The physician, biologist, and naturalist, author of The Origin of Species (1859), made history as the scientist who saw natural selection as the basis for the evolution of species.
He proposed evolution from a common ancestor who would not be a divine being resulting from creativity, belief, or religion, but through an entirely iconoclastic process called natural selection.
Darwin would be the author of phrases like “There is no doubt that there is no progress” and “It is not the strongest species to survive, nor is it the most intelligent… It is the most adaptable to change.”
And also editors of other works such as The Voyage of the Beagle and The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals.
For the latter, he had developed a 17-item questionnaire, including: Do you express surprise by opening your eyes and mouth wide and raising your eyebrows? Does embarrassment cause a blush, and more importantly, how far up the body does the blush extend? When a man is outraged or defiant, does he frown, hold his body and head up, square his shoulders, and clench his fists?
Undoubtedly, he was one of the great scientists fascinated by nature and humans. To find out what the reactions were, he sent these questions to friends, family, and, more importantly, to naturalists, missionaries, merchants, and travelers in remote places.
He was interested in peoples who had little communication with European settlers, since the goal was to gauge the extent to which emotional expressions were cultural and conventional, or instinctive and universal.
In his search he received answers from Australia, New Zealand, Borneo, Malaysia, China, Calcutta, Ceylon, South and West Africa, North and South America.
Like many greats of history, Darwin has been called insane on various occasions for claiming that the inner feelings of humans and animals manifest themselves outwardly in similar ways.
He held that the expressions as evidence of man’s animal ancestry must have evolved through common evolutionary mechanisms.
Not only are Darwin’s findings historically interesting, they continue to guide our thinking about how we develop policies to study disease, Peter Snyder, a professor of neurology at Brown University, told the BBC.
“We’re still using what Darwin discovered. He really was a genius and had an impact in all sorts of areas, but one of the areas he’s not really known for is human psychology.”
mem/cdg