For instance, why are we scared of the dark naturally? why are we scared of dark places naturally? like that? i just can’t figure out why we’re scared of certain things naturally and others not. and everything i find doesn’t make sense to me.
i don’t know if i’m just stupid or something?
In: Biology
Your brain (the thing that makes your behaviour) is a physical structure that has evolved like the rest of your body. That means it has characteristics that got passed down because they give some kind of survival or reproduction advantage, the same way we evolved muscles and livers and eyeballs.
So to answer your question, we’re afraid of the dark because we are descended from ancestors that were afraid of the dark, because the ones who *weren’t* afraid of the dark were more likely to get sick, injured, killed, lost, or otherwise prevented from reproducing. So they got out-bred over time by those that were afraid of the dark – fast forward a few thousand generations and here we are.
It’s the same reason we’re afraid of heights, are wary of strangers, dislike spiders and gross bugs, feel protective of family members, feel jealous of things others have, and countless other “instinctual” behaviours. They evolved because having them gave a survival advantage vs those that didn’t have them, so over time the bloodlines with the more useful instincts out-breed the others until the more useful traits like being scared of the dark are very widespread (among the survivors after millennia of selection pressure weeding out disadvantages).
In our early forms wandering around looking for food, it helped to have a built in “What the hell is that!” detector so that we wouldn’t eat, touch, or sit wit our back to some hungry tiger or bear or whatever.
We are more instinctual than people like to admit. We evolved into creatures that fear the dark because we weren’t endowed with good night vision, and if there’s a predator out in the night we shouldn’t be wandering around in the dark.
This is also part of natural selection. Early humans who were afraid of the snakes, alligators, and the dark lived longer and hence reproduced more than their neighbors who were dancing with alligators at night.
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