Darwin’s Third Evolution Book Was Fraudulent
Darwin’s book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
found to be fraudulent, but is still lauded by Darwinians
by Jerry Bergman, PhD
Cover of Darwin’s Expressions book, 1872
Darwin’s book on facial expressions, titled The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, was his third major work on his evolutionary theory. Originally intended to be a single chapter in The Descent of Man, Darwin added so much material that it was eventually published separately in 1872. A best seller when published, out-selling Darwin’s other books, it has never been out of print since then.[1] The year 2022 is the 150th anniversary of the Expression book, often described as Darwin’s “forgotten masterpiece.” Since February 12th (Darwin’s birth date) is celebrated by his followers as ‘Darwin Day,’ it will likely receive publicity each year on that day.
Darwin’s interest in the subject began when, as an Edinburgh medical student, he read Sir Charles Bell‘s Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression (1844) which argued for a theological connection to emotions. Darwin took umbrage at this conclusion, and argued that cultural factors had only a minor role in shaping human expression. His approach was a biological—thus evolutionary—cause of the origins of animal expression. His philosophical foundation also led to his belief in a universal expression of emotions, implying a single evolutionary origin for the human species.
Darwin’s work was celebrated before Darwin Day by Australia’s Benjamin Bradley, a psychology professor at Australia’s Charles Sturt University. He opined that Charles Darwin’s writing about how expressions evolved pre-empted modern psychology by over a century.[2] He wrote that Darwin’s book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, teaches
valuable lessons for scientists seeking to understand how and why humans do what we do. The book hardly mentions natural selection. Instead, it puts how organisms behave at the heart of evolutionary adaptation – an idea that is becoming commonplace in 21st-century biology. Since the 1940s, evolutionists have viewed natural selection as an aimless mechanism: random genetic variations arise, and chance environmental events allow the most beneficial (or “fittest”) ones to survive. More recently, biologists have found it necessary to introduce the actual behavior of living creatures into this picture. From this perspective, organisms adapt to their circumstances, and genetics then stabilizes the changes.[3]
Thus, Professor Bradley indicates that Darwinian evolution is backward. Behavior occurs first, then the genes change in response to the behavior, an idea supposedly based on Darwin’s Expressions book.[4] The fact is, the scientific methodology in this book is seriously problematic and it is difficult to base any theory on it.
One of the illustrations in Darwin’s emotions book which actually was a mental patent shocked by electrodes. The electrodes were removed from this illustration.
Darwin Resorted to Fraud to Prove His Theory
Although Darwin admitted that some of the photographs he used were posed, and others were modified, Paul Ekman (social psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco) “found from the Darwin archives and correspondence that the alterations were more extensive” than previously believed.[5] Instead of photographing natural expressions elicited by typical humans responding to real situations, many of the photographs, it was implied or openly stated, were actually posed. Darwin went far beyond simply retouching the photographs, which would have been a problem even if Darwin had admitted that the photographs were doctored. The only photograph in the Expressions book that we know for sure was not posed was that of Darwin’s dog Polly.[6]
Judson related that Darwin used several photographs taken by London photographer Oscar Rejlander because he “proved especially skillful at securing the expressions Darwin wanted.”[7]
Trick Photography
Rejlander is most often identified with the “composite printing” technique today called “trick photography” in which several photographic negatives were artfully combined to create a photographic print made from several pictures. As a result, Rejlander was able to manipulate his images, and produce convincing photorealistic images that were artificially assembled in the darkroom.[8] Rejlander even occasionally used himself at the subject for his photographs. Trodger determined that one picture of Rejlander’s wife was specifically posed for Darwin to illustrate “a most convincing sneer.”[9]
Other pictures in Darwin’s emotions book. The girl in the chair discussed in the article is figure 1 in the montage.
Rejlander put his trick photography skills to good use to help Darwin “prove” his thesis. The first, and most celebrated photograph in Darwin’s Expression book, is of a weeping baby that turned out to be a photographic copy of a drawing made from an original photograph that Rejlander altered.[10] Darwin titled this picture “mental distress.”[11] Rejlander’s skills enabled him to effectively “highlight elements of the image Darwin sought to express” such as in one photograph where the “child’s hair, cheeks, and brow … seem slightly more lively and energetic in the drawn version.”[12] Another manipulation was to put the child into an unnaturally small chair by means of trick photography, making the child look “larger-than-life.” The goal was to artificially create an “illustration that would have seemed persuasive to Darwin’s readers.”[13]
Darwin’s Shameful Lack of Transparency
Darwin nowhere mentioned in his writings that this picture was an altered copy of a photograph that was “changed substantially from the photographic original.”[14] Ironically, T.H. Huxley, called ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’ because of his major role as Darwin’s apologist, was one of the main critics of Darwin’s photographic manipulations.[15]
Other pictures in Darwin’s emotions book. The bottom photograph shows the electrodes used in an attempt to illustrate great fear or a startle reflex.
Darwin also used eight photographs by the famous Paris physiologist Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne who used electrodes to stimulate the facial muscles in mental patients and then take their photograph.[16] He is also credited with the discovery of Duchenne muscular dystrophy which was named after him. Duchenne published a book that contained photographs of patients forced to endure these barbaric treatments.[17] From another set of more than 40 photographs of mental patients, Darwin selected a woman diagnosed as insane to use as an example of a “normal” human expression.[18]
Considerable differences exist between capturing the results of genuine emotions naturally expressed by a person and using electrodes to force facial expressions. Likewise, substantial dissimilarity exists between artificial facial contortions touched up by an artist and capturing people on film in the natural act of expressing joy, disgust, or one of the many other common human emotions. Darwin’s purpose of using photography was to study realistic facial expressions “without relying on the expertise of visual artists.”[19]
To artificially produce what an observer thinks is a sneer is quite different than evaluating the results of expressing this genuine emotion as confirmed by the subject. This point is critical because “Darwin believed that the objectivity of photographic evidence could be used to challenge” existing ideas about the expression of emotion, thus proving his theory that human expressions were inherited from lower animals.[20]
Darwin’s Lack of Scientific Objectivity
In a review of Darwin’s work on emotions, Beth Mole noted that “Darwin’s experiment included only 20 or so participants—mostly his friends and family—and he ignored some of the data.”[21] The major issue Darwin avoided is the unbridgeable gap that exists between humans and animals. Only humans have the face muscles required to express the emotions that Darwin was looking for in animals. Humans have on average 43 facial muscles and chimps, supposedly our closest relatives, have only 23.
Darwin claimed he arrived at his basic conclusions about emotions in around 1870, and only after close observations of facial expressions. Contrary to his claim, Ekman found that all of his basic conclusions were in his notebooks written in 1838-1839.[22] Although often regarded as one of the most highly esteemed scientists, Darwin clearly had many major scholarly shortcomings.[23] These few examples of the many Darwinian errors illustrate the fact that his conclusions were based both on faulty analysis and deceptive data. His research was often very superficial and strongly biased toward his thesis.[24]
Other pictures in Darwin’s Emotion book showing family and friends pictures mimicking various emotions.
References
[1] Brown, Janet. Charles Darwin: The Power of Place. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, NY, 2002, p. 490.
[2] Bradley, Ben. “150 years ago, Charles Darwin wrote about how expressions evolved – pre-empting modern psychology by a century,” The Conversation, 6 February 2022.
[3] Bradley, 2022.
[4] Bradley, Ben, Darwin’s Psychology, Oxford University Press, New York, NY, 2020.
[5]Judson, Horace Freeland, The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science, Harcourt Publishing, Orlando, FL, 2004, p. 62.
[6] Brown, 2002, p. 361.
[7] Judson, 2004, p. 63.
[8] Prodger, Phillip, An Annotated Catalogue of the Illustrations of Human and Animal Expression from the Collection of Charles Darwin: An Early Case of the Use of Photography in Scientific Research, Edwin Mellen Press, Lewiston, NY, p. 170.
[9] Judson, 2004, p. 63.
[10] Judson, 2004, p. 63.
[11] Prodger, 1998.
[12] Prodger, 1998, p. 173.
[13] Prodger, 1998, p. 173.
[14] Prodger, 1998, p. 175.
[15] Prodger, 1998, p. 177.
[16] Helmuth, Laura, Boosting Brain Activity from the Outside In, Science 292(5520):1284-1286, 2001, p. 1284.
[17] Duchenne de Boulogne, G.-B., and Andrew Cuthbertson, The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression, Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, 1990.
[18] Prodger, 1998, p. 162.
[19] Prodger, 1998, p. 141.
[20] Prodger, 1998, p. 141
[21] Mole, Beth Marie, The Look of Emotion, circa 1868, The Scientist 26(12):88, December 2012.
[22] Prodger, 1998, p. xxvii.
[23] Simonton, D.K., Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity. Oxford University Press, New York, NY, 1999.
[24] Ekman, Paul (editor), Darwin and Facial Expression: A Century of Research in Review, Academic Press, New York, NY, 1973.
Dr. Jerry Bergman has taught biology, genetics, chemistry, biochemistry, anthropology, geology, and microbiology for over 40 years at several colleges and universities including Bowling Green State University, Medical College of Ohio where he was a research associate in experimental pathology, and The University of Toledo. He is a graduate of the Medical College of Ohio, Wayne State University in Detroit, the University of Toledo, and Bowling Green State University. He has over 1,300 publications in 12 languages and 40 books and monographs. His books and textbooks that include chapters that he authored are in over 1,500 college libraries in 27 countries. So far over 80,000 copies of the 40 books and monographs that he has authored or co-authored are in print. For more articles by Dr Bergman, see his Author Profile.