Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar must have got it wrong. “Let me have men about me that are fat,” he said. “…Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look….” Such men are dangerous, he thought, his creator having missed out — no fault of his that he was born a few centuries ago — on the recent study conducted by researchers in Brock University in Canada. Nothing wrong with the lean and hungry look, suggests this study, because the round-faced man is the more aggressive. Shakespeare was very up-to-date in his times; it is tempting to speculate what would have happened to Falstaff had the Bard partaken of the wisdom of the Canadian scientists. Science still carries the aura of sacredness in post-modern times. When the study says that the larger the width-to-height ratio of a man’s face, the likelier he is to be aggressive, and links it, predictably this time, to levels of testosterone, non-scientific people blink and adjust their nervous biases. No wonder Edward G. Robinson is such an unforgettable villain, they reflect, he had just the right face.

With due reverence to science, it is a little more unnerving to find that the study was conducted among hockey players. Ninety ice hockey players, male varsity and professional players, made up the sample. There is a general impression that to play hockey at that level, aggression — however sportingly targeted — has to be honed and heightened. Perhaps the sample selection provided the ultimate in controlled environments. The report apparently says that “the facial ratio was linked in a statistically significant way with the number of penalty minutes per game”. Obviously, the ones with the lean and hungry look got beaten up. No doubt that was enough for a scientific conclusion. But a non-scientific person might be confused: when an aggressive game is being played, are the ones violating rules in order to win trying to be better players or are just more aggressive because they cannot help themselves? Are they good boys because they want to win or bad boys because their hormone has made them aggressive and round-faced at the same time?

All this is extremely worrying, because, like Julius Caesar, everyone needs to know who to duck. What were the measurements of Attila the Hun’s face, and how did Marlowe conceive of his Tamburlaine? When Thomas Nast created the archetypal Santa Claus out of the unremarkable-looking Saint Nicholas, he could not have been thinking of sumo wrestlers. And if facial measurements can be the index of aggressiveness, what was wrong with phrenology, the once revered “science” of reading a man’s “nature” by the “bumps” on his skull? If all it took to read character were bumps on the skull, the shape of the face and — furtively perhaps — the colour of the skin, then science would make society a far more dangerous place than prejudice already has.