Column: Dr's Casebook - Dr Keith Souter: Did it matter that Charles Darwin had a short nose?
I was down in London over the weekend and paid a visit to the National Portrait Gallery where I was determined to seek out the portrait of Charles Darwin the naturalist and great Victorian scientist, who gave us the theory of evolution. I really wanted to look at his nose!
First, let me take you back to 1830, when Robert Fitzroy was given the position of captain of HMS Beagle. Since the ship was a survey vessel Fitzroy advertised for a naturalist to accompany him. One of the applicants was Charles Darwin, a young 22-year-old divinity graduate from Cambridge. Fitzroy was an enthusiastic student of physiognomy, the study of character according to facial features. Although he liked Darwin he considered that his nose was too short, wide and lumpish! This led him to believe that he would not be robust enough or have enough determination to endure the long sea voyage that he estimated would take five years. He therefore appointed another applicant.
One wonders if things might have been different had the first choice candidate not turned down the position, for Darwin may not have developed his theory of evolution if he had not visited the Galapagos Islands.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Arthur Thomson, an Oxford professor of anatomy made an intensive study of nose shapes and formulated Thomson’s Nose Rule. He stated that ethnic groups that originated in cold, arid climates tend to have longer, thinner noses, while those from warm, humid climates have shorter and thicker ones.
Researchers at Penn State University anthropology department have looked at nose traits that differ across populations and looked at geographical variation with respect to temperature and humidity. They used high-tech 3-D imagining and analysed nostril measurements and nose shapes in a vast number of subjects. They conclude that Thomson was right, that the natural selection of certain noses, fit for certain climates played a part in the evolution of nose shapes. Narrower nostrils alter the airflow to enable mucus-covered nasal passages to moisten and warm the air that will enter the lungs. Peoples with this trait would have survived better in the cold climates of the Ice Age as they migrated away from the equator, so over millenia there would have been a decline in wider noses.
Interestingly, although physiognomy was discredited and is regarded as a pseudo-science like phrenology, Fitzroy’s assessment of Darwin’s robustness was half correct. All his life he was plagued by ill health and on the Galapagos trip suffered badly from seasickness. But he was certainly wrong about his determination.