# Is our fear of certain animals evolutionary **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [June 28, 2005, 3:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-our-fear-of-certain-animals-evolutionary/310144 "2005-06-28T03:12:36Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![pinkfreud](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pinkfreud/32/17603_2.png) [@pinkfreud](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pinkfreud)\ **Post date:** [June 28, 2005, 11:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-our-fear-of-certain-animals-evolutionary/310144/21 "2005-06-28T23:45:07Z")
> [@e-logic](#): > > Not sure if this is scientifically validated, but… > > I have been told that if you show a baby a piece of paper with a large circle and eight arms coming off it, they will exhibit similar fear responses as they would to a real spider. > > This works for children who’ve never come across a spider before.I have Steven Pinker’s book upstairs (Blank Slate, it’s called) so I’ll go see what he has to say. I am very skeptical of this. It was my understanding that children are not born with any fears other than the fear of falling. Everything else is learned. ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2005, 12:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-our-fear-of-certain-animals-evolutionary/310144/22 "2005-06-29T00:08:45Z")
> [@pinkfreud](#): > > I am very skeptical of this. It was my understanding that children are not born with any fears other than the fear of falling. Everything else is learned. Children aren’t born with a fear of falling. That’s a fear that develops only _after_ the child starts crawling. If you put a three month old baby on the edge of a cliff it shows no fear at all. There’s still some debate as to whether fear of falling/heights is learned or is an instinctive behaviour that develops post partum. At the moment the evidence seems to favour it being entirely instinctive though of course it’s impossible to prove either way practically. ---
**Author:** ![CC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f1d935/32.png) [@CC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CC)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2005, 2:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-our-fear-of-certain-animals-evolutionary/310144/23 "2005-06-29T14:12:08Z")
A) Colibri, I think you’re correct here twice. Thank you. B) Can’t you scare a 3 month old child by making faces and loud noises at him? Jumping at him? I’d imagine he’d show some type of recoil, which I’d take for fear. C) Are startle reflexes basically a version of a fear reaction? Is it fear that an infant is feeling when it scrunches up its face and brings in its arms and legs at, say, the sound of thunder? ---
**Author:** ![DocCathode](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/doccathode/32/18773_2.png) [@DocCathode](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DocCathode)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2005, 2:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-our-fear-of-certain-animals-evolutionary/310144/24 "2005-06-29T14:49:37Z")
> [@CC](#): > > B) Can’t you scare a 3 month old child by making faces and loud noises at him? Jumping at him? I’d imagine he’d show some type of recoil, which I’d take for fear. Loud noises yes, faces not so much. Recognizing human faces seems to be innate (can’t remember the researcher’s name. The experiment involved mobiles with human faces on them. Some of the faces lacked features or had them in the wrong places) and reading facial expressions for emotion is also innate (you know the study. Folks round the world all read the pictures of facial expressions the same way regardless of culture), but up until a certain age babies just read expressions as ‘person doing something amusing’. Make the angriest face you want at a three-month old, unless you yell the kid will only express rapt interest. OTTOMH 3 months is too young for the copying game, in which you make a face at the baby and they mimic you. ---
**Author:** ![BwanaBob](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bwanabob/32/2985_2.png) [@BwanaBob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BwanaBob)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2005, 3:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-our-fear-of-certain-animals-evolutionary/310144/25 "2005-06-29T15:42:36Z")
My mother informed me that as a baby I had a horrible fear of any man with facial hair. Note that Dad was clean shaven at that time. ---
**Author:** ![Darwins\_Finch](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darwins_finch/32/20304_2.png) [@Darwins\_Finch](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darwins_Finch)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2005, 4:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-our-fear-of-certain-animals-evolutionary/310144/26 "2005-06-29T16:48:56Z")
> [@DocCathode](#): > > > [@Good Egg](#): > > > > Since when are dogs evolved from wolves? > > Since always. > > > [@](#): > > > > There wouldn’tbe any wolves stillaround then. > > Yes there would. Is **Darwin’s Finch** still around? He can give you a great long answer. Short answer-Just because a population of a species evolves into a new species does not mean that the original species becomes extinct. Yeah, he’s still around. But he won’t give a long answer here, seeing as how that would constitue a major hijack. He will, however, say, that it is not so much the case that dogs _evolved_ from wolves; rather, they _are_ wolves. Their classification has been changed to _Canis lupus familiaris_ - downgraded to a mere subspecies of the Grey Wolf. And, as **Doc** indicates, just because something evolved from something else doesn’t mean the parent species goes extinct. A lengthy discussion about the differcnes between anagenesis and cladogensis could be had at this point… As for the OP, I ain’t buying any of this “innate fear” stuff, either. There may be more generalized fears (of things larger than us, for example), but specific fears of reptiles or bugs aren’t likely to be innate. There is much evidence to the contrary, especially considering we would have had much more contact with bugs early in our evolutionary history than we tend to now. Being afraid of bugs would have bode ill for our future evolution… And, of course, there are several animals towards which learning a healthy respect for will allow us to retain our limbs and other assorted appendages. The aforementioned crocodiles, or big cats, for example. That doesn’t mean people necessarily _fear_ them, just that a certain level of increased wariness is typically a good idea when in their presence (in the wild, of course, being afraid of certain animals is usually going to go hand-in-hand with “ohmygodI’mabouttogeteatenIbetterrun!” syndrome – which is more of a generalized fight-or-flight response than the exhibition of innate fear). ---
**Author:** ![muttrox](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/a8b319/32.png) [@muttrox](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/muttrox)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2005, 9:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-our-fear-of-certain-animals-evolutionary/310144/27 "2005-06-29T21:43:27Z")
I will try and find the cite. Unfortunately my Dad has the book (How the Mind Works, though I wouldn’t be surprised if the concepts also appeared in The Blank Slate), so I"m not sure I’ll be able to. Googling gets me this: [http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge8.html](http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge8.html) “Put these bits of evidence together and one begins to consider a developmental theory opposite to the stimulus-response-linkage account — kids don’t start off fearless and gradually acquire fears through conditioning; they start out fearful (not necessarily at birth, but in the first few years) and gradually master them, with adult phobias being childhood fears that never went away.” Or [http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/2004\_10\_29\_religion.htm](http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/2004_10_29_religion.htm), which says, “We apparently have an innate fear of snakes, because the world has snakes and they are venomous.” So I can find cites that demonstrate Pinker believes it, but I need the book to find where he got his theories from! ---
**Author:** ![Suburban\_Rythm](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/5f9b8f/32.png) [@Suburban\_Rythm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Suburban_Rythm)\ **Post date:** [June 30, 2005, 4:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-our-fear-of-certain-animals-evolutionary/310144/28 "2005-06-30T04:22:52Z")
If I remember correctly (and if we’re thinking of the same show), this was part of a “report” on dragons, the Loch Ness Monster, dinosaurs in the Congo, and Bigfoot. Not exactly the place I’d want to get my biology notes from. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-our-fear-of-certain-animals-evolutionary/310144.md?page=1)