Phobias: Fighting the Fear. Helen Saul

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      Evolutionists believe that this observation is important in our understanding of phobias. They say the things we fear today could have been fatal to our prehistoric ancestors. A bite from a spider or snake could have killed; it would have been dangerous to be out after dark; being cornered in a cave by an animal was definitely best avoided. By contrast, the things that really do kill us today – cars, guns or cigarettes – rarely inspire the same level of fear.

      They believe that we are, at heart, barely adapted Stone-Agers, now working in offices and driving cars. We are strangely mismatched with our circumstances. We have modern and sophisticated lives but the deep recesses of our mind have developed to react to long-gone situations. The primeval drive of fear is more easily provoked by ancient threats, evolutionists say, because it is still best attuned to days spent roaming the African plains. Then, it would have made sense to have a proper respect for spiders, the dark or enclosed spaces. Stone-Agers lived in dangerous times and required a certain level of caution to survive and have children. Those who did survive passed their safety-consciousness on to their offspring and it became programmed into the human psyche.

      The conversation at the dinner table might have ostensibly been about crazy, overblown fears of harmless objects, but an evolutionist would contend that it was in fact about proper caution for dangerous situations – albeit a few tens of thousands of years late.

      The theory of evolution has been widely known since Charles Darwin shocked contemporary society with The Origin of Species, in 1859. The book had ramifications throughout science, religion and society, as discussed in the previous chapter. It hinted that humankind evolved from a primitive creature over millions of years and is related to the apes. Darwin was initially ridiculed and pilloried for his ideas, but acceptance of them grew and they are now largely taken for granted. In the past decade or so, scientists from many disciplines have revisited evolution theory and attempted to apply it to such diverse questions as why nations go to war and what features of the face or body determine sexual attractiveness. It has been used to argue for a new approach to pest control in agriculture; computers have been programmed to use a kind of technological natural selection to continually improve performance.

      But what of our reactions to danger? Can evolution theory tell us anything about the nature of fear and anxiety? Evolutionists claim that part of the reason we develop phobias may lie in the mismatch between life in the twenty-first century and the Stone Age. As a species we are still primed to react to the threats and opportunities that our ancient ancestors faced. Evolutionarily speaking, we have hardly budged in the past ten thousand years but our lifestyle has changed beyond all recognition.

      Primates are believed to have appeared sixty-five million years ago, followed thirty million years later by the first apelike creatures. They began walking on two legs about four million years ago, and using early stone tools two and a half million years ago. After a phase of rapid brain expansion two million years ago, they started to use shaped hand-axes and moved from Africa into Europe and Asia. This was the beginning of the Stone Age and its people developed a stable lifestyle roaming African plains for food until about ten thousand years ago.

      Anatomically modern humans developed from their ancestors a hundred thousand years ago and discovered fire. Farming was introduced ten thousand years ago, the wheel about eight thousand years ago, and people started to write about 4000 BC. The pace of change accelerated and it took less than two hundred years to get from the first machines of mass production in the industrial revolution to the technology that put men on the moon.

      It is rather like an old man who has lived for seventy years in an isolated spot in an unchanging world. One summer, somebody strikes oil nearby. Big business moves in, a town is developed, new roads are built, the population soars and he finds himself ill-equipped to cope. Humans have spent 99.5 per cent of their existence as hunter-gatherers and are barely out of the Stone Age in evolutionary terms. But life today bears little resemblance to that of our ancestors.

      Evolutionists have attempted to explain many modern health problems in terms of the poor fit between our biological make-up and modern lifestyle. Soaring rates of obesity are a good example. Our ancestors had to move around constantly in search of food, which was often in short supply. The ability to store fat around their bodies so that they could survive times of potential starvation would have been a great advantage. Today in most parts of the Western world, food is plentiful. Supermarkets carry a dazzling and expanding range of foods and food shortages are almost unheard of. Add to that a sedentary lifestyle, in which we are entertained at home by the TV, transported around in cars and have our manual work done by machines. The result, according to the World Health Organisation, is that almost half of Britain’s adults are overweight and the entire population of America will be obese by 2230 if the increase seen since 1980 continues. Obesity is serious, known to contribute to heart disease, diabetes and premature death. Fat storage, the very mechanism which kept our starving ancestors alive, may be killing people off in the modern world.

      The Pima Indians in Arizona, US, are a particularly dramatic example. They maintained a traditional way of life, relying on farming, hunting and fishing for food, until the late nineteenth century. Then, diversion of their water supply by American farmers upstream drove them to poverty and malnutrition, even starvation. The Second World War brought both prosperity and contact with Caucasian Americans, which westernised their dietary and lifestyle habits. Since then, the Pima Indians as a group have put on an unhealthy amount of weight. Half of the adults have diabetes and 95 per cent of those are overweight. Scientists from the US Government’s National Institute of Health have studied the Pima Indians for more than thirty years, looking for genetic causes of diabetes and obesity.

      Just as the Pima Indians are physically adapted for a traditional lifestyle, our minds may be geared to deal with traditional dangers. We still eat as if food shortages were imminent; perhaps we are also still on the look-out for predators and natural threats. Certainly, evolutionary psychiatrists Randolph Nesse at the University of Michigan, and Isaac Marks, from London University, believe that we are all programmed to react to threats. Anxiety and fear are necessary, they say, and have been essential for our survival throughout evolution.

      At the simplest level, mild anxiety boosts performance. It prompts the student to revise for exams, the musician to practise, the sales rep to rehearse a presentation. But evolutionists say it is far more sophisticated than that.

      We could improve our understanding of anxiety at a stroke if we stopped thinking of it as a disorder, and considered it a defence that regulates and orchestrates our reactions to every threat and opportunity, say Nesse and Marks. The anxiety system is as important to our survival as is our immune system. It protects against threats to our whole body, and life, in the way that the immune system fights off specific physical threats. Both defence systems have developed within our species as we evolved. The individuals with appropriate reactions to danger or to micro-organisms are most likely to survive, produce offspring and pass on these traits to future generations.

      Both have a range of reactions to meet specific threats. The immune system creates a scab to heal a cut finger and produces antibodies to deal with viruses. Similarly, at least some of our reactions to danger are clearly adaptive and matched exactly to the threat, say Marks and Nesse. For example, people who are afraid of heights may ‘freeze’ if they have to walk along a ledge or cross a narrow bridge. They cling to the side, unable to move. They may need a companion’s reassurance and physical assistance to get going again. This sort of reaction is not helpful if it stops you climbing stairs but in natural surroundings someone who became immobile by the side of a sheer drop might avoid a bad fall.

      Blushing often seems to make a difficult situation worse. People who lack confidence in social gatherings dread being the centre of attention and burning cheeks do not help anyone blend into the background. But if, as has been argued, blushing signals social submission, a red face could be a plea for continued membership of the group. In ancient times, membership СКАЧАТЬ