You too can be Darwin’s guinea pig

Posted on October 21, 2011 by Alison Pearn

Imagine going to dinner with Charles and Emma Darwin and, the minute you get through the door, being dragged off by the famous scientist to take part in one of his experiments. That is exactly what happened to a series of visitors between March and November 1868 when Darwin was researching for his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. You can take part in an online recreation of the experiment combining 21st century techniques with Darwin’s own test materials, developed as part of our ‘Darwin and Human Nature‘ research programme.

 

We can get a very good idea of what was going on from surviving letters and manuscripts – it’s an exciting, and perhaps surprising, close-up view of Darwin at work surrounded by family, friends, and colleagues, all of whom get involved. One visitor described what happened:

Mr. Darwin brought in some photographs taken by a Frenchman, galvanizing certain muscles in an old man’s face, to see if we read aright the expression that putting such muscles in play should produce

- the guests admitted that they’d all gone off afterwards and made faces at themselves in the mirror. That visitor was Jane Gray, wife of the Harvard botanist, Asa Gray; you can also find out more about Jane’s correspondence with Darwin, and read the full text of the charming letter in which she describes her stay.

 

The photographs were from a book by the physiologist, Benjamin Duchenne, whose claim to be able artificially to simulate convincing expressions using electrodes Darwin wanted to test. The eleven black and white photos he used – and that we reuse in the online test – have a bit of a ghoulish quality. Both Duchenne and Darwin were keen to stress that the people in them weren’t in pain – well, OK, not much – but when Darwin later reproduced some of them in Expression he had two engraved with the electric probes left out – a nineteenth-century version of photoshopping.

 

Darwin was investigating the claim that our ability to express emotion is evidence of our separate creation; he argued that most human expression is innate, with shared expressions being evidence of the common descent not just of all human races, but of humans and other animals. This experiment, part of his wider research programme, was not a scientific experiment as we understand it today: there was no control group, the experimental materials were not consistent across the whole trial, and he used a very small number of test subjects by modern standards, but this was pioneering work in a field where methodology is still a thorny issue. We hope recreating his experiment will get people thinking about some important and intriguing questions: Are there core emotions? What are they and how many? Why do we express emotion in the way we do? How do we recognise it and can we be sure we all mean the same things? Is the expression of emotion innate? Or is it culturally modified? How do we equate different words to describe emotion? Can a static image ever convey emotion accurately?

 

Darwin claimed that he had not led his witnesses, but that the photographs had been tested by “showing them to many persons without any explanation and asking what they meant”. This would be described today as a “single-blind” test, Darwin’s tables of results – which you can also see on the website – show that actually he was refining his method as he went. The tables aren’t dated, but we worked out their order by matching the sequence of visitors with references in letters and diaries. The first batch of visitors saw only seven of the eventual set of eleven photographs, and the first few responses consisted of “yes/no” answers, suggesting that, rather than asking what the expression was, Darwin had asked simply whether the photographs showed what they were supposed to.

 

We showed the tables and the original photographs to two other Cambridge groups whose work builds on what Darwin started – one at the Computer Lab teaching robots to recognise human expressions, and the other at the Autism Research Centre, where Professor Simon Baron-Cohen and his team use brain imaging in studying recognition of emotions. Darwin’s tables are roughly drawn on rather scrappy bits of paper – pioneering science in a field that now uses MRI scans and supercomputers started with nothing more than basic materials and a sharp mind. The three groups have begun a collaboration, launched this Saturday at Cambridge University’s Festival of Ideas – the UK’s only festival covering the arts, humanities and social sciences. The 21st century Darwin experiment uses a format developed by the Computer Lab and shows Darwin’s photographs alongside some of the video clips of the Emotions Library developed by the ARC.

 

We don’t know what Darwin’s selection criteria were for his test subjects, or even if they were volunteers, or conscripts. In the middle of conducting his experiment Darwin went off for a family holiday to the Isle of Wight where he was introduced to the poets Tennyson and Longfellow – its a pity he didn’t ask them what they thought.

La Machanga del Agua Mansa

Posted on October 11, 2011 by rjhw2

La Petite Lune, 1871

How much like a monkey is a person? Did our ancestors really swing from trees? Are we descended from apes? By the 1870s, questions like these were on the tip of everyone’s tongue, even though Darwin himself never posed the problem of human evolution in quite these terms. Nevertheless, his Descent of Man (1871) dealt directly with human origins, and it opened the floodgates in Victorian society for all kinds of speculation—from the scientific to the outrageous—into the nature of human evolution. In particular, evolutionary oddities—what might have been called “freaks of nature” at the time—generated a great deal of interest and supposition.  And Darwin, with his wide and varied network of correspondents, was well placed to receive accounts of these cases in his postbox.

