Darwin's illegitimate children: How body language experts undermine Darwin's legacy
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
has received and continues to receive much attention from emotion researchers and behavioural scientists. However, the common misconception that Darwin advocated for the universality of emotional reactions has led to a host of unfounded and discredited claims promoted by 'body language experts' on both traditional and social media. These 'experts' receive unparalleled public attention. Thus, rather than being presented with empirically supported findings on non-verbal behaviour, the public is exposed to 'body language analysis' of celebrities, politicians and defendants in criminal trials. In this perspective piece, we address the misinformation surrounding non-verbal behaviour. We also discuss the nature and scope of statements from body language experts, unpacking the claims of the most viewed YouTube video by a body language expert, comparing these claims with actual research findings, and giving specific attention to the implications for the justice system. We explain how body language experts use (and misuse) Darwin's legacy and conclude with a call for researchers to unite their voices and work towards stopping the spread of misinformation about non-verbal behaviour.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.100 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it