Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Count Lucanor]

LuckyR, I'm open to other ideas, but if those fears is not inherited, then how else would they be transmitted down through the generations. Fear of heights, for example, in bipedal apes like us, could not have been worked out by each individual ape from scratch. Don't you think that a tabula rasa on which learned fears essential for survival are painted would have been too slow and inefficient. Just as we are born to feel hunger and thirst so that we seek out food and water, so, it seems to me, we are born to feel fear in order to forestall certain dangers that would have presented to our ancestors out on the savanna much more frequently than they do to us today. As usual, I think evolution came up with a quick and dirty solution that worked well enough. It meant that most of us don't go stepping of cliffs.

I would be cautious on how we attribute specific responses to specific situations as a result of specific survival adaptations. It is possible, for example, that we have an innate predisposition to balance and control the center of gravity of our bodies, so we react with alertness and fear when exposed to risk of losing that balance, then everything else comes from applying the learned basic experience to other situations after repeated observations and the corresponding inferences, such as understanding what is falling off a cliff. We might be using simultaneously other combinations of basic predispositions and real life scenarios, such as protection from heavy impacts. That's why we can also "unlearn" fears that seem pretty common and instinctive, as well as we can learn to fear new things. I doubt that everyone fears spiders and heights instinctively. Whatever the case, I'm terrorized by both.

[LuckyR]

LuckyR, I'm open to other ideas, but if those fears is not inherited, then how else would they be transmitted down through the generations. Fear of heights, for example, in bipedal apes like us, could not have been worked out by each individual ape from scratch. Don't you think that a tabula rasa on which learned fears essential for survival are painted would have been too slow and inefficient. Just as we are born to feel hunger and thirst so that we seek out food and water, so, it seems to me, we are born to feel fear in order to forestall certain dangers that would have presented to our ancestors out on the savanna much more frequently than they do to us today. As usual, I think evolution came up with a quick and dirty solution that worked well enough. It meant that most of us don't go stepping of cliffs.

I didn't say they weren't inherited, I said the inheritance wasn't through DNA.

Say through epigenetics, for example.

[Sy Borg]

Almost all species are afraid of humans. The dodo, the great auk and the Falklands wolf, for example, were all hunted to extinction because they did not instinctively flee from bands of carnivorous quasi-eusocial apes. Thus, the only living species today are either afraid of humans or, occasionally, prey on them.

We humans are also imprinted from birth, with infants showing instinctive fear of spiders and snakes on first exposure. People who were careless around spiders and snakes would have died before procreating at a higher rate than those who were more cautious. Over generations, those tendencies were ever more reflected in genes.

I am wondering about other interesting imprints that can so easily become philosophical blind spots.

Saying species fear humans is not a justification for saying that humans fear some species.
Dodos never feared humans. BTW.
There are many examples of this.
Generally all animlas have a potential to fear others. But you would expect a fawn to fear a lion; or a kitten to fear a dog. Yet is would take only a minute to find examples all over the Internet which show cross species adoptions. Fawns lying with mother lions, ad infinitem.
Humans more than any other creature on the planet rely more on learning than all other animals, who tend to rely more on instinctive innate responses.
Mltiple studies have shown that it requires a mother to demonstrate fear of spiders for a child to learn that.
You ideas are based on long term myths.

The tabula rasa theory has been completely discredited.

I made clear that dodos died due to their lack of fear.

And BTW, you are wrong again: https://www.sciencealert.com/deep-unsha ... chnophobia

We Really Are Born With a Natural Fear of Spiders And Snakes, New Study Shows

It's long been debated whether arachnophobia is something that's embedded into us as a species – or whether we learn it from culture – so to tease out the answer, scientists recruited the most innocent and neutral of study participants: human babies.

With these unsuspecting infants on hand, researchers led by the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany exposed the six-month-olds to images of eight-legged nightmare fuel to measure their innate, untrained responses to the arachnids.

In addition to images of spiders, the infants, sitting safely on a parent's lap, were also shown pictures of flowers, while in a separate experiment, the babies looked at a series of images showing either snakes or fish.

