Darwin’s Descent of Man and The Expression of Emotions

Abstract

The chapter discusses the major topics presented in Charles Darwin’s books The Descent of Man and The Expression of Emotions. As the chapter explains, the primary scientific importance of The Descent of Man is that it extends the evolutionary concept of descent from an ancient common ancestor, which was proposed by Charles Darwin, Erasmus Darwin, the Comte de Buffon, Jean-Baptise Lamarck and others, to humans. However, by the time The Descent of Man was published, two other books had already made the claim that humans had evolved from lower types of animals. The other major contribution of the book, from a psychological perspective, was its claim that the mental abilities of animals and humans differ only in degree, not in kind, a concept that has come to be called the theory of the “continuity of mind.” As the chapter explains, the major contribution of The Expression of Emotions, which has been called the first book on Evolutionary Psychiatry, is that it explicitly extends the concept of the continuity of mental abilities in humans and other animals to the experience and expression of emotions. The chapter describes the parallels Darwin saw between the human and animal expression of anger, fear, and other emotions.