The whites of our eyes

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I'm not sure if this should go in a different forum or not, but I was just wondering today about the fact that human eyes reveal more of the white than other animals' and I found this, which I thought might be of interest:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/13/opini ... sello.html

"The whites of our eyes are several times larger than those of other primates, which makes it much easier to see where the eyes, as opposed to the head, are pointed. [...]
The idea is simple. Knowing what another person is looking at provides valuable information about what she is thinking and feeling, and what she might do next."

I read this and had to think that this makes the NT obsession with eye contact a little more understandable. If human eyes adapted to show one another what we're looking at, making eye contact would mean trust, cooperation, treating someone as a member of our own "tribe", while hiding our eyes would mean we're hiding our intentions and mark us as a threatening stranger. It would be like refusing to respond to someone's speech. Trouble is I can't speak that way and verbally at the same time any more than I can speak English and German at once, but it still makes the eye-contact thing seem a little less bizarre to me.

Eye contact is very meaningful in non human mammals.

But usually staring into the eyes is considered threatening and hostile.

In humans a little eye contact is considered friendly-if you dont overdo it and bore into the other persons eyes. Then it becomes an animal-like contest of wills.

But ..that it interesting that increasing the whites of the eyes makes the aim of the head and the aim of the eyes into to two seperately trackable pieces of data.

Humans have a more evolved ability to reconstruct what each other are thinking than other animals. So you would think our eyes would evolve the opposite way- to conceal our thoughts. But apparently there was a selective advantage for each individual to be able to lock into what others in the group are looking at.

Even how a person looks away/breaks eye contact (the direction) imparts feelings and intent e.g. Down is submissive. Also peoples eyes look left when creating (lying) or right (recalling data) at least in right handed people can be reversed in left handed people (that might be why lefties are sinister or wrong handed)