A BIOLOGICAL HOMAGE TO MICKEY MOUSE Stephen
Jay Gould Born in 1941 in | ||
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Age often turns fire to placidity. Lytton Strachey, in his incisive portrait
of Florence Nightingale, writes of her declining years: Destiny,
having waited very patiently, played a cruel trick on Miss Nightingale. The benevolence
and public spirit of that long life had only been equaled by its acerbity. Her
virtue had dwelt in hardness.... And now the sarcastic years brought the proud
woman her punishment. She was not to die as she had lived. The sting was to be
taken out of her; she was to be made soft; she was to be reduced to compliance
and complacency. I was therefore not surprised--although the
analogy may strike some as sacrilegious--to discover that the creature who gave
his name as a synonym for insipidity had a gutsier youth. Mickey Mouse turned
a respectable fifty last year. To mark the occasion, many theaters replayed his
debut performance in Steamboat Willie (1928). The original Mickey was a rambunctious,
even slightly sadistic fellow. In a remarkable sequence, exploiting the exciting
new development of sound, Mickey and Minnie pummel, squeeze, and twist the animals
on board to produce a rousing chorus of | |
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As Mickey's personality softened, his appearance changed. Many Disney fans
are aware of this transformation through time, but few (I suspect) have recognized
the coordinating theme behind all the alterations--in fact, I am not sure that
the Disney artists themselves explicitly realized what they were doing, since
the changes appeared in such a halting and piecemeal fashion. In short, the blander
and inoffensive Mickey became progressively more juvenile in appearance. (Since
Mickey's chronological age never altered--like most cartoon characters he stands
impervious to the ravages of time--this change in appearance at a constant age
is a true evolutionary transformation. Progressive juvenilization as an evolutionary
phenomenon is called neoteny. More on this later.) | |
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The characteristic changes of form during human growth have inspired
a substantial biological literature. Since the head-end of an embryo differentiates
first and grows more rapidly in utero than the foot-end (an antero-posterior gradient,
in technical language), a newborn child possesses a relatively large head attached
to a medium sized body with diminutive legs and feet. This gradient is reversed
through growth as legs and feet overtake the front end. Heads continue to grow
but so much more slowly than the rest of the body that relative head size decreases.
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In addition, a suite of changes pervades the head itself during human growth.
MICKEY'S
EVOLUTION during 50 years (left to right). As Mickey became increasingly well
behaved over the years, his appearance became more youthful. Measurements of three
stages in his development revealed a larger relative head size, larger eyes, and
an enlarged cranium--all traits of juvenility. @ Walt Disney Productions.
The brain grows very slowly after age three, and the bulbous
cranium of a young child gives way to the more slanted, lower-browed configuration
of adulthood. The eyes scarcely grow at all and relative eye size declines precipitously.
But the jaw gets bigger and bigger. Children, compared with adults, have larger
heads and eyes, smaller jaws, a more prominent, bulging cranium, and smaller,
pudgier legs and feet. Adult heads are altogether more apish, I'm sorry to say.
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Mickey, however, has traveled this ontogenetic pathway in reverse during fifty
years among us. He has assumed an ever more childlike appearance as the ratty
character of Steamboat Willie became the cute and inoffensive host to a magic
kingdom. By 1940, the former tweaker of pig's nipples gets a kick in the ass for
insubordination (as the sorcerer's Apprentice in Fantasia). By 1953, his last cartoon,
he has gone fishing and cannot even subdue a squirting clam. The Disney artists
transformed Mickey in clever silence, often using suggestive devices that mimic
nature's own changes by different routes. To give him the shorter and pudgier
legs of youth, they lowered his pants line and covered his spindly legs with a
baggy outfit. (His arms and legs also thickened substantially--and acquired joints
for a floppier appearance.) His head grew relatively larger- and its features
more youthful. The length of Mickey's snout has not altered, but decreasing protrusion
is more subtly suggested by a pronounced thickening. Mickey's eye has grown in
two modes: first, by a major, discontinuous evolutionary shift as the entire eye
of ancestral Mickey became the pupil of his descendants, and second, by gradual
increase thereafter. | |
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Mickey's improvement in, cranial bulging followed an interesting path since
his evolution has always been constrained by the unaltered convention of representing
his head as a circle with appended ears and an oblong snout. The circle's form
could not be altered to provide a bulging cranium directly. Instead, Mickey's
ears moved back, increasing the distance between nose and ears, and giving him
a rounded, rather sloping forehead. | |
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To give these observations the cachet of quantitative science, I applied my
best pair of dial calipers to three stages of the official phylogeny--the thin-nosed,
ears forward figure of the early 1930s (stage 1), the latter-day Jack of Mickey
and the Beanstalk (1947, stage 2), and the modern mouse (stage 3). I measured
three signs of Mickey's creeping juvenility: increasing eye size maximum height)
as a percentage of head length (base of the nose to the top of rear ear); increasing
head length as a percentage of body length; and increasing cranial vault size
measured by rearward displacement of the front ear (base of the nose to top of