One such account came in a letter from a Venezualan-born American named Benjamin Renshaw. In June of 1872, he wrote to Darwin about a local girl living in a mountain town on the island of Tenerife. Clearly “the offspring of a man & woman,” she “so much resemble[s] a monkey, that she is called ‘La Machanga del Agua Mansa,’” or “the Monkey of Agua Mansa.” Bold enough to write to Darwin despite their lack of acquaintance, Renshaw described the monkey-girl in as much detail as he could, convinced that it would be more than a mere curiosity to Darwin, but of actual scientific interest and use.

“The head of the machanga is small & her body is thickly covered with hair. Her mode of scratching herself with upturned hands, of throwing things over her shoulder; her passion for climbing trees, & her ways & habits generally resemble those of a monkey. Her hands & feet are more like the human hand & foot, only the fingers & toes are unusually long. She is very shy, but is easily allured by the sight & smell of food; she speaks only in inarticulate sounds, & is at times quite savage.”

Juliana Pastrana, from Hutchinson et al, The Living Races of Mankind (London, 1900)

Juliana Pastrana, from Hutchinson et al, The Living Races of Mankind (London, 1900)

Unusually hairy people have often been the subject of popular scrutiny. Think of the quintessential side-show—the bearded lady—guaranteed to draw a crowd at any circus, fair, or public show. (Darwin even referred to one of the most famous bearded ladies in history, Juliana Pastrana, in the second volume of Variation, although it was for her unusual dentition rather than her hairiness.) Public exhibition, Renshaw feared, was the likely fate of La Machanga:

“I suppose she will be victimized one of these days by some enterprizing Barnum, & I have no doubt he will make a good thing of it.”

Continue reading →

Monkeys Attracted to Humans, but do they Kiss and Tell?

Posted on July 15, 2011 by the darwin human nature project

In recent posts, we’ve explored the implications of cross-species sexual attraction, and the perception of language as a measure of distinction between Homo sapiens and the rest of the animal kingdom. The question of what separates our species from other animals, and whether language is indeed a mark of distinction, continues to fascinate, intrigue and trouble today, just as it did in the 1870s. These two issues–of cross-species selection and language acquisition–came together following the publication of Darwin’s Descent of Man in 1871 in the search for the so-called “missing link” in human evolution.

 

As a famous figure in the debates surrounding human evolution, Darwin could be something of a lightning rod for eccentric thinkers with their own ideas about his theories. The idea of a “missing link” compelled one such enthusiast to write to him about the possible origins of humankind. Having read an “exposition of the ‘Darwinian theory’” that posited the missing link as an extinct “race of ‘Speechless Men,’” an American banker living in Paris by the name of William B. Bowles suggested to Darwin that, in fact, the “missing link” was neither speechless nor extinct. Rather, the “missing links” in human evolution were “Speaking Monkies,” and Bowles was bold enough to suggest that he thought he could “point out this missing race, show where and how it lives.” Continue reading →

Rubicon crossed?

Posted on July 8, 2011 by the darwin human nature project
Hugo Rheinhold, "Ape with Skull", by Darwin Monkey

Hugo Rheinhold, "Ape with Skull", (Darwin Monkey)

A long-standing debate concerns whether humans are specialized for speech perception ; in the the second half of the nineteenth century, two of the primary figures in this debate were Charles Darwin and Friedrich Max Müller.

A distinguished scholar and one of the leading figures of Victorian cultural life, Müller stated that language was a “Rubicon” between man and brute. Müller specifically attacked the ideas Darwin had formulated about languages in the Descent of Man, where Darwin had rejected Müller’s ideas about Man’s special place in evolution. The difference of opinion led to a series of letters  between the two men of science.

The recent findings of an experiment published in the journal Current Biology could, however, prove to be further evidence that Darwin was right.

Some researchers argue that the capacity for language acquisition is demonstrated by the ability to understand synthetic speech, incomplete or distorted spoken words. Lisa Heimbauer and her colleagues Michael Beran and Michael Owren, from Georgia State University in Atlanta tested a chimpanzee, which had been raised by humans and spoken to as if she were human, to find out whether she too could recognise incomplete or distorted spoken words. The talented chimp, named Panzee, recognised degraded spoken words far more often than should have been the case by chance, providing evidence that our common ancestor would have had the ability to perceive speech.

So has the Rubicon been crossed?

Sources:
Lisa A. Heimbauer, Michael J. Beran and Michael J. Owren, A Chimpanzee Recognizes Synthetic Speech with Significantly Reduced Acoustic Cues to Phonetic Content, Current Biology,  Available online 30 June 2011.
 Matt Walker Editor, BBC Nature, “Chimp recognises synthetic speech”  http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/14045206

Too Human in Nature?

