Why do we fear spiders, and scorpions even though they stand no chance against us, and would lose 9/10 times. ( Unless they crawl up you’re leg…. then GG ).
In: Earth Science
Scorpions are venomous and can cause severe pain. Some can even cause death. We have learned to fear venomous things like wasps, spiders, scorpions, snakes, etc because they are potentially life threatening.
Other small animals such as rats are feared because they often carry disease. Some of which are potentially fatal to humans.
In both kinds of cases we as societies developed cultural fears of these things as those that did fear them and so avoided or eradicated them lived longer and had more children.
>Why do we fear spiders, and scorpions even though they stand no chance against us, and would lose 9/10 times.
Because losing that fight 10% of the time is totally unacceptable. I mean, how many spiders do you encounter in a year? More than ten, I bet. And besides, “winning” the fight is meaningless. If you get bit by a spider and your leg gets infected, it’s cold comfort to say, “you should see the other guy.”
I never used to be scared of bugs. Then I got two fucking chronic illnesses from tick bites- Lyme Disease and Bartonella that’s taken most of my life from me and left me in extreme pain. So yeah, fuck fuckers that can get you sick.
It’s possible that we have some level of instinctive fear of particularly dangerous animals such as snakes and spiders, i.e. something that’s hardwired into our brains as a result of natural selection, but I don’t think anyone knows for sure.
Otherwise it’s mainly a cultural thing. We hear stories about certain animals being dangerous or scary or associated with disease, and so we learn to fear or hate them. Though obviously most of us have some direct experience of certain animals causing pain or being annoying, and that plays into it too.
Remember that **instinctual** behaviors can be/are **evolutionarily** changed and formed.
Largely because we weren’t large apex predators for most of our existence as LIFE. I say life, because when we look at our inherent behaviors, we have to look even further into the past than our common ancestor with apes. Arthropods were actually among the first to make the move to land, and these would have been Apex predators, at least for a while (a big while, we are talking evolutionary time scale). Because of this, every subsequent move of life from water to land had to contend with these insects, as well as other predators.
Its possible that detection and avoidance of arthropodal life was paramount to survival and genetic dominance. If this is the case, then innate fear of the appearance of chitin, compound eyes, many legs, etc. would have been beneficial adaptations.
Combine that with the fact that many arthropods developed toxins to make up for their shrinking size compared to their new fleshy competitors, (Oxygen became more scarce. A-la inverse-square problem, the big bugs couldn’t get the oxygen needed to make cellular energy. So they got much smaller to effectively transport oxygen to their vital organs.) thus reinforcing the need to avoid arthropods, and you can see why we innately fear them.
Fast forward literal millions of years, and we no longer face any real threat from what were our feared predators, but we still feel that instinctual fear. Something in you is telling you that if you don’t run or fight, a giant centipede will eat you.
Latest Answers