Darwin would have loved Botox.
I don’t mean that he would have been first in line at the doctor’s office to get a needle jabbed into his famously furrowed brow. I mean that Darwin would have loved to use Botox as a scientific tool—to eavesdrop on the intimate conversation between the face and brain.
For much of his life, Darwin was obsessed with faces. On a visit to the London Zoo, he gave mirrors to a pair of orangutans and watched them grimace and pucker their lips as they stared at their reflections. He passed many an afternoon gazing intently at photographs of crying babies and laughing women. He showed his friends pictures of a man whose facial muscles were distorted in various ways by electric shocks and quizzed them about what emotion the man seemed to be feeling. To find out if all humans expressed emotions in the same way, he wrote up a list of 16 questions, which he sent to dozens of acquaintances around the world. His list of questions began:
1. Is astonishment expressed by the eyes and mouth being opened wide, and by the eyebrows being raised?
2. Does shame excite a blush when the colour of the skin allows it to be visible? and especially how low down the body does the blush extend?