Posted on July 1, 2011 by the darwin human nature project

The human-like qualities of great apes have always been a source of scientific and popular fascination, and no less in the Victorian period than in any other. Darwin himself, of course, marshalled similarities in physiology, behaviour and emotional expression between Homo sapiens and other simians over the course of his long career to support his views on evolution. This kind of evidence appeared in many of his publications, notably The Descent of Man and  The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.  But were some parallels between human beings and other great apes too disquieting to use as scientific evidence?

Correspondence between Charles Darwin and Gaston de Saporta, a French paleobotanist, suggests that this may indeed be the case. In 1872, de Saporta wrote to Darwin after reading Descent of Man. In a long letter in which he both praised the work and expressed his opinion that Darwin may have argued for too close a common ancestry for man and monkey, de Saporta identified two key pieces of evidence which he believed showed most strongly the commonalities between humans and apes: dentition, which “seems to denote an exclusive link with the Monkeys of the old continent,” and “female menstruation and, as a corollary, the odour which makes women attractive to many monkeys.”

In his reply, Darwin graciously thanked de Saporta for “the trouble which you have taken in giving me your reflections on the origin of Man.” Promising to reflect on de Saporta’s comments, he nonetheless stood his ground:

I cannot at present give up my belief in the close relationship of Man, to the higher Simiate. I do not put much trust in any single character, even that of dentition; but I put the greatest faith in resemblances in many   parts of the whole organization, for I cannot believe that such resemblances can be due to any cause except close blood-relationship.

It’s no accident that Darwin did not acknowledge de Saporta’s point about menstruation or its corollary—the attractiveness of human women to other apes. Darwin’s difficulty negotiating this issue had much to do with norms of Victorian respectability, and what was or wasn’t appropriate for wider circulation beyond private correspondence or, for publication.

Punch cartoon, with reference to cross-species sexual attraction

From Punch 24 May 1873

Continue reading →

Spotlight on a correspondent: William Winwood Reade

Posted on May 20, 2011 by the darwin human nature project

On May, 19, 1868, an African explorer and unsuccessful novelist, William Winwoode Reade (1838–1875) offered to help Darwin, and started a correspondence and, arguably, a collaboration, that would last until Reade’s death.

After a first 1861 tour of West Africa, in which he paid particular attention to arguments then current about the character of gorillas and the existence of cannibalism, Reade had been associated with the Anthropological Society, which at the time mostly represented those who disagreed with Darwin’s theory and advocated the separate creation of the human races, and opposed the monogenist views of the Ethnological Society.

Nonetheless, Reade contacted Charles Darwin in 1868 to offer his services: his second expedition to Africa was conceived, at least in part, as a scientific venture. Darwin drew on this information in the Descent of Man. In turn, describing himself as a “disciple” of Darwin, Reade claimed inspiration from the Origin of Species (“your book – The Origin- has had considerable influence on my mind. If I read it earlier in life it might have completely changed the course of it – Winwood Reader to Charles Darwin, 31 January 1871) and sought Darwin’s advice on the passages about the origin of language which he intended to publish in the Martyrdom of Man. Reade’s reputation as a writer rests not on his novels, nor on his travel writing, but on that single work, first published in 1872. The Martyrdom be quoted as an essential book by HG Wells, George Orwell, and, even, Sherlock Holmes. People are sometimes surprised to find from his correspondence that Darwin worked so collaboratively, but this is just one of many examples drawn from his international network [link to the other post here]. The Darwin and Human Nature Project will be making some of the most significant of Reade’s letters available online ahead of their publication in the print edition of the Correspondence – a fascinating glimpse into the construction of Descent and into the warring beginnings of two sciences, ethnology and anthropology, as understood by an avowed Darwinian free-thinker.

For more about William Winwood Reade, see

Felix Driver, Geography Militant, Cultures of Exploration and Empire, (Blackwell, 2001)

Felix Driver, ‘Reade, William Winwood (1838–1875)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford University Press, 2004); online edn, May 2009.

Workshop in the History and Philosophy of Biology, Aberdeen, 21 May 2011

Posted on May 20, 2011 by the darwin human nature project

Dr White, from the Darwin Correspondence Project,  is speaking on Darwin and the evolution of sympathy at a workshop in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen.

The event will focus on the moral and religious debates surrounding evolutionary theory in the nineteenth century and the implications of evolutionary theory for modern ethics and psychological models of the self.

