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The fictional character Max Klein, played by Jeff Bridges in the film Fearless, had survived a plane crash and became convinced he was invulnerable. His high-rise jig came some time after he walked across a city highway without looking, cars and vans screeching to a halt all around. He ate a bowl of strawberries, knowing that his allergy to them could cause a fatal reaction. Finally, he drove at top speed into a brick wall.
Klein survived a few months of this behaviour, but his life was disintegrating. His close encounter with death during the crash had eliminated his day-to-day anxieties and he felt he did not have to answer to anyone. He became so self-sufficient, not to say arrogant, that he felt little need for the closeness of those around him. He was remote and distant from his wife; he alienated friends with his lack of sensitivity. He spent more time with a young boy he had rescued from the crash than with his own son. He was not working, but spent his days looking at buildings. When introduced to a fellow survivor of the crash, he told his wife he had a feeling of overwhelming love for this woman. He had never felt anything like it before, he said. A few months of this and his wife was ready to leave him.
His psychiatrist was struggling with an extreme case of post-traumatic stress disorder; Klein himself claimed the crash was the best thing that had ever happened to him. It had been extraordinary, and had shown him ‘the taste and touch and beauty of life’. He would not give up this state of mind.
Subjectively, Klein felt more alive than ever; objectively, he stood to lose his wife, son and home, his friends and his livelihood. It is an interesting take on fear. We are so used to portrayals of neurotics crippled by a million anxieties that we seldom stop to think what would happen if we had none at all. Anxiety and stress have a bad image. They are the scourge of the modern age, blamed for everything from undermining happy marriages to destroying sleep and causing headaches. Anxiety exaggerates bodily pains, it ruins good performances at work or school and quenches joy and laughter. It leads to alcoholism, eating disorders, domestic violence. The lifestyle pages of newspapers and magazines are filled with articles about dealing with stress and, we are told, life without anxiety would be wonderful.
Yet in this film, fear is portrayed as the glue that holds lives together, keeps marriages, friendships and careers intact and protects us from avoidable accidents. Klein eventually realises he needs help, regains normal sensitivities – along with his allergy to strawberries – and the story is resolved. Anyone behaving like this in real life would be lucky to escape so lightly.
The anxiety system can go wrong, of course, and we would all like to banish the misery of panic attacks, obsessional behaviour or phobias. Successful treatment for these problems can revolutionise lives and nobody wants to get in the way of this. But evolutionists insist we would benefit from taking a step back and looking at why there is so much anxiety in society. They challenge the prevailing view of anxiety as a wholly negative experience. On the contrary, they say anxiety is a prime motivator, a positive drive, a force for good. It prompts us to achieve at work, to guard our reputation and to keep our families together.
We do not doubt that other animals need the ability to recognise and respond to threats. All living things face danger and must react appropriately if they are to survive. Creatures have a fascinating array of defence mechanisms, each specific to the threats they most commonly encounter. The chameleon changes colour to blend in with its surroundings and hide from potential attackers. A threatened squid squirts ink at its aggressors. Antelope simply run away from lions. Moths are preyed on by bats and have become experts in bat-frequency signals. They monitor the signals continuously and map the direction of their predators’ flight. Only if the bat is heading directly for it does the moth snap its wings shut and fall, as if dead, to the ground. Familiar reactions like these have been sufficient, not for every animal to survive, but to keep the species going.
The intensity of the reaction also has to be appropriate since animals use up precious resources when trying to defend themselves. An antelope that is too ready to give up grazing and run will soon become undernourished; squid do not have unlimited ink. Even the simplest creatures have remarkably sophisticated responses, as demonstrated by American biologist Herbert Jennings, working in Europe at the turn of the century.
Jennings was interested in the ordered and elegant lifestyle of a tiny pond animal called a stentor. A stentor is only one cell big, a trumpet-shaped creature, attached by a ‘foot’ to a rock on the water bed. It has a tube at its base which can provide shelter, and the trumpet is an open pouch at its free end for feeding. Hairs around the edge of the pouch waft in food particles.
Jennings used carmine, a natural red dye extracted from the cochineal beetle. It can be an irritant even for humans and is certainly toxic to tiny animals like stentor. He added carmine to the water tank in which the stentor was living, and simply watched to see what happened.
The stentor did not at first react to the carmine in the water, but then decisively bent away from the oncoming red specks. The gesture is normally enough to keep it out of trouble in the peaceful conditions at the bottom of a pond. It costs the animal little to try, and it can continue feeding even as it defends itself. In Jennings’s experiment, the stentor bent this way three or four times, and when the strategy did not work, demonstrated a second line of defence. It suddenly pushed its pouch out in the opposite direction in an attempt to dislodge any poisonous particles around the mouth. Again this failed, as Jennings continued to drop carmine into the water. Red particles settled on the pouch and a few more similar moves by the stentor proved futile.
Drastic measures were called for, so the stentor retreated. It contracted and moved down into the tube at its base. It waited there for a time but could not wait for ever because a single cell does not store much energy and it cannot feed in its bolthole. It moved tentatively upwards out of the tube, but found the water still full of carmine and had to force itself back down again. It advanced to test the water a couple more times but when conditions had not improved, the tiny creature risked its remaining precious energy, contracted violently, dragged its foot away from the rock and floated away in search of an uncontaminated spot.
Experiments like this have been given new significance by the latest thinking on the adaptive and positive role of fear. A one-celled creature like the stentor has a graded response to a threat, from simply swaying away from the toxin, to pulling up its foot and drifting into the unknown. Stentor allocates its resources meanly so that only the minimum is used to meet a threat. How much more complex, then, might our own reactions to danger be? And could they be built on similar principles?
People do not function in the same way as protozoans, but some of nature’s rules are universally true. A great deal of our knowledge of human genetics, for example, is derived from study of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. Our genetic material is the very template from which we grow, and yet most of it can be found in a fly. As Oxford Professor of Physiology Colin Blakemore once rather flippantly pointed out we probably share 70 per cent of our genes with a garden lettuce.
Biologists discovered in 1972 that human cells can apparently commit suicide for the greater good of the whole body. Cells normally receive signals from neighbouring cells telling them to keep going, and should these stop, they die. Cell death is part of the normal development of a foetus in the womb. Babies develop with webbed hands and feet but the skin between the digits normally retreats before they are born. The cells in this skin die, they ‘commit suicide’ and allow babies to be born with perfectly separated fingers and toes. When cell suicide was first described, it was assumed to be relevant only to the highest creatures since a single-celled organism cannot benefit from its own death. Twenty years after the initial discovery, though, researchers found that single-celled creatures do indeed die in this way. They apparently ‘lay down their lives’ for the good of their community.
This is just one of many biological similarities between creatures of very different appearance and classification. There is obviously a big difference between the death of a few cells and an all-pervading feeling of fear, but both could be essential for healthy development. Careful observation of animals might help scientists ask more relevant questions about humans. For example, an obvious feature of animals’ fear is that it is necessary. If stentor does not react to a toxin, it dies. If the antelope does not run from the lion, it gets eaten. Max Klein lacked normal fear and stood to damage himself socially, financially and physically. All animals need to be able to respond to danger. But how does that help us understand the common phobias?
Age-Old Anxieties
A mixed bunch of academic publishers, scientific editors and advertising sales staff ate dinner together at the end of a conference. One editor was regaling the table with tales of her previous career as an Avon lady. She lost one of her clients, she said, when she took a swipe at the woman’s budgie with her cosmetics bag. Everyone looked up, amazed. ‘It was coming straight at me,’ she said, by way of explanation. This confident, bright young woman had ornithophobia and was not going to stay in the same room as a free bird.
One of the sales staff was listening with particular interest. ‘I know exactly how you feel,’ he said with feeling. He was afraid of butterflies and moths, and they started discussing the intricacies of the unpleasantness of wing flapping. Suddenly other diners were vying to compare the strength of their fears. His boss chipped in with a fear of heights and a publisher managed both a fear of spiders and of flying.
The conversation unearthed five phobias in four people among the twelve at the table. Doubtless a psychologist could have found more by interviewing us individually – those mentioned were specific and without much stigma attached – but even this tiny straw poll was telling. The phobias discussed so freely in the restaurant were all directed at threats in the natural world.
No scientist would be impressed by the dubious methods of this survey, but the results are surprisingly reproducible. Whenever a group starts talking about phobias, notice the fears people describe. Occasionally someone has a weird phobia of buttons, cotton wool or wallpaper, and if they do this may dominate the conversation. But most people fear a limited range of creatures or situations. They fear spiders, snakes, the dark, open or closed spaces; creatures and situations that pose few real problems in the West today but which could be dangerous if we lived less cosseted lives.
Evolutionists believe that this observation is important in our understanding of phobias. They say the things we fear today could have been fatal to our prehistoric ancestors. A bite from a spider or snake could have killed; it would have been dangerous to be out after dark; being cornered in a cave by an animal was definitely best avoided. By contrast, the things that really do kill us today – cars, guns or cigarettes – rarely inspire the same level of fear.
They believe that we are, at heart, barely adapted Stone-Agers, now working in offices and driving cars. We are strangely mismatched with our circumstances. We have modern and sophisticated lives but the deep recesses of our mind have developed to react to long-gone situations. The primeval drive of fear is more easily provoked by ancient threats, evolutionists say, because it is still best attuned to days spent roaming the African plains. Then, it would have made sense to have a proper respect for spiders, the dark or enclosed spaces. Stone-Agers lived in dangerous times and required a certain level of caution to survive and have children. Those who did survive passed their safety-consciousness on to their offspring and it became programmed into the human psyche.
The conversation at the dinner table might have ostensibly been about crazy, overblown fears of harmless objects, but an evolutionist would contend that it was in fact about proper caution for dangerous situations – albeit a few tens of thousands of years late.
The theory of evolution has been widely known since Charles Darwin shocked contemporary society with The Origin of Species, in 1859. The book had ramifications throughout science, religion and society, as discussed in the previous chapter. It hinted that humankind evolved from a primitive creature over millions of years and is related to the apes. Darwin was initially ridiculed and pilloried for his ideas, but acceptance of them grew and they are now largely taken for granted. In the past decade or so, scientists from many disciplines have revisited evolution theory and attempted to apply it to such diverse questions as why nations go to war and what features of the face or body determine sexual attractiveness. It has been used to argue for a new approach to pest control in agriculture; computers have been programmed to use a kind of technological natural selection to continually improve performance.
But what of our reactions to danger? Can evolution theory tell us anything about the nature of fear and anxiety? Evolutionists claim that part of the reason we develop phobias may lie in the mismatch between life in the twenty-first century and the Stone Age. As a species we are still primed to react to the threats and opportunities that our ancient ancestors faced. Evolutionarily speaking, we have hardly budged in the past ten thousand years but our lifestyle has changed beyond all recognition.
Primates are believed to have appeared sixty-five million years ago, followed thirty million years later by the first apelike creatures. They began walking on two legs about four million years ago, and using early stone tools two and a half million years ago. After a phase of rapid brain expansion two million years ago, they started to use shaped hand-axes and moved from Africa into Europe and Asia. This was the beginning of the Stone Age and its people developed a stable lifestyle roaming African plains for food until about ten thousand years ago.
Anatomically modern humans developed from their ancestors a hundred thousand years ago and discovered fire. Farming was introduced ten thousand years ago, the wheel about eight thousand years ago, and people started to write about 4000 BC. The pace of change accelerated and it took less than two hundred years to get from the first machines of mass production in the industrial revolution to the technology that put men on the moon.
It is rather like an old man who has lived for seventy years in an isolated spot in an unchanging world. One summer, somebody strikes oil nearby. Big business moves in, a town is developed, new roads are built, the population soars and he finds himself ill-equipped to cope. Humans have spent 99.5 per cent of their existence as hunter-gatherers and are barely out of the Stone Age in evolutionary terms. But life today bears little resemblance to that of our ancestors.
Evolutionists have attempted to explain many modern health problems in terms of the poor fit between our biological make-up and modern lifestyle. Soaring rates of obesity are a good example. Our ancestors had to move around constantly in search of food, which was often in short supply. The ability to store fat around their bodies so that they could survive times of potential starvation would have been a great advantage. Today in most parts of the Western world, food is plentiful. Supermarkets carry a dazzling and expanding range of foods and food shortages are almost unheard of. Add to that a sedentary lifestyle, in which we are entertained at home by the TV, transported around in cars and have our manual work done by machines. The result, according to the World Health Organisation, is that almost half of Britain’s adults are overweight and the entire population of America will be obese by 2230 if the increase seen since 1980 continues. Obesity is serious, known to contribute to heart disease, diabetes and premature death. Fat storage, the very mechanism which kept our starving ancestors alive, may be killing people off in the modern world.
The Pima Indians in Arizona, US, are a particularly dramatic example. They maintained a traditional way of life, relying on farming, hunting and fishing for food, until the late nineteenth century. Then, diversion of their water supply by American farmers upstream drove them to poverty and malnutrition, even starvation. The Second World War brought both prosperity and contact with Caucasian Americans, which westernised their dietary and lifestyle habits. Since then, the Pima Indians as a group have put on an unhealthy amount of weight. Half of the adults have diabetes and 95 per cent of those are overweight. Scientists from the US Government’s National Institute of Health have studied the Pima Indians for more than thirty years, looking for genetic causes of diabetes and obesity.
Just as the Pima Indians are physically adapted for a traditional lifestyle, our minds may be geared to deal with traditional dangers. We still eat as if food shortages were imminent; perhaps we are also still on the look-out for predators and natural threats. Certainly, evolutionary psychiatrists Randolph Nesse at the University of Michigan, and Isaac Marks, from London University, believe that we are all programmed to react to threats. Anxiety and fear are necessary, they say, and have been essential for our survival throughout evolution.
At the simplest level, mild anxiety boosts performance. It prompts the student to revise for exams, the musician to practise, the sales rep to rehearse a presentation. But evolutionists say it is far more sophisticated than that.
We could improve our understanding of anxiety at a stroke if we stopped thinking of it as a disorder, and considered it a defence that regulates and orchestrates our reactions to every threat and opportunity, say Nesse and Marks. The anxiety system is as important to our survival as is our immune system. It protects against threats to our whole body, and life, in the way that the immune system fights off specific physical threats. Both defence systems have developed within our species as we evolved. The individuals with appropriate reactions to danger or to micro-organisms are most likely to survive, produce offspring and pass on these traits to future generations.
Both have a range of reactions to meet specific threats. The immune system creates a scab to heal a cut finger and produces antibodies to deal with viruses. Similarly, at least some of our reactions to danger are clearly adaptive and matched exactly to the threat, say Marks and Nesse. For example, people who are afraid of heights may ‘freeze’ if they have to walk along a ledge or cross a narrow bridge. They cling to the side, unable to move. They may need a companion’s reassurance and physical assistance to get going again. This sort of reaction is not helpful if it stops you climbing stairs but in natural surroundings someone who became immobile by the side of a sheer drop might avoid a bad fall.
Blushing often seems to make a difficult situation worse. People who lack confidence in social gatherings dread being the centre of attention and burning cheeks do not help anyone blend into the background. But if, as has been argued, blushing signals social submission, a red face could be a plea for continued membership of the group. In ancient times, membership of a group would have been near-essential for survival. Anyone expelled and left alone would become vulnerable to cold, starvation and attack. They would also be unlikely to pass their influence on to the next generation if they could not reproduce.
