Where does arachnophobia or that prominent fear of spiders come from? According to a new study carried out by a team of scientists from Columbia University (USA), the key to this fear is the product of human evolution .
The work shows that in the earliest evolutionary stages of the human being , spiders posed a great threat due to their powerful poisons, the subtlety of their hiding places and the way they presented themselves to their victims; In fact, at the dawn of human evolution, only those who had special abilities to detect this and other types of animals were the ones who managed to survive. Hence, the fear of this class of arthropods ended up sealed in our DNA with the passage of time.
“Humans were at perennial, unpredictable and significant risk from encountering highly poisonous spiders in their ancestral environments. Even when it was not fatal, the bite of, for example, a black widow in the ancestral world could incapacitate a man for days or even weeks, during which time he was exposed to numerous dangers, “explains Joshua New, leader of the study. .
Why precisely spiders?
For some, the fear of spiders is innate and not learned. According to a duo of psychologists, spiders are an evolutionarily persistent ancient danger that humans are especially attuned to, even when we’re not paying special attention to anything else in our environment. After all, our ancestors coexisted with these eight-legged critters for millions of years, and being aware of spiders and their life-threatening bites was critical to survival.
Our visual system may have preserved “ancient mechanisms” dedicated to the rapid detection of immediate and specific threats that have persisted throughout evolution, according to Joshua New of Barnard College and Tamsin German of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Like snakes and spiders.
Therefore, to test this ancient danger, the duo recruited hundreds of college students for a simple task: choosing the longest of the two lines in a cross that is displayed on a computer screen. After the participants completed this test a few times, the researchers added an object that flashed for a few hundred milliseconds on the screen. These objects ranged from modern threats (hypodermic needles) to irrelevant creatures (house flies) to ancient dangers (spiders).
Less than 15% realized and were able to identify the location of the hypodermic needle in these “inattention blindness” tests. Similarly, only 10% successfully located the house fly. However, when a spider or spider shape quickly appeared on the screen, more than half of the participants were able to identify and locate in which quadrant it appeared.
The funny thing is that spiders are not such a serious threat these days, compared to the deep past. Only about 200 out of 40,000 present serious medical concerns for healthy adults, with about 200 confirmed deaths a year worldwide. A really meager figure.