During the experiment, the babies had their pupillary dilation measured by an infrared eye tracker, which indicates levels of the fight-or-flight chemical norepinephrine (aka noradrenaline), and so can help gauge stress response.

"When we showed pictures of a snake or a spider to the babies instead of a flower or a fish of the same size and colour, they reacted with significantly bigger pupils", says neuroscientist Stefanie Hoehl from the Max Planck Institute and the University of Vienna in Austria.

"In constant light conditions this change in size of the pupils is an important signal for the activation of the noradrenergic system in the brain, which is responsible for stress reactions. Accordingly, even the youngest babies seem to be stressed by these groups of animals."

[Lagayascienza]

The idea that we have to be taught to fear deadly snakes, spiders and other dangerous critters does not stand to reason, and the scientific research demonstrates that the fear is inherited just like the fear we feel at cliff edges. The brain is "hard-wired" at birth for lots of things - to acquire spoken language is another example. The tabula rasa notion is long past its use-by date.

[Count Lucanor]

There is an interesting, although long, peer-reviewed paper, published on the Developmental Psychology journal, titled: Fear in Infancy: Lessons From Snakes, Spiders, Heights, and Strangers and authored by Vanessa LoBue and Karen E Adolph. It “challenges the traditional interpretation of infants’ and young children’s responses to 3 types of potentially “fear-inducing” stimuli—snakes and spiders, heights, and strangers.” It is enlightening about proclaimed evolutionary origins of such fears. It’s worth checking it out.

[Lagayascienza]

I'll take a look at that paper, Count Lucanor. Before I do I should reiterate that innate fears can be modified with learning. For example we can learn which spiders are venomous and interact with them accordingly. In the abstract to that paper I notice that the authors refer to "stimulus-specific responses that are highly dependent on context, learning, and the perceptual features of the stimuli." But I need to read it in more detail to see if their "evidence" stands up. I also notice in the abstract that they make an "alternative explanation" and I will be interested to read what that is.

[Count Lucanor]

I'll take a look at that paper, Count Lucanor. Before I do I should reiterate that innate fears can be modified with learning. For example we can learn which spiders are venomous and interact with them accordingly. In the abstract to that paper I notice that the authors refer to "stimulus-specific responses that are highly dependent on context, learning, and the perceptual features of the stimuli." But I need to read it in more detail to see if their "evidence" stands up. I also notice in the abstract that they make an "alternative explanation" and I will be interested to read what that is.

The first problem is, of course, determining if specific fears are universal and innate. The paper that I just referenced states that children do not fear instinctively snakes, spiders, heights and strangers, and gives itself references to a body of studies that support that interpretation. In human psychology, perhaps unfortunately, by the own nature of the subject, there isn’t always the possibility of strict hard science and it depends a lot on interpretations. So, I just want to make the case that the idea of specific innate fears is an hypothesis worth challenging, and such challenge is not unreasonable and unsupported by science.

The second problem is how, in finding explanations for the causes of those common fears, we don’t resort to the tabula rasa conception. My stance is that there may be indeed some innate properties at the base of those fears, but that they are general purpose traits that are then shaped in experience as common responses to specific events. They could even be universally implemented as a result of all humans having to go through the same developmental experiences, but not necessarily imprinted genetically.

Last, I want to mention, just in case you weren’t completely aware of it, that there’s ample resistance in scientific circles to many claims coming from the field of evolutionary psychology, specially the ones related to adaptionism for specific traits, criticism which has coined the term “just so” stories of evolutionary psychology. The fears we are dealing with here are good candidates for including in that dispute.

[Sculptor1]

Almost all species are afraid of humans. The dodo, the great auk and the Falklands wolf, for example, were all hunted to extinction because they did not instinctively flee from bands of carnivorous quasi-eusocial apes. Thus, the only living species today are either afraid of humans or, occasionally, prey on them.

We humans are also imprinted from birth, with infants showing instinctive fear of spiders and snakes on first exposure. People who were careless around spiders and snakes would have died before procreating at a higher rate than those who were more cautious. Over generations, those tendencies were ever more reflected in genes.

I am wondering about other interesting imprints that can so easily become philosophical blind spots.