Blood and injury phobias provide an intriguing physiological example of the possible benefits of an anxiety response. People with these phobias may faint at the scene of an accident or even at the sight of a syringe or needle. These are the only phobias associated with fainting. Someone with agoraphobia may feel extremely dizzy or uncomfortable in a crowded street and believe they are going to pass out, but they almost never do. As the agoraphobic prepares to flee the difficult situation, rising blood pressure effectively prevents a faint. By contrast, the blood and injury phobics’ blood pressure drops at the sight of blood, and they often do pass out. Nesse and Marks argue that this, again, could be adaptive. If a hunter saw blood, it was more likely to be his own than anyone else’s. An injured man loses less blood if his blood pressure drops. Even if he fainted, this could conceivably be useful. Some animals only attack moving creatures and lying still might just discourage further attack by predators.
Many animals are known to play dead while remaining conscious. Charles Darwin himself once caught a robin in a room and said it ‘fainted so completely, that for a time I thought it was dead’. David Barlow, an eminent psychologist in Albany, New York, says there may be a human parallel. Women who have been raped frequently describe being paralysed, rigid and cold during the attack. They are not unconscious because they can later remember details of what happened. In the past, this freezing has been wrongly taken by courts to mean that the women somehow consented to sex. Barlow says their immobility may in fact be an ancient defence mechanism. Remaining still may reduce further violence by a more powerful assailant and could conceivably reduce his sexual arousal.
In this way, the nature of a reaction is matched to the threat. Blushing is not likely to scare off a snake and freezing would not help in a difficult social situation. Normal phases of development also fit the evolutionists’ model. Babies may suddenly become afraid of strangers between six and twelve months old, just when they are starting to crawl and coming into more contact with unknown people. Animal fears peak at about four years old, the age when they may start meeting and playing with animals unattended. Social phobia typically starts in the late teens, just when young people are establishing their identities and facing all sorts of social pitfalls. While it would be unwise to take the argument too far – even Marks and Nesse have admitted that imaginative thinkers could come up with an adaptive use for virtually any human reaction – there are many compelling examples.
The strength of a reaction to a threat is every bit as important as its nature. Both the anxiety and immune systems are tightly regulated and over- or under-reaction causes problems. The human immunodeficiency virus, HIV, does not itself kill, but its destruction of immune defences means normally harmless bacterial and viral infections can become fatal. At the other end of the scale, allergies and hay fever develop when the immune system is overreacting to irrelevant stimuli like dust or pollen.
Anxiety is similar, argue Marks and Nesse. An underactive anxiety system may create real problems, as demonstrated by Max Klein in Fearless. A lack of concern about the future sounds wonderful, but not if this destroys all ability to plan for it. Never worrying about the consequences of your actions may mean you speak out when it would be diplomatic to say nothing. Telling your boss exactly what you think of him or her is a fantasy for many of us, but we never do it. A moment of extreme satisfaction could cost you your job. Similarly, you might feel like objecting loudly when someone pushes past you at a bar, but if they are big, drunk and bad-tempered, you probably keep your feelings to yourself. Those without normal levels of anxiety may lack basic caution and end up losing jobs and getting into fights where others simply sidestep trouble. Without the push of anxiety, it may be difficult to revise for exams or apply yourself to any long-term project. Marks has termed this hypophobia. It is interesting but speculative. It has not been studied much because those who lack anxiety often don’t imagine they have a problem and tend not to come forward for help. However, New Zealand researchers have some evidence to back the idea and at the same time, challenge the widespread assumption that a traumatic experience can trigger a phobia. They looked for height phobias among children who had serious falls between the ages of five and nine. They found that, at eighteen, these children were much less – not much more – likely than others to have height phobias. This study implies that temperament (discussed in chapter 7) may be all-important and suggests that children without fear, those who have never worried about heights may be hypophobic, and most likely to injure themselves in a fall.
The over-reactive end of anxiety is far more familiar. A wealth of anxiety disorders, including phobias, result directly from a tremendously sensitive anxiety system. People with these disorders can become upset by things others would never notice. Hoarders, obsessives and agoraphobics fear things but they all have hair-trigger anxiety systems. The hoarder is so afraid of losing something important that he cannot throw away anything. His house gradually silts up with layers of junk and old newspapers. The obsessive washes and cleans for three hours every morning and is quite unable to go to work unless she, and the house, are immaculate. The agoraphobic may hear about a road accident fifty miles away and be housebound for days afterwards.
Nesse carried out an interesting exercise in which he listed the physical and social dangers that would have threatened early humans. Physical dangers included accidents, disease, starvation, predators, hostile humans; social dangers included rejection, attacks on status or disruption of relationships. Modern anxiety disorders correspond well with these ancient threats. The hunter-gatherer’s proper fear of predators could have become today’s animal phobia; storage of food in times of plenty to ward off starvation could have become hoarding; cleaning rituals and taboos to ward off disease or contamination could have become obsessive-compulsive disorder. The hunter who sensibly stayed at the home base while a hungry lion roamed may have become today’s agoraphobic, highly reluctant to go out.
Responses that may once have been life-saving reactions have become inappropriate. Fear of heights, once a proper respect for the danger of a high cliff, is now a nuisance if it translates into fear of bridges or high-rise apartments. Reluctance to approach spiders may have been wise, and still is in some parts of the world. But fear of spiders in countries like Britain, where none is harmful, is widespread, and serves no useful purpose.
Nesse’s point is that today’s anxiety reactions would often have been essential in the Stone Age. There is nothing essentially wrong with the reactions, they are just too easily triggered for life today. It is a helpful idea. Fear of danger is a natural response and one which in other circumstances, thousands of years ago, might have protected us rather than blighted our lives.
The Evolution of Fear
The idea that we are attuned to life on the African plains makes a wonderful story, but most of us do not feel much like Stone-Agers. We have adapted to many changes even in the last few decades; we are more or less at ease with cars and aeroplanes, computers, dishwashers and foreign holidays. How come our fears lag so far behind?
Can we really blame our prehistoric ancestors for our fear of snakes and spiders? Fear may be contagious but evolution demands that it is passed down for tens of thousands of years. It is asking rather a lot for fear to survive intact so long. Diseases have died out in that time, whole species have become extinct. Yet evolutionists say that our fears of heights and the dark have remained unchanged since our predecessors in the Stone Age were trying to get back to their caves at night.
Charles Darwin first introduced evolution to the public in the mid nineteenth century. Some of his basic ideas were old, even then; Charles’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had been one of several advocates of the theory in the eighteenth century. Charles Darwin himself became convinced during a five-year voyage through the southern hemisphere on HMS Beagle. He watched species of animals change gradually from island to island as the boat moved south. But it was his observations in the Galapagos Islands that were critical to forming his theories. Finches and giant tortoises varied slightly but predictably from island to island and the local people could always tell where a particular bird or tortoise belonged. It seemed that all the variations of these creatures must have had a common ancestor.
It took Darwin twenty years to publish The Origin of Species, possibly in part because he anticipated and dreaded the uproar it would cause. The book is packed with examples of evolving creatures: ants and bees, horses and zebras, birds, fish and plants. Darwin defined the process of natural selection as ‘the slow and gradual accumulation of numerous, slight, yet profitable variations’. If a tiny random change in an individual gives it an advantage over other members of the species it is more likely to survive, reproduce and pass the adaptation on to its offspring. The offspring in turn are more successful than those without the adaptation and over many generations more and more of the population are born with this small advantage. In the same way, variations which give their carriers a disadvantage are eliminated.
Natural selection works to produce gradations in animals’ instincts as well as in their physical features, Darwin said. Nesting birds, for instance, have an instinctive fear of most of their enemies, strengthened by their own experience and by the sight of fear in other birds. But they are slow to develop a fear of humans. According to Darwin, large birds in highly populated countries like England are wilder than small birds because they have been persecuted by humans. In uninhabited islands, large birds have no more fear than small birds. Magpies and hooded crows are wary in England but, in Darwin’s time at least, magpies were tame in Norway as were hooded crows in Egypt.
Darwin omitted humans from his arguments in The Origin of Species, but discussed them at length in later books, The Descent of Man, 1871, and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 1872. Expression of the Emotions set out to demonstrate that different races, and even different species, show their emotions in a remarkably similar way, implying that emotions such as fear have been conserved throughout evolution:
That the chief expressive actions, exhibited by man and by the lower animals, are now innate or inherited – that is, have not been learnt by the individual – is admitted by every one. So little has learning or imitation to do with several of them that they are from the earliest days and throughout life quite beyond our control: for instance, the relaxation of the arteries of the skin in blushing, and the increased action of the heart in anger.
Fear is one of these chief emotions:
Fear was expressed from an extremely remote period, in almost the same manner as it now is by man; namely, by trembling, the erection of the hair, cold perspiration, pallor, widely opened eyes, the relaxation of most of the muscles, and by the whole body cowering downwards or held motionless.
Or, as he says elsewhere, quoting from Papinus Statius’ Thebaid: ‘Obstupui, steteruntque comae, et vox haesit’ (‘I was astounded, my hair stood on end, and my voice choked in my throat’).
Erection of the hair is singled out for special comment because it serves no purpose in humans and may simply be a leftover from evolution.
With respect to the involuntary bristling of the hair, we have good reason to believe that in the case of animals this action, however it may have originated, serves, together with certain voluntary movements, to make them appear terrible to their enemies; and as the same involuntary and voluntary actions are performed by animals nearly related to man, we are led to believe that man has retained through inheritance a relic of them, now become useless. It is certainly a remarkable fact, that the minute unstriped muscles, by which the hairs thinly scattered over man’s almost naked body are erected, should have been preserved to the present day; and that they should still contract under the same emotions, namely, terror and rage, which cause the hairs to stand on end in the lower members of the Order to which man belongs.
Darwin therefore argued that the similarity of our and animals’ response to danger is further proof of our common ancestry. But not all emotions are so ancient. Other emotions, such as blushing through shame, shyness or excessive attention, have developed more recently, he said. Different races of people across the world all blush, but animals never do.
It does not seem possible that any animal, until its mental powers had been developed to an equal or nearly equal degree with those of man, would have closely considered and been sensitive about its own personal appearance. Therefore we may conclude that blushing originated at a very late period in the long line of our descent.
Or as Mark Twain wrote, ‘Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.’
Darwin referred to innate and inherited fears, but a key problem with his argument at the time was that he could not explain how physical or emotional traits were passed down. In fact, the Moravian monk Gregor Mendel was coming up with answers even then. Mendel was working with peas and developing the idea of genetic traits conserved through generations. This is now generally accepted as the mechanism by which evolution works and the idea of genes being passed from parents to children, determining family traits and peculiarities, is a familiar one.
Genes are the template from which we develop. They influence all aspects of our physical and mental well-being, including our appearance and vulnerability to diseases, our intelligence and personality. They are not the whole story and our environment also plays its part. But genes certainly influence the development of the brain’s structure and the activity of chemical messengers involved in our experience of fear. As explored in more depth in the next chapter, our genes could programme our brains to react to danger.
Although it may have taken millions of years for the lumbering progress of natural selection to give the world its incredible diversity of species, Nesse points out that individual traits can change much more quickly. Selective breeding of dogs for their temperament, for example, takes just a handful of generations to produce puppies which are either exceptionally easygoing or frantically neurotic.
But genes may not be our only link to the Stone Age. A chain of people also exists. If we are lucky, we know our parents and their parents and we may be familiar with the two or three, possibly even four generations which preceded us. These generations in turn knew their parents and grandparents and so on back through history. The human links are continuous and it could be that we learn our behaviour from those around us, just as they learnt it from another generation. A kind of cultural rather than genetic transmission of fear could take place.
Humans have passed on information since we could paint on cave walls and tell stories. Today’s films, books and TV programmes may be efficient ways of relaying a fear of ancient threats. When a writer wants to create a threatening atmosphere, a dark night, a few large spiders and a pair of animal’s eyes usually do the trick. Many ancient threats are symbols or shortcuts to fear and the storyteller only has to mention them to create the desired mood. Cultural learning is powerful and flexible and can quickly shape attitudes in an enduring way.
The idea was proposed by psychologist Graham Davey from the University of Sussex, and he set out to test it in relation to fear of spiders. Spiders have been embroiled in European culture since the Middle Ages, when they were thought to absorb poisons and to infect any food they touched. They were seen as the forerunners of disease and death during the Great Plague (the discovery that rats’ fleas carried the disease was not made until the nineteenth century). A form of hysteria called tarantulism was even blamed on the spider and only later found to be caused by too much sun. It was not all bad for the spider – tiny ‘money spiders’ were thought to bring financial good luck and cobwebs were used in traditional medicine to bind wounds – but for hundreds of years, in the main, spiders were thought to be highly dangerous and widely feared.
This thinking was confined to Europe, so if cultural learning is responsible for fear of spiders, Davey reasoned that it should only be widespread in Europeans and their descendants. Observations back him up. In parts of Africa the spider is thought to be wise and local people clean and protect its habitat. Spiders are eaten as a delicacy in areas as diverse as Indo-China, the Caribbean, among the native North Americans and Australian aborigines. Children in Brazil often keep spiders as pets. Hindus in eastern Bengal collect spiders to release at weddings to wish the couple good luck, and in Egypt it is common to put a spider in the bed of a newly married couple.
Researchers found that the incidence of spider fear in Britain is similar to that in Holland and in the US. So far, so good. Many North Americans are descended from Europeans, so this is not unexpected. The incidence in these countries was higher than in India, as predicted. But, strangely, the incidence in Japan, where there is no particular history of spider fear, is even higher, which tends to weaken the argument.
Davey’s central point is that it takes countless generations for the biology of a population to change even slightly. Threats would have had to be extremely dangerous and common, killing people in large numbers, for fear reactions to have become biologically programmed. He says we must not ignore the costs of our reactions. Our ancestors might have been well-advised to keep away from poisonous spiders or snakes, but they had to grub through plants to get food. Too much fear of insects would have led to malnutrition if it made people reluctant to look for food. An infant starting to explore its surroundings might be at risk from strangers and suspicion might be appropriate. But strangers are also likely to help a child in trouble and over-reluctance to approach a stranger could be fatal.
Spiders and snakes may simply have had longer to become embroiled in our culture and inherited learning than modern threats. Guns and electricity outlets have not been around long enough to acquire the symbolic significance that would mark them out as objects to fear. Children may develop fears by absorbing information from the people around them, who are themselves more likely to fear snakes than guns.
Cultural transmission of fear was a bold challenge to the prevailing view that our thought processes are shaped by strong biological links with our ancient predecessors. It suggested that our fears may have nothing to do with our biology and that perhaps our primitive brain was not, after all, programmed over millions of years. It is possible that we have learned them solely through careful observation of those around us.
However, this idea has not caught on. Nobody denies the importance of learning, but some of the most exciting research work is attempting to examine the structure and activity in our brains. It seems most likely that genetic and cultural transmission of information work in tandem. We have evolved with a certain biological background which comes to life only in the context of cultural learning. The tendency to fear may be instinctive or hardwired, irrevocably programmed into us as a species. But personal experience and observation of others may be essential before we develop specific fears.
The idea of flexible learning overlying hardwired fear has been re-explored by evolutionists in recent years. They are delving into aspects of the theory and attempting to test them out in practical, modern ways.
Animal Instincts
One of the good things about being an evolutionist is that you can never be definitively contradicted. Most scientists have their best work overturned within their own working life. They spend time trying to disprove other scientists’ ideas but they in turn are usually overtaken by someone else who contradicts or at least refines their work.