front ear as a percentage of base of the nose to top of rear ear). | |
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All three percentages increased steadily--eye size from 27 to 42 percent of
head length; head length from 42.7 to 48. 1 percent of body length; and nose to
front ear from 71.7 to a whopping 95.6 percent of nose to rear ear. For comparison,
I measured Mickey's young "nephew" Marty Mouse. In each case, Mickey
has clearly been evolving toward youthful stages of his stock, although he still
has a way to go for head length. | |
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You may, indeed, now ask what an at least marginally respectable scientist
has been doing with a mouse like that. In part, fiddling around and having fun,
of course. (I still prefer Pinocchio to Citizen Kane.) But I do have a serious
point--two in fact--to make. He must first ask why Disney chose to change his
most famous character so gradually and persistently in the same direction? National
symbols are not altered capriciously and market researchers (for the doll industry
in particular) have spent a good deal of time and practical effort learning what
features appeal to people as cute and friendly. Biologists have spent a great
deal of time studying a wide range of animals. | |
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In one of his most famous articles, Konrad Lorenz argues that humans use the
characteristic differences in form between babies and adults as important behavioral
cues. He believes that features of juvenility trigger "innate releasing mechanisms"
for affection and nurturing in adult humans. When we see a living creature with
babyish features, we feel an automatic surge of disarming tenderness. The adaptive
value of this response can scarcely be questioned, for we must nurture our babies.
Lorenz, by the way, lists among his releasers the very features of babyhood that
Disney affixed progressively to Mickey: "a relatively large head, predominance
of the brain capsule, large and low-lying eyes, bulging cheek region, short and
thick extremities, a springy elastic consistency, and clumsy movements."
(I propose to leave aside for this article the contentious issue of whether or
not our affectionate response to babyish features is truly innate and inherited
directly from ancestral primates--as Lorenz argues--or whether it is simply learned
from our immediate experience with babies and grafted upon an evolutionary predisposition
for attaching ties of affection to At
an early stage in his evolution, Mickey had a smaller head, cranial vault, and
eyes. He evolved toward the characteristics of his young nephew Morty (connected
to Mickey by a dotted line). certain learned signals.
My argument works equally well in either case for I only claim that babyish features
tend to elicit strong feelings of affection in adult humans, whether the biological
basis be direct programming or the capacity to learn and Fix upon signals. I also
treat as collateral to my point the major thesis of Lorenz's article---that we
respond not to the totality or Gestalt, but to a set of specific features acting
as releasers. This argument is important to Lorenz because he wants to argue for
evolutionary identity in modes of behavior between other vertebrates and humans,
and we know that many birds, for example, often respond to abstract features rather
than Gestalten. Lorenz's article, published in 1950, bears the title Ganzheit
und Teil in der tierischen und menschlichen Gemeinschaft--"Entirety and
part in animal and human society." Disney's piecemeal change of Mickey's
appearance does make sense in this context--he operated in sequential fashion
upon Lorenz's primary releasers.) | |
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Lorenz emphasizes the power that juvenile features hold over us, and the abstract
quality of their influence, by pointing out that we judge other animals by the
same criteria--although the judgment may be utterly inappropriate in an evolutionary
context. We are, in short, fooled by an evolved response to our own babies, and
we transfer our reaction to the same set of features in other animals. | |
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Many animals, for reasons having nothing to do with the inspiration of affection
in humans, possess some features also shared by human babies but not by human
adults---large eyes and a bulging forehead with retreating chin, in particular.
We are drawn to them, we cultivate them as pets, we stop and admire them in the
wild- while we reject their small-eyed, long-snouted relatives who might make
more affectionate companions or objects of admiration. Lorenz points out that
the German names of many animals with features mimicking human babies end in the
diminutive suffix chen, even though the animals are often larger than close relatives
without such features--Rotkehlchen (robin), Eichhörnchen (squirrel), and
Kaninchen (rabbit), for example. | |
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In a fascinating section, Lorenz then enlarges upon our capacity for biologically
inappropriate response to other animals, or even to inanimate objects that mimic
human features. 'The most amazing objects can acquire remarkable, highly emotional
values by “experiential attachment” of human properties. . . . Steeply rising,
somewhat overhanging cliff faces or dark storm-clouds piling up have the same,
immediate display value as a human being who is standing at full height and leaning
slightly forwards—that is, threatening. | |
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We cannot help regarding a camel as aloof and unfriendly because it mimics,
quite unwittingly and for other reasons, the "gesture of haughty rejection"
common to so many human cultures. In this gesture, we raise our heads, placing
our nose above our eyes. We then half-close our eyes and blow out through our
nose--the "harumph" of the stereo-typed upper-class Englishman or his
well-trained servant. "All this," Lorenz argues quite cogently, "symbolizes
resistance against all sensory modalities emanating from the disdained counterpart."