Saying species fear humans is not a justification for saying that humans fear some species.
Dodos never feared humans. BTW.
There are many examples of this.
Generally all animlas have a potential to fear others. But you would expect a fawn to fear a lion; or a kitten to fear a dog. Yet is would take only a minute to find examples all over the Internet which show cross species adoptions. Fawns lying with mother lions, ad infinitem.
Humans more than any other creature on the planet rely more on learning than all other animals, who tend to rely more on instinctive innate responses.
Mltiple studies have shown that it requires a mother to demonstrate fear of spiders for a child to learn that.
You ideas are based on long term myths.

The tabula rasa theory has been completely discredited.

I made clear that dodos died due to their lack of fear.

We Really Are Born With a Natural Fear of Spiders And Snakes, New Study Shows

It's long been debated whether arachnophobia is something that's embedded into us as a species – or whether we learn it from culture – so to tease out the answer, scientists recruited the most innocent and neutral of study participants: human babies.

With these unsuspecting infants on hand, researchers led by the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany exposed the six-month-olds to images of eight-legged nightmare fuel to measure their innate, untrained responses to the arachnids.

Nothing more than body langauge
Kids are smarter than your imagination

In addition to images of spiders, the infants, sitting safely on a parent's lap, were also shown pictures of flowers, while in a separate experiment, the babies looked at a series of images showing either snakes or fish.

During the experiment, the babies had their pupillary dilation measured by an infrared eye tracker, which indicates levels of the fight-or-flight chemical norepinephrine (aka noradrenaline), and so can help gauge stress response.

"When we showed pictures of a snake or a spider to the babies instead of a flower or a fish of the same size and colour, they reacted with significantly bigger pupils", says neuroscientist Stefanie Hoehl from the Max Planck Institute and the University of Vienna in Austria.

"In constant light conditions this change in size of the pupils is an important signal for the activation of the noradrenergic system in the brain, which is responsible for stress reactions. Accordingly, even the youngest babies seem to be stressed by these groups of animals."

You are still confusing teo things.
1) an innate mechanism to caution, and fear.
2) Specific encoded fear responses to specific and taxomomically identifyable threats.
1 is true, 2 is false.
If you can account for how natural selection manages to equip the cognitive system of a human baby with the ability to see an archnid as a threat whilst managing to ignore a large list of insects to which they seem to exhinit curiosity , then do so. But if you cannot remember pulling the legs off "daddy long legs" when you were a child or seeing other children do the same ,showing zero fear of spiders then You might want to get out more.

[Sy Borg]

Almost all species are afraid of humans. The dodo, the great auk and the Falklands wolf, for example, were all hunted to extinction because they did not instinctively flee from bands of carnivorous quasi-eusocial apes. Thus, the only living species today are either afraid of humans or, occasionally, prey on them.

We humans are also imprinted from birth, with infants showing instinctive fear of spiders and snakes on first exposure. People who were careless around spiders and snakes would have died before procreating at a higher rate than those who were more cautious. Over generations, those tendencies were ever more reflected in genes.

I am wondering about other interesting imprints that can so easily become philosophical blind spots.

Saying species fear humans is not a justification for saying that humans fear some species.
Dodos never feared humans. BTW.
There are many examples of this.
Generally all animlas have a potential to fear others. But you would expect a fawn to fear a lion; or a kitten to fear a dog. Yet is would take only a minute to find examples all over the Internet which show cross species adoptions. Fawns lying with mother lions, ad infinitem.
Humans more than any other creature on the planet rely more on learning than all other animals, who tend to rely more on instinctive innate responses.
Mltiple studies have shown that it requires a mother to demonstrate fear of spiders for a child to learn that.
You ideas are based on long term myths.

The tabula rasa theory has been completely discredited.

I made clear that dodos died due to their lack of fear.

We Really Are Born With a Natural Fear of Spiders And Snakes, New Study Shows

It's long been debated whether arachnophobia is something that's embedded into us as a species – or whether we learn it from culture – so to tease out the answer, scientists recruited the most innocent and neutral of study participants: human babies.

