Daddy Darwin

Few scientists have been more tender, sympathetic parents than Charles Darwin, father of ten. But Darwin was a scientist first, a father afterward. From the moment his first child, William Erasmus ("Doddy"), was born, 100 years ago, the eager Revolutionist began to take notes on his infants' wailing, coughing, drooling, kicking, stretching, winking, frowning, screaming. "With a fine degree of paternal fervor," Darwin tickled the naked soles of his babies' feet with paper, "tried to look savage" to provoke tears. Purpose of his baby-baiting was to determine whether the instinctive reactions of childhood were similar to the gestures of lower animals.

Director Arnold Lucius Gesell of Yale's famed Clinic of Child Development, writing in Scientific Monthly for December, gave Darwin credit for these experiments, because, in trying to bolster up his theory of man's lowly origin, Darwin gave a tremendous push to the infant science of infant behavior. Still a source book for child psychologists is Darwin's A Biographic Sketch of an Infant, published in 1877.

Gestures in which Darwin displayed greatest interest were: 1) monkey-like "contraction of muscles around the eyes just before crying"; and 2) pouting. "A dear young lady near here," he wrote, "plagued a very young child for my sake, till he cried and I saw the eyebrows for a second or two beautifully oblique, just before the torrent of tears began."

"He was equally interested," Dr. Gesell continued, "in the pouting of the European child, of Kafir, Fingo, Malay, Abyssinian, Orang and Chimpanzee. [He found] that discontented primates protrude their lips to an extraordinary degree, Europeans to a lesser degree, but that among young children lip protrusion is characteristic of sulkiness throughout the greater part of the world. . . . The study of emotional expression strengthened the conclusion that man is derived from some lower animal form."

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