If we weren’t capable of being afraid, we simply wouldn’t exist, so we can say of fear: it’s the stuff we’re made of! Let’s appreciate this evolutionary heritage, even if in everyday life we’d prefer not to feel its effects.
Fear has been our companion since the dawn of time. But when exactly did it first appear? Biological life on Earth began more than 3.5 billion years ago, but the first organisms still had a long way to go before the time when a member of one species ate another, becoming the first predator. And it is predators who cause the greatest fear among their prey. The appearance of predatory animals sparked an evolutionary arms race on Planet Earth.
The Red Queen Hypothesis
In Lewis Carroll’s novel Through the Looking Glass, the Red Queen explains to Alice the rules for getting around the country where she’s found herself: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” The outstanding American evolutionary biologist Leigh Van Valen noted that in the world of living organisms, we can perceive a similar dependency. He described it in 1973 in A New Evolutionary Law, one of the most important works in contemporary ecology. Prey who flee from predators in fear bring with them a process of creating new adaptations, or “genetic evasions,” making their flight more efficient. In response, predators also develop new abilities—and on and on. To maintain the status quo in the relationship between predator and prey, you have to be constantly developing; to remain in constant motion, like Alice. And the changes don’t happen in a linear faction, but in leaps. After each such irregular jump, a new species may emerge. According to one hypothesis, this is how life on Earth diversified; thus we can say with confidence that fear is largely responsible for our planet’s great biodiversity.
I’m writing about the role of fear in the beginnings of life on Earth, but this of course involves a certain simplification. Fear is just one emotion, and to feel emotions you need a complex nervous system. Already about 850 million years ago, single-cell flagellates were most likely able to send electrical signals and to release and receive chemical signals. That means that very early in phylogenetic development, animals developed the ability to communicate with each other, as well as the capacity for internal exchange of information—among particular parts of the body. But this still wasn’t enough for them to be able to feel fear, as an emotion. We also know that a little later, 520 million years ago, there lived a sea creature of a shellfish-like species, which already had a central nervous system. It was capable not only of transmitting information to specific parts of its body, but also of processing it more deeply, allowing the animal to move and to react to its surroundings in a more sophisticated way. But more highly advanced brain structures appeared only about 200 million years ago, among the early mammals. These creatures had a neocortex—an additional layer of nervous tissue on the surface of the brain that is responsible for receiving and processing sensory impressions, planning and executing movements as well as cognitive processes, such as memory, thought and language. So did animals begin to feel fear already 520 million years ago, or only 320 million years after that? Well, there’s the problem. The problem of consciousness.
Who’s Afraid, and Who’s Not?
Charles Darwin, in his 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, wrote that human emotional states of mind are a legacy of our ancestors. They are a sort of continuum, not something distinct and exceptional. So we shouldn’t be surprised by the statement that animals also feel emotions. While it may be harder for us to accept this possibility among groups that are further from us, such as fish, amphibians, or reptiles (though I don’t doubt it), it’s easy to believe that dogs, cats, and certainly our closest relatives, e.g., chimpanzees or bonobos, have feelings. But certain contemporary neurobiologists doubt even this. They believe that in this area, humans turn out to be exceptional animals.
This is because emotions are connected with consciousness. Consciousness in animals other than humans is recognized by the scientific world based on the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, signed in 2012 by a number of outstanding specialists in neuroscience. The document was created because scientific data do not unambiguously confirm the existence of consciousness in animals other than humans, so in the scientific community there arose the need for a “statement of faith.” The very concept of consciousness in humans is exceptionally complicated; neuroscience is only now attempting to understand it, and if we know so little about human consciousness, we can hardly expect to easily prove its existence among other creatures. Many researchers are aware of these complications, and thus decided to sign the declaration, which is meant to contribute to better treatment of animals. Scientists may still struggle for a long time with proving consciousness in animals, but we must not forget to treat non-humans with dignity.
Still, I believe the problem is not whether animals have consciousness—because this is obvious to me—but rather that we (still?) can’t study it. Animals can’t communicate the state of their consciousness to humans, which for understandable reasons makes it difficult to conduct research on their emotions. We can’t discover anything about an animal’s feelings in the moment when they find themselves in a threatening situation, so we’re not able to completely confirm that they feel fear or anxiety (I’ll get to the difference between these emotions in a moment). This understanding is somewhat reminiscent of the Cartesian concept of the animal machine, just dressed up in modern, neuroscientific robes.
One of the figures who denies the existence of emotions in animals, including their experience of fear and anxiety, is the leading American neurobiologist Joseph LeDoux, author of the monumental work Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety. He believes there is no scientific basis to assume that in the evolutionary process we inherited emotions from the animals. This is a shocking statement, considering that humans are in fact also animals. According to LeDoux, animals are equipped only with special, ancient defensive survival circuits that serve to discover dangers and react to them instinctively. Nothing more. Counterbalancing this, outstanding animal behavior researchers such as Frans de Waal and Marc Bekoff have no doubt that animals have self-awareness and feel a full range of emotions—from sadness, regret, and fear, through anger and envy, to joy and love.
The contemporary concept of fear in the biological sense (similarly to consciousness, memory, and intelligence) is a broader concept than it would appear. At the very least, we have evidence that different neural systems are activated depending on the type of threat. Some in the case of pain, predators, or hunger; others in response to aggressive relatives. Additionally, each of these systems can be triggered by a separate sensory channel, such as vision, hearing, touch, or smell. Taken in this new context, fear is no longer understood as a momentary reaction to a threat enabling the avoidance of injury or death. If, first of all, we still haven’t understood consciousness as such, and second the very understanding of fear is still evolving, can we completely deny its existence in other animals? I don’t believe we have that right.
The Intricacies of Definition
We know for certain that fear is born in a specific part of the brain, known as the amygdala (from the Latin for “almond,” which describes its shape). All four-limbed chordates have one, and fish have very similar structures known as the amygdaloid complex. When there’s a threat, these structures activate the autonomic nervous system, which sets off a range of reactions that happen without our knowledge or will. We describe this pathway of activating fear, which has no involvement of the self, as “subcortical,” or “low.” It’s a primary defense mechanism: the stress hormones cortisol, noradrenaline, and adrenaline that are released into the body take it into a state of maximum readiness, which will result in fight, flight, or freezing.
When the body is overcome by fear, the cerebral cortex, acting as the center of rational understanding and judgment, momentarily loses control over decision-making. The ability to think and draw logical conclusions is sharply limited. It takes a while for reason to speak up and attempt to analyze the dangