When I become interested in a thinker, one of the first things I do is to look up photos of him.
It’s hard to articulate to a distinguished reader like yourself why I do this.
I shudder to imagine what you must think of me. Prior to this post, you likely held me in high-esteem. And now, I am lower in status than the whore in church who asks to lead the Bible study.
Perhaps I should just say this is a result of my formation and leave it there.
This is tacit stuff. Who am I to try to articulate my shameful practice?
Mate, fair go. Life is different for the beautiful vs the ugly.
I must follow truth wherever it leads.
I’m not an idiot. Really. I don’t believe that physiognomy is destiny, but it is a catchy phrase that makes me smile.
What do I see in a photo? Age, class cues, ethnic and coalition markers, self-presentation style, bearing. You see whether the man grooms himself, what he signals with his glasses or haircut or clothes, how he holds his face for a camera. You see whether he looks tired, vital, guarded, amused. These signals do not tell you whether his argument is correct. They tell you something about the man who made it.
Faces carry information about hormonal profile, health, age, ancestry, affect, and self-presentation. Most of this is legible at a glance and consciously used in ordinary life. We hire, date, vote, and trust on face data constantly. The social prohibition falls on articulating what we already do.
The incentives against articulation are real. A scholar who says he reads faces risks association with Lombroso, phrenology, Nazi race science, and Progressive Era eugenics. The taboo protects against genuine harms. It also protects the fiction that we encounter ideas as disembodied propositions. Academics cannot admit they read faces because admitting it would contaminate the purity of the argument-exchange model their status rests on.
Photos help me track:
Coalition markers. A man’s face, hair, glasses, and bearing place him in a social world. Heterodox economist, reform rabbi, evangelical pastor, tech founder, literary critic. These types look different because grooming and self-presentation are coalition signals. You read the signal and update on whose approval he seeks.
Hormonal and energetic state. Testosterone, cortisol, vitality, and fatigue show on faces. A thinker running on fumes writes differently than one at peak. Knowing which you are reading helps you weight the work.
Congruence. Does the face match the prose? A man who writes with swagger and looks cowed, or who writes with humility and looks imperious, is telling you something about the gap between his self-presentation in print and in flesh.
Age and life stage. A man at thirty writes from a different place than the same man at sixty. The face tells you where he stands.
Affect. Some thinkers look haunted. Some look amused. Some look angry. The emotional register of the face primes you for the emotional register of the work, and mismatches are informative.
None of this is physiognomy in the Lavater sense. It is closer to what Goffman called the presentation of self, read backward from photographs. The academic refusal to engage it leaves a gap that popular culture fills with crude versions. Somebody articulating it carefully would be doing real work. The incentives against doing so are enormous.
People get to choose most of their photos online. This curation of the self matters.
Minor physical anomalies research, abbreviated MPA, was a scale built by Mary Waldrop and Charles Halverson in 1971. It catalogs eighteen subtle deviations from typical morphology: adherent earlobes, low-seated ears, asymmetric ears, malformed ears, fine electric hair, abnormal hair whorls, epicanthal folds, wide-spaced or narrow-spaced eyes, high-steepled or narrow palate, furrowed tongue, smooth or rough spots on the tongue, curved fifth finger, single palmar crease, third toe longer than second, webbed toes, large gap between first and second toes. None of these are disfigurements in the ordinary sense. They are subclinical markers, visible only to someone looking for them.
The biological story runs through prenatal development. The face and the brain develop from the same embryonic tissue, ectoderm and neural crest cells. Disruption in utero, from maternal smoking, alcohol, infection, toxin exposure, malnutrition, or genetic stress, can mark both at once. The face records prenatal history.
The Copenhagen study from 1989 is the canonical paper. Elizabeth Kandel, Patricia Brennan, Sarnoff Mednick, and Norman Michelson used a Danish birth cohort. They measured MPAs at ages eleven to thirteen and checked police records at ages twenty to twenty-two. Recidivistic violent offenders showed elevated MPA counts compared to men with one violent offense or none. PubMed The men with multiple violent offenses carried more of the markers than the men with one offense, who carried more than the men with none. A dose-response pattern.
Louise Arseneault and colleagues followed in 2000 with a Montreal study. They assessed MPAs in 170 adolescent boys from low-socioeconomic-status Montreal neighborhoods using the eighteen-item Waldrop scale. Psychiatry OnlineLouise-arseneault Each additional mouth anomaly raised violent-delinquency risk by a factor of 1.7. When they removed mouth anomalies from the total count, the overall MPA effect vanished. Louise-arseneault The authors suggested mouth anomalies might track both neurological deficits and early feeding problems that complicate socialization. PubMed The mouth result echoed earlier findings of mouth anomalies in psychotic children and schizophrenics.
Adrian Raine at Penn has carried the biosocial program forward, though his most cited work uses brain imaging rather than MPAs. PET scans of murderers showing reduced prefrontal activity in impulsive subgroups. Structural abnormalities in amygdala and corpus callosum among antisocial populations. MPAs appear in his synthesis as one marker among several, not the center of attention.
The framework extends beyond violence. A 2015 study administered the Waldrop scale to men referred for assessment after sexual assault or other illegal sexual behavior. MPA indices correlated with penile response to depictions of children, number of child victims, and possession of child pornography. PubMed The prenatal-origin thesis travels into paraphilia research.
The body of work stays small for identifiable reasons.
Funding committees grew up after Lombroso and phrenology and Nazi race science. They know what criminology looked like before it got respectable. A grant proposal that says “we will measure murderers’ facial features” sets off institutional alarms even when the actual measurement is adherent earlobes and palate shape.
Sociology-dominated criminology resists the framework. The field staked itself on social explanations: labelling theory, strain, differential association, criminal justice process. Biological markers threaten the apparatus. Biosocial criminology remains a small subfield, and Raine, Kevin Beaver, Anthony Walsh, and John Paul Wright have taken career friction for doing it.
The effect sizes are modest. Few men with many MPAs become violent offenders. Most violent offenders do not carry strikingly high counts. The finding is a population-level shift in distribution, not a diagnostic signature. That makes it easy to dismiss and hard to popularize.
The face sits inside a sacred zone the brain does not occupy. You can show a PET scan of a murderer’s prefrontal cortex and no one panics. Annotate his face with notes about ear asymmetry and palate shape and the room empties.
Lombroso haunts the closet. He examined thousands of Italian prisoners in the 1870s and claimed he could identify the born criminal by atavistic stigmata: asymmetric face, large jaw, sloping forehead, handle-shaped ears, fleshy lips. His theory of atavism was wrong, his method contaminated, his racial conclusions poison. But his specific observations overlap a fair bit with the modern MPA list. Asymmetric ears, palate shape, mouth anomalies, fifth-finger shape. The Copenhagen and Montreal findings vindicate a thin slice of what Lombroso saw, stripped of the theory he wrapped it in. Modern researchers do not say this aloud.
Developmental disruption in utero marks both face and brain. The facial traces are easier to see than the neural ones. Population studies pick up the correlation. The face does not cause the violence. It is a slow leak from the same underground source that produced the neural substrate of impulsivity, low frustration tolerance, and poor emotional regulation.
I wonder how Monty Python might create a scene about a PhD student in Criminology deciding to do his thesis on MPA. AI suggested this:
The Earlobe Heresy
INT. DAY. THE OFFICE OF PROFESSOR MARGARET CRUMB, CHAIR OF CRITICAL CRIMINOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF EAST WESSEX.
A dusty office. Towers of Foucault. A poster reads BIOLOGY IS A CONSTRUCT. Professor Crumb, in a cardigan, sips herbal tea. A knock.
CRUMB: Enter.
(NIGEL TWISTLETON-PERCH enters. Thirty-two, beige jumper, spectacles askew, binder labeled “THESIS PROPOSAL (DRAFT 14).” He has the face of a man who has never won or lost anything.)
NIGEL: Professor Crumb. Thank you for seeing me.
CRUMB: Sit down, Nigel. How is your work progressing on… remind me…
NIGEL: Narratives of Resistance Among Shoplifting Single Mothers in Post-Industrial Doncaster.
CRUMB: Yes. Marvelous. Foucauldian?
NIGEL: Extensively.
CRUMB: Good lad. Now what did you want to discuss?
NIGEL: Well. I’d like to change my topic.
CRUMB (encouraging): A pivot! Splendid. Queering the shoplift, perhaps. Or intersectional…
NIGEL: Minor Physical Anomalies and Recidivistic Violent Offending.
(Long pause. The tea hovers halfway to her lips.)
CRUMB: I’m sorry. Say that again.
NIGEL: Minor Physical Anomalies. The Waldrop scale. I was reading Kandel and Mednick, the Danish cohort, and I thought…
CRUMB: Nigel.
NIGEL: …adherent earlobes, palate shape, mouth anomalies…
CRUMB: NIGEL.
(She sets down her tea. Walks to the window. Closes the blinds. Returns to her desk.)
CRUMB: Nigel. Tell me truthfully. Is this a joke?
NIGEL: No.
CRUMB: Has someone put you up to this? The Economics Department? Dawkins?
NIGEL: I read a paper.
CRUMB: You read a paper.
NIGEL: Several papers.
CRUMB (whispering): Where did you find them?
NIGEL: PubMed.
(She crosses herself.)
CRUMB: Nigel. Listen to me. Minor Physical Anomalies is not a field of study. It is a disease. It killed a man at Leicester in 2007. We do not speak of him. His widow received a settlement.
NIGEL: I only want to measure earlobes.
CRUMB: THAT IS HOW IT STARTS.
(The door bursts open. A MAN in a grey suit enters, flanked by two people in hi-vis vests marked INSTITUTIONAL REVIEW BOARD.)
IRB MAN: We heard the word “earlobes.”
CRUMB: Gerald, it’s fine, he’s just…
IRB MAN: Protocol dictates that any mention of measurable facial features in a criminology context triggers a Level Three Ethics Review. He will have to fill in Form 47-B.
NIGEL: Is that the long one?
IRB MAN: Seventy-one pages. Page forty-three asks you to account for Lombroso.
NIGEL: I was going to distinguish my work from Lombroso by…
(Another door bursts open. A door appears where no door was. THREE CARDINALS enter in red robes.)
FIRST CARDINAL: NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION.
SECOND CARDINAL: Our chief weapon is surprise. Surprise and fear. Fear and surprise. And a moral panic about race science.
THIRD CARDINAL: And ruthless efficiency.
FIRST CARDINAL: Our THREE chief weapons are…
CRUMB: Yes, thank you, Cardinals, we have rather a situation.
FIRST CARDINAL (examining Nigel): He does not look like a criminal.
SECOND CARDINAL: That’s the problem. He looks like a Volvo driver.
THIRD CARDINAL: If he looked like a criminal we could send him away and nobody would mind. Do you have any cousins in prison, young man?
NIGEL: My uncle Derek was once fined for fishing without a license.
FIRST CARDINAL: UNACCEPTABLE.
(The filing cabinet behind Professor Crumb begins to shake. It opens. CESARE LOMBROSO climbs out, Victorian dress, calipers in hand.)
LOMBROSO: Did someone say my name?
CRUMB: No.
LOMBROSO: I distinctly heard my name.
CRUMB: Get back in the cabinet, Cesare.
LOMBROSO (approaching Nigel, raising calipers): Let me see your forehead, boy…
NIGEL: I’d rather you didn’t.
LOMBROSO: Sloping! Slightly sloping! Ha! An atavist! A born nomenclator! A THESIS SUPERVISOR in embryo!