Believing in evolution gives a scientist some respite. Evolution took place over such a phenomenally long time scale that we can never recreate the same conditions and, ultimately, never know anything for certain. It provides a rather luxurious and permanent platform for scientists to stand on.
This does not mean that we have to accept the evolutionary perspective without question. With some lateral thinking, many ideas stemming from evolution theory can be studied scientifically. For example, evolutionists say that we are more likely to fear ancient rather than modern threats. If this is so, it should hold true for people of different races and cultures since we share the same ancestry and should therefore share the same fear programming.
A few small studies have produced some evidence for this. Researchers at a mental health clinic in Bangalore, India, found an incidence of phobias only a tenth of that in the West, a rate similar to that in other Indian communities. However, the vast majority of the phobias fitted the evolutionists’ model. Agoraphobia was the most common, closely followed by illness and social phobias. Animal phobias were rare, which is usually the case in clinics catering for people with the most seriously disabling problems. Scottish work found that more than two-thirds of a group’s phobias were relevant to ancient times. A Sri Lankan study used the same method and came up with virtually identical figures. This provides some backing for the idea that people in different parts of the world are similarly attuned to fear threats in the natural world.
More fundamentally, we cannot apply evolution theory to phobias at all unless we think cautious Stone-Agers were more likely to survive and produce offspring than their fearless friends. Fearfulness should have increased the chances of people passing on their genes to the next generation.
Coupled with this is the demand that ancient threats which still provoke fear today were capable of killing off people in large numbers, or at least reducing their chances of having children.
We cannot easily test this out in humans, but we can look for evidence in animals. Darwin noticed that birds are more ready to fear cats than people, presumably because they are at more risk from cats. More than one hundred years after Darwin, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, Martin Seligman, became interested in how that should be. After all, both cats and people kill birds and it might be as well for the average bird to have a healthy respect for both.
Seligman said that birds are programmed to fear cats but not people. Somewhere in the depths of the bird’s tiny brain lies the knowledge or the instinct that makes them ready to fear cats. By contrast, they are essentially neutral towards humans. Birds may become afraid of humans, but are not likely to fear people unless they have been harmed or hounded in some way. Cats are natural enemies of birds and have killed off swathes of them down the ages.
Seligman said that birds are ‘prepared’ to fear cats but ‘unprepared’ to fear people. He said further that some animals are ‘contra-prepared’ to develop certain fears and never become afraid even if they have repeated bad experiences. For example, pigeons instinctively peck for food and in the laboratory they learn quickly to peck a lighted key if it delivers grain. But if the experiment is set up so that pecking the key prevents them getting grain, they do not learn, and continue pecking at the key even though they never get anything to eat. Pigeons normally have to peck to feed and they are contra-prepared to make an association between pecking and starvation. The hungrier they are, the harder they peck, and it never occurs to them that taking a rest might be the answer.
Similarly, they learn quickly to fly away to avoid a shock but only with great difficulty to peck a key to stop the shock. Again, it makes sense. Hopping or flying away from an unpleasant stimulus is a good idea. Pecking, as a rule, would not help.
Humans may also have degrees of preparedness to develop fears. Watson and Rayner’s experiment with Little Albert (described in the last chapter), showed that he learnt instantly to fear the furry rat, and many other similar objects, after the experimenters startled him with a loud noise while he was playing. He did not take against the scientists conducting the work, who quite clearly deserved it, which suggests he was more ready to fear animals than people. Another researcher gave children common household objects like curtains and blocks to play with, delivered a sudden loud noise, and found they developed no fear at all. In yet another similar experiment, children remained robustly unafraid of a wooden duck.
This may be an important hint as to how phobias develop. The brain’s hardwiring determines how ready we are to become afraid of something. It provides a kind of mould for our fears. Some animals and situations fit it well. Fears of them are instinctive and develop with the least provocation. Seligman initially said that objects or situations which threatened the survival of the species, such as insects, animals, heights or the dark, best fit the mould. Phobias develop without conscious thought, sometimes after a one-off event, and they are not easily extinguished. In addition, the more flexible process of experience, learning and observing others, means that we can become afraid of anything. Modern objects tend not to fit the mould and it takes very adverse circumstances to make us fear them. Phobias of objects can and do develop, but not easily. Seligman rather harshly suggested that people with these fears may have ‘talked’ themselves into it. Fear of cars or guns is unprepared, he says, our brains have no template for it, and it takes effort or severe experience to lodge the fear in our minds. We will return to this point later in the chapter.
For many years there was a fierce debate over whether people and animals were born with fears or developed them later, but in the 1960s researchers demonstrated that laboratory-reared monkeys are not at all afraid of snakes. Monkeys who have spent even a short period in the wild are extremely afraid. It is highly unlikely that all of the once-wild monkeys had had a traumatic experience with a snake, so this was puzzling and it seemed that at least some of the monkeys must have acquired their fear vicariously, through seeing another monkey acting scared – a kind of fear by proxy.
Susan Mineka and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin put a monkey’s favourite treat, such as a marshmallow or raisin, on a ledge behind a transparent box. There was a real or toy snake in the box and the monkey had to reach over the snake to get the sweet. The more afraid the monkey was, the more reluctant it was to stretch over the box, and Mineka found that the fearless laboratory-reared animals grabbed the treat where the once-wild monkeys refused it.
Some laboratory-reared monkeys had lived with their previously wild parents all their lives. This was obviously not sufficient for them to acquire the fear of snakes – they seemed to need some experience for the fear to develop. When the laboratory-reared monkeys were allowed to watch older, wild-reared monkeys cowering from the snake, the vast majority developed the same reaction themselves, within minutes. They mimicked the screen monkey’s behaviour, clutching or shaking the cage, grimacing or threatening.
Mineka then attempted to make monkeys fear flowers or rabbits, objects that could never pose a threat. One video showed a monkey afraid of a snake and another was edited so that the same monkey was apparently afraid of a flower. Fearless young monkeys watched the tapes and afterwards, those who had seen the snake tape avoided snakes, but those who had seen the flower tape remained unconcerned by flowers. It was clearly easier to induce a fear of snakes than flowers. A similar experiment demonstrated that the monkeys were more ready to fear toy crocodiles than toy rabbits.
This is powerful evidence that creatures really are programmed to fear certain things. These monkeys were born in laboratories and had never previously encountered snakes, flowers, crocodiles or rabbits. Mineka and Cook concluded that it was highly likely that the difference in the monkeys’ reactions was somehow in-built, or ‘phylogenetic’. In other words, snakes and toy crocodiles are a better fit for the mould in the monkey’s brain.
Monkeys may not be born afraid of snakes but any sort of demonstration is enough to provoke their fear. It makes sense from the evolutionists’ point of view. Animals may not get a second chance in the wild and mistakes can be fatal. It could be that monkeys that quickly learn to be afraid of snakes or crocodiles have a survival advantage over their bolder companions. They are more likely to avoid these animals and therefore to survive and produce offspring. They will pass on the tendency to fear and, over generations, natural selection would increase the proportion of all monkeys inclined to fear snakes or crocodiles.
Work like this could not be done on people because we would all have experience of any object the researchers chose. But it might still be possible to draw human parallels from the work. Monkeys are not people, but our learning processes are surprisingly similar.
Take a country like Britain, where we have only one poisonous snake, the adder, and virtually none of us has ever seen it. Yet many of us are afraid of snakes. Why? Mineka’s work suggests, if humans are anything like primates, it will not take much exposure to snakes for a strong fear to develop. Monkeys developed permanent fears from watching videos and people probably do, too. We could be watching from a distance as someone else reacts to a snake or, much more likely, see someone shuddering at them in a film or on TV. From a very young age, we learn of Little Miss Muffett being frightened away by the spider, or the farmer’s wife shrieking in terror at three blind mice.
Role models are powerful, especially – according to Mineka – if they are older and more dominant. Her models did not have to be related to the young monkeys but it helped if they knew each other. This suggests that parents or other influential adults – even television and film role models – could pass on their fear to children. Mineka believes that if adults have phobias, they should not confront snakes, spiders or whatever it is they fear in front of children. We might expect it to be a bad thing for parents to blatantly avoid objects or situations, but this study suggests that it is worse for children to see their parents visibly disturbed.
There is a plus side to this work. Mineka found that monkeys can be immunised against developing a fear and learn not to be afraid. A model monkey who was unafraid of a snake made a lasting impression on the naive monkeys. They apparently got the message that snakes are not to be feared and it prevented the later development of fear. If, afterwards, they saw another monkey afraid of the snake, three-quarters of the young monkeys remained fearless. This suggests that adults who show no signs of fear when dealing with spiders or snakes exert a powerful influence on children and may prevent them developing these fears.
Mineka’s work tells a neat story, based around the assumption that snakes and crocodiles were real threats to monkeys and killed them off in huge numbers. Monkeys who were afraid of these animals therefore had a survival advantage. Unfortunately, the evidence does not fully back up the theory. The rhesus monkeys used by Mineka evolved in India, where cobras and other poisonous snakes could have been dangerous. However, there is less evidence that crocodiles would have been a danger. Crocodiles might be feared because of their reptilian similarity to snakes, but this seems rather to weaken the argument.
It partly hangs on how the brain recognises threatening animals or situations. The brain could have a full picture of snake or crocodile irrevocably programmed into its hardwiring. Alternatively, features like smell, sliminess or sudden movements may be what we are on our guard for.
People with phobias often give vivid descriptions of what they fear; the appearance, feel or thought of the animal. Abrupt, jerky, unpredictable movements are frightening. Sliminess disgusts us. Even babies dislike strange, inhuman appearances. Jamie Bennet-Levy and Theresa Marteau in London asked a group of people about rats, cockroaches, butterflies, frogs, rabbits, spiders, blackbirds and other small animals. The volunteers rated each creature for ugliness, sliminess, speed and how suddenly they appear to move. Another group said how afraid they were of the various characteristics and how near they would go to each animal. Not surprisingly, the more harmful the animal was, the more afraid people were and the less prepared to get close. Physical characteristics, especially ugliness, also deterred them. The volunteers in the study said that ugliness was a composition of sliminess, hairiness, colour, dirtiness, number of limbs or antennae, compactness of body and the relation of the eyes to the head. In other words, how different the animals’ appearances were from humans. Touch and sound came into it as well and people hated the thought of a spider running up their leg or in their hair.