Workshop in the History and Philosophy of Biology

Centre for the History and Philosophy of Science, Technology and Medicine
and Department of Philosophy

Divinity Library, King’s College
University of Aberdeen

Saturday, May 21st 10:00-17:30

Programme:
10:00
Robert J. Richards, (Chicago)
Darwin’s Principles of Divergence and Natural Selection: Why Fodor was Almost Right
11:30
Paul White (Cambridge)
Becoming an Animal: Darwin and the Evolution of Sympathy
14:00
Pietro Corsi (Oxford)
Idola Tribus: Lamarck, Politics and Religion in the Early Nineteenth Century
15:00
Kevin Brosnan (Cambridge)
Do the Evolutionary Origins of our Moral Beliefs Undermine Moral Knowledge?
16:30
Catherine Wilson (Aberdeen)
From Biological Selves to Psychological Selves
The workshop is free and open to all. Registration is required via a note to c.wilson@abdn.ac.uk

Top 10!

Posted on April 5, 2011 by the darwin human nature project

Image credit Tom Morgan Jones

 

Are humans inherently generous and sympathetic to others?

Is there such a thing as an “instinct for truth” ?

How do people around the world express their emotions?

All these questions are discussed in Darwin’s correspondence. Darwin also writes about the continuity in moral behaviour between humans and animals, evoked  the religious implications of his theory, and the wider significance of human progress in light of the eventual extinction of life on earth …

We have selected 10 letters,  written between 1830 and 1871, to give you a glimpse  of Darwin’s wide-ranging reflections on human nature

Discover what Darwin thought about animal behavior, the evolution of aesthetic taste and moral sensibility, the origin of the human races, and the implications of evolution for human progress … and let us know what your favourite letter is!

It’s all in the language !

Posted on January 13, 2011 by the darwin human nature project

How can an English bishop and a French évêque help Darwin explain his theories about species and natural selection?

In the middle of the nineteenth century, linguists were concerned with establishing genetic relationships between the English language and cognates (words that have a common etymological origin) in various other Indo-European languages.

Hensleigh Wedgwood , Emma Darwin’s brother and Charles’ cousin was a philologist, barrister and original member of the Philological Society, which had been created in 1842. In 1857, while Wedgwood was preparing a dictionary of English etymology, he wrote to Darwin suggesting that the common origin of the French “chef” and the English “head” or “????” and “bishop” illustrated the parallels between extinct and transitional forms in language and palaeontology.

Hensleigh’s cousin must have appreciated the comparison, for he used the case of ‘bishop’ and evêque’ in a chapter about the difficulties presented by his theory in Natural selection, in order to show how apparently dissimilar animals could be derived from a common source, just like etymology could show words to be : “to one who knew no other language, dead or living, besides French & English, how absurd would the assertion seem, that evêque & bishop had both certainly descended from a common source, & could still be connected by intermediate links, with the extinct word episcopus.”

Charles Darwin dropped the bishops, but used the analogy again in Origin, and eventually in the in the Descent of Man, where he wrote soberly that “the formation of different languages and of distinct species and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process are curiously the same.”

Darwin and phrenology

Posted on November 24, 2010 by the darwin human nature project

19th century phrenology chart

According to the phrenological doctrine, as elaborated by Franz Joseph Gall, the shape of the skull reflects the `organs’ or faculties of the brain.

Phrenology attained considerable popularity in England: by 1832 there were 29 phrenological societies and an influential journal edited by George Combe.

Yet the theory is almost never mentioned by Darwin, who did not discuss it,  nor mentioned in any of the two editions of the Descent of Man the experiments which by then had demonstrated that some movements hitherto attributed to free will could be produced by localised electrical simulation of the brain - (although a section on the brain was added to the second edition in 1874).

Darwin’s early doubts about one of the most popular Nineteenth-century theories of nature  can be found in the correspondence: In 1830, a young Charles wrote to his cousin and friend William Darwin Fox  “I forgot to mention, I dined with Sir J. Mackintosh & had some talk with him about Phrenology, & he has entirely battered down the very little belief of it that I picked up at Osmaston.”

Darwin had spent three weeks with Fox at Osmaston Hall, the Fox Family’s home, in the summer of 1829.  Sir James Mackintosh (1765-1832) was a philosopher and historian who had studied medicine at Edinburgh; he and Josiah Wedgwood of Maer married two of the Allen sisters, so there was connection by marriage between the families. Darwin wrote about fist meeting Mackintosh during one of his visits to Maer in 1827 and later referred to him as `the best converser I ever listened to’ (The autobiography of Charles Darwin, p. 55)

Osmaston

Charles’ letter to Fox is both interesting in showing how a popular subject such as phrenology could be “picked up” or not, by young minds, but also how easily a conversation was enough to “batter down” any belief in it !