Why are so many humans (myself included) afraid of spiders? Arachnophobia consistently lands in the top 10 most-common phobias. Why? Especially when there aren’t *that* many deadly species of them? Why spiders over other animals?
In: Biology
A lot of the more primal instincts we have, such as a fear of spiders, snakes, and other creepy crawlies, are left over from our evolutionary ancestors. There aren’t that many spiders that are dangerous to humans, mostly based on our size, but imagine 10 or 20 or 30 million years ago, when our ancestors were much smaller, think monkeys. Relative to a small mammal, spiders are MUCH more dangerous just based on volume of the venom being injected by a bite, and also remember that when the world was warmer arthropods like insects and spiders grew to be larger as well. Because there is very little harm that comes from arachnophobia, and there are dangerous spiders out there, evolution hasn’t removed these primitive instincts from our species.
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