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Why do people from different cultures smile, frown and blush in the same way? Darwin collected answers from missionaries around the world, observed the faces…
Why do people from different cultures smile, frown and blush in the same way? Darwin collected answers from missionaries around the world, observed the faces of his own children and studied animals in the London zoo to show that many expressions are inherited, shared with other animals and older than language.
Context and significance
Published in 1872, it was one of the first scientific books illustrated with photographs, and it laid the foundations of the modern study of emotion. It is also one of Darwin's most charming books, full of dogs, cats, monkeys and babies. It follows naturally from The Descent of Man.
About the author
Charles Darwin (1809–1882) left medical school in Edinburgh because he could not bear to watch operations, and studied at Cambridge to become a clergyman. Instead, at twenty-two, he joined the five-year voyage of HMS Beagle, described in The Voyage of the Beagle, which gave him the observations of a lifetime.
Back in England he worked for twenty years at his country home in Kent before a letter from the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who had reached the same idea, pushed him to publish On the Origin of Species in 1859. He went on to write The Descent of Man and books on barnacles, orchids and earthworms, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.