But the poor camel cannot help carrying its nose above its elongated eyes, with
mouth drawn down. As Lorenz reminds us, if you wish to know whether a camel will
eat out of your hand or spit, look at its ears, not the rest of its face. | |
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In his important book Expression of the
Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872, Charles Darwin traced the
evolutionary basis of many common gestures to originally adaptive actions in animals
later internalized as symbols in humans. Thus, he argued for evolutionary continuity
of emotion, not only of form. We snarl and raise our upper lip in fierce anger--to
expose our nonexistent fighting canine teeth. Our gesture of disgust repeats the
facial actions associated with the highly adaptive act of vomiting in necessary
circumstances.
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In any case, the abstract features of human childhood elicit
powerful emotional responses in us, even when they occur in other animals. I submit
that Mickey Mouse's evolutionary road down the course of his own growth in reverse
reflects the unconscious discovery of this very biological principle by Disney
and his artists. In fact, the emotional status of most Disney characters rests
on the same set of distinctions. To this extent, the magic kingdom trades on a
biological illusion--our ability to abstract and our propensity to transfer inappropriately
to other animals the fitting responses we make to changing form in the growth
of our own bodies. | |
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Donald Duck also adopts more juvenile features through time. His elongated
beak recedes and his eyes enlarge; he converges on Hewey, Louie, and Dewey as
surely as Mickey approaches Morty. But Donald, having inherited the mantle of
Mickey's original misbehavior, remains more adult in form with his projecting
beak and more sloping forehead. | |
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Mouse villains or sharpies, contrasted with Mickey, are always more adult in
appearance, although they often share Mickey's chronological age. In 1936, for
example, Disney made a short entitled Mickey's Rival. Mortimer, a dandy in a yellow
sports car, intrudes upon Mickey and Minnie's quiet country picnic. The thoroughly
disreputable Mortimer has a head only 29 percent of body length, to Mickey's 45,
and a snout 80 percent of head length compared with Mickey's 49. Nonetheless,
and was it ever different, Minnie transfers her affection until an obliging bull
from a neighboring field dispatches Mickey's rival. Consider also the exaggerated
adult features of other Disney characters—the swaggering bully Peg-leg Pete or
the simple, lovable, dolt Goofy. | |
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As a second, serious biological comment on Mickey's odyssey in form, I note
that his path to eternal youth repeats, in epitome, our own evolutionary story.
For humans are neotenic. We have evolved by retaining to adulthood the originally
juvenile features of our ancestors. Our australiopithecene forebears, like Mickey
in Steamboat Willie, had projecting jaws and low vaulted craniums. | |
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Our embryonic skulls scarcely differ from those of chimpanzees.
And we follow the same path of changing form through growth: relative decrease
of the cranial vault since brains grow so much more slowly than bodies after birth,
and continuous relative increase of the jaw. But while chimps accelerate these
changes, producing an adult strikingly different in form from a baby, we proceed
much more slowly down the same path and never get nearly so far. Thus, as adults,
we retain juvenile features. To be sure, we change enough to produce a notable
difference between baby and adult, but our alteration is far smaller than that
experienced by chimps and other primates. | |
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A marked slowdown of developmental rates has triggered our neoteny. Primates
are slow developers among mammals. We have very long periods of gestation, markedly
extended childhoods, and the longest life span of any mammal. The morphological
features of eternal youth have served us well. Our enlarged brain is, at least
in part, a result of extending rapid prenatal growth rates to later ages. (In
all mammals, the brain grows rapidly in utero but often very little after birth.
We have extended this fetal phase into postnatal life.) | |
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But the changes in timing themselves have been just as important. We are preeminently
learning animals, and our extended childhood permits the transference of culture
by education. Many animals display flexibility and play in childhood but follow
rigidly programmed patterns as adults. Lorenz writes, in the same article above:
"The characteristic which is so vital for the human peculiarity of the true
man--that of always remaining in a state of development--is quite certainly a
gift which we owe to the neotenous nature of mankind." | |
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In short, we, like Mickey, never grow up although we, alas, do grow old. Best
wishes to you, |