Charles Darwin facial expressions

Charles Darwin the Buddhist?

467px-Charles_Darwin_01.jpgEwen Callaway, online reporter

In the Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals -- the neglected step-child of Charles Darwin's trifecta of treatises -- the father of evolution theorised that emotion and compassion were universal and naturally selected features of humans.

While traveling around the world aboard the HMS Beagle, Darwin was struck by the fact that he could understand facial expressions of people from different cultures, but not their languages or gestures. Darwin also believed that our sense of moral compassion came from a natural desire to alleviate the suffering of others. He was an ardent abolitionist.

Paul Ekman, a psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who has authored an introduction to Expressions of the Emotions, said today at a AAAS press conference that these views are nearly identical to those of Tibetan Buddhists.

"I am now calling myself a Darwinian, " Ekman recalled the Dalai Lama saying, after Ekman read him some passages of Darwin's work.

Ekman said he spent two full days in deep conversation with the Dalai Lama, resulting in a treatise of his own. He argues through several lines of evidence that Darwin's views on emotion and compassion were inspired directly by Tibetan Buddhism.

"There's always the possibility that two wise people looking at the same species for long enough are going to come to the same conclusion, " he said. Ekman thinks otherwise.

He bristled at requests to elaborate more on his ideas until his talk later today. I'll try to attend that session and provide an update.

But Ekman did make one thing clear: "I'm not saying that Darwin was a Buddhist." Rather, he took intellectual inspiration in some aspects of the religion.

Source: www.newscientist.com

Hotbed of biodiversity: Fascinating images of wildlife from the Galapagos Islands  — Mother Nature Network
Located 575 miles off the coast of Ecuador, this remote volcanic archipelago is famous as the birthplace of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.

FAQ

WasatchLake
How universal is recognizing facial expressions?

I heard that Charles Darwin said that with just a few exceptions, the ability to read facial expressions is the same across cultures. Is this true? How much has this been researched?


The context of why I ask this:

I know a lot of evolutionary psychologists have said that men are more likely to misinterpret women's friendliness for sexual interest, and the reason is that men are more sexual in nature. Then I found a study where they show both men and women movie clips of women having facial expressions: friendly, sexually interested, sad or rejecting.…

Some facial expressions are involuntary and they derive from our natural instincts. They will always be the same in every person because we are all born with the same instincts, but of course that doesn't mean that everyone can read them as such.

Of course that would raise the question how do we know certain involuntary facial expressions are linked to instinctive reactions when we are s|-|ite at reading those facial expressions for what they are? Well, the simple answer for that is face people with certain events that trigger instinctive reactions that in turn trigger…

farfana
In which book the expression "crows feet" is used?

Charles Darwin wrote in his 1872 book, The Expression Of The Emotions In Man And Animals,in this book crows feet is used.


The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals is a book by the British naturalist Charles Darwin published in 1872, on how animals and humans express and signal to others their emotions. It, along with his 1871 book The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, was part of Darwin's attempt to address questions of human origins and human psychology using his theory of evolution by natural selection.

When writing The…

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