The Anatomy of Tears: Why Human Beings Weep

Weeping is one of humanity's most intimate and least understood behaviours. For much of scientific history it was dismissed as a physiological accident — a vestige of some earlier, more primitive function with no bearing on the lives of modern human beings. The proposition that crying served any discernible (17) .......... purpose was met with scepticism, most famously by Charles Darwin himself, whose assessment has since been comprehensively revised. Contemporary researchers have redirected attention towards the profound social (18) .......... of tears, documenting the central role that crying plays in forging the (19) .......... between infant and caregiver during the earliest and most vulnerable months of life. The prevailing view is that tears function, at least in childhood, as the body's most unambiguous signal of (20) .......... — a broadcast of need addressed to anyone within sight or hearing. Why weeping should persist into adulthood is a considerably thornier question. One compelling hypothesis holds that it proved (21) .......... to early human communities precisely because it was so difficult to fake: a visible display of vulnerability functioned as a reliable indicator of sincerity, enabling the cultivation of trust across social groups. On this account, we weep in solidarity with those enduring profound (22) .......... because tears communicate what words routinely fail to convey. They may also be shed entirely (23) .......... — to the consternation of the weeper — in response to music of extraordinary beauty or a particularly affecting passage of prose. The social function of crying would appear, on any honest reckoning, to be (24) .......... , even as its deeper mechanisms remain tantalizingly out of reach.