students delicately thumbed through the two boxes, marveling at the faded script from a 12th-century copy of the Qur’an and the torn edges of a 19th-century Arabic text about hygiene.
A 3-by-6 inch piece of glazed linen stood apart from the other items. It was the only leaf that showed not just text, but also an illuminated illustration: seven people gathered on a lush hill. On the opposite side of the print were a dozen black and gold lines of script.
Over at Tech Review‘s website, ScienceBlogger Mo Costandi has an amazing photo essay showing how brain imaging technology has progressed since Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s exquisite drawings of the late 19th century. A must-read for brain buffs!
Tom Wolfe writes an astute, if a bit too cheeky, op-ed in the New York Times about the long failure of NASA. The major problem? It has no overarching philosophy, no mission, no “Word”:
What NASA needs now is the power of the Word. On Darwin’s tongue, the Word created a revolutionary and now well-nigh universal conception of the nature of human beings, or, rather, human beasts. On Freud’s tongue, the Word means that at this very moment there are probably several million orgasms occurring that would not have occurred had Freud never lived. Even the fact that he is proved to be a quack has not diminished the power of his Word.
July 20, 1969, was the moment NASA needed, more than anything else in this world, the Word. But that was something NASA’s engineers had no specifications for. At this moment, that remains the only solution to recovering NASA’s true destiny, which is, of course, to build that bridge to the stars.
This ‘America the Beautiful’ animation is ridiculously cheesy, but I suppose cheesiness is OK for a holiday. Happy Independence Day! (Hat tip: Dad!)
I gave a delightful little giggle after reading this tidbit from Starts with a Bang:
One of the coolest biological things (to an astrophysicist) that was done recently was the crushing of moonrocks into a sandy dust, followed by planting seeds in them and watering them. The result?