With these unsuspecting infants on hand, researchers led by the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany exposed the six-month-olds to images of eight-legged nightmare fuel to measure their innate, untrained responses to the arachnids.

Nothing more than body langauge
Kids are smarter than your imagination

In addition to images of spiders, the infants, sitting safely on a parent's lap, were also shown pictures of flowers, while in a separate experiment, the babies looked at a series of images showing either snakes or fish.

During the experiment, the babies had their pupillary dilation measured by an infrared eye tracker, which indicates levels of the fight-or-flight chemical norepinephrine (aka noradrenaline), and so can help gauge stress response.

"When we showed pictures of a snake or a spider to the babies instead of a flower or a fish of the same size and colour, they reacted with significantly bigger pupils", says neuroscientist Stefanie Hoehl from the Max Planck Institute and the University of Vienna in Austria.

"In constant light conditions this change in size of the pupils is an important signal for the activation of the noradrenergic system in the brain, which is responsible for stress reactions. Accordingly, even the youngest babies seem to be stressed by these groups of animals."

You are still confusing teo things.
1) an innate mechanism to caution, and fear.
2) Specific encoded fear responses to specific and taxomomically identifyable threats.
1 is true, 2 is false.
If you can account for how natural selection manages to equip the cognitive system of a human baby with the ability to see an archnid as a threat whilst managing to ignore a large list of insects to which they seem to exhinit curiosity , then do so. But if you cannot remember pulling the legs off "daddy long legs" when you were a child or seeing other children do the same ,showing zero fear of spiders then You might want to get out more.

No, I never pulled legs from a daddy longlegs, nor did I ever see that happen. Daddy longlegs look more like stick insects than, say, funnel webs. No doubt children can be taught not to fear any animal. However, infants have long been known to show intrinsic fear responses to spiders and snakes. There have been a number of studies to this end.

If you cannot tell the difference between daddy longlegs and dangerous spiders then you might want to get out more.

It makes sense that some species would have a morphology deigned to illicit fear. That's a good survival strategy. Likewise, it's a good survival strategy to have special responses to potential threats. There is no way that infants will respond the same way to a beetle and a funnel web. Likewise, there is no way they will respond the same way to snakes as puppies. What's the point of genetic inheritance if it doesn't provide instinctive survival-oriented behaviours?

[Joule Mwendwa]

We moved from fearing other species to ourselves. We are afraid of each other now. We have nuclear weapons waiting for that one dreaded day to strike each other.

[Sy Borg]

We moved from fearing other species to ourselves. We are afraid of each other now. We have nuclear weapons waiting for that one dreaded day to strike each other.

That is learned, not instinctive. Infants don't fear nuclear bombs.

[Pattern-chaser]

If you cannot tell the difference between daddy longlegs and dangerous spiders then you might want to get out more.

In the name of health and wellbeing, I suggest the exact opposite!

[Sy Borg]

If you cannot tell the difference between daddy longlegs and dangerous spiders then you might want to get out more.

In the name of health and wellbeing, I suggest the exact opposite! 😅😂🤣

Anyone who stays in to avoid spiders is either over-sensitive, or there's a ton of spiders around.

Might as well drive the nail in a bit more:

Itsy Bitsy Spider…: Infants React with Increased Arousal to Spiders and Snakes. Stefanie Hoehl, Kahl Hellmer, Maria Johansson and Gustaf Gredebäck. Front. Psychol., October 18 2017, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01710

Abstract: Attention biases have been reported for ancestral threats like spiders and snakes in infants, children, and adults. However, it is currently unclear whether these stimuli induce increased physiological arousal in infants. Here, 6-month-old infants were presented with pictures of spiders and flowers (Study 1, within-subjects), or snakes and fish (Study 1, within-subjects; Study 2, between-subjects). Infants’ pupillary responses linked to activation of the noradrenergic system were measured. Infants reacted with increased pupillary dilation indicating arousal to spiders and snakes compared with flowers and fish. Results support the notion of an evolved preparedness for developing fear of these ancestral threats.

https://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2017 ... 1f1b69995f

Like any other species, humans have their own pre-programming.

[Pattern-chaser]

Like any other species, humans have their own pre-programming.