CRUMB: CESARE.
(She shoves him back in the cabinet and locks it. Pounding from within.)
CRUMB (breathing hard, to Nigel): You see what you’ve done.
NIGEL: I just wanted to measure ears.
(The window opens. FOUCAULT’S GHOST floats in, semi-transparent, smoking.)
FOUCAULT: Mon cher, the body is inscribed by power. To measure the ear is to re-inscribe the carceral gaze upon the very…
CRUMB: Michel, not now.
(Foucault shrugs, floats to the drinks cabinet.)
IRB MAN: Mr. Twistleton-Perch, you will also need Form 92-C (Eugenics Disavowal), Form 116 (Lombroso Non-Affiliation), and a short essay titled “Why I Am Not A Fascist.”
NIGEL: How short?
IRB MAN: Forty thousand words.
NIGEL: I only want to look at earlobes.
FIRST CARDINAL: HE SAID IT AGAIN.
(The Cardinals cross themselves.)
CRUMB: Nigel. Listen. I am trying to help you. Pick another topic. Queer Phenomenology of the CCTV. The Semiotics of the Tagged Hoodie. Critical Race Theory of the Traffic Cone. I will sign off on any of these today.
NIGEL: But the Danish data…
CRUMB: THE DANES ARE NOT TO BE TRUSTED. They have a king. They eat pastry. Their cohort studies ruin lives.
(A giant ANIMATED FOOT in the Terry Gilliam style descends from the ceiling with a splat, squashing the IRB Man. A raspberry sound. The foot ascends.)
CRUMB (unfazed): Gerald will be missed.
NIGEL (quietly): I could just measure the ears of people who’ve already consented to other studies. Nothing invasive. Existing photographs.
LOMBROSO (muffled, from the cabinet): YES. YES. LET HIM DO IT.
CRUMB: SHUT UP, CESARE.
FOUCAULT: The archive is never innocent.
NIGEL: Professor. I’ve read the literature. The effect sizes are modest. I won’t overclaim. I’ll caveat everything. I just think someone should check whether the Montreal mouth finding replicates in a British cohort.
(A long pause. Crumb looks at him for the first time with something like pity.)
CRUMB: Nigel. You are a nice boy. Your jumper is beige. You drive, I assume, a Nissan Micra.
NIGEL: A Skoda Octavia.
CRUMB: Close enough. You have no scent of combat on you. You have never been punched. You believe that good work protects its author. It does not. If you publish this thesis, no department in the English-speaking world will hire you. Your mother will receive phone calls. Your name will appear on a list. The list has seventeen other names on it. Twelve of them drive Ubers. Three are in Hungary. Two teach at Liberty University and lie about it at Christmas.
NIGEL (small voice): But it’s true.
FIRST CARDINAL: OH, HE’S DONE IT NOW.
(The Cardinals advance. Foucault sighs. Lombroso pounds on the cabinet door. The foot descends again, hovers menacingly. An animated hand with a stamp marked “RETRACTED” emerges from a desk drawer.)
CRUMB (closing her eyes): I’ll let the Cardinals finish up. Nigel, for what it’s worth. You had promise.
NIGEL: Will I still get my funding?
CRUMB: Hm?
NIGEL: The funding. My stipend.
CRUMB: Oh. The committee met this morning. You’ve been reallocated to a new project.
NIGEL: What’s the project?
CRUMB: Narratives of Resistance Among Shoplifting Single Mothers in Post-Industrial Doncaster.
NIGEL: But that’s my old project.
CRUMB: Yes. Isn’t it lovely how things work out?
CUT TO: A BBC-style ANNOUNCER at a desk in a field, holding an umbrella.
ANNOUNCER: And now for something completely different. A man with earlobes that match.
(A MAN stands in a field. His earlobes match.)
MAN: Hello.
(Credits. Small print at the bottom: “No criminologists were harmed in the making of this sketch. Several were mildly inconvenienced.”)
END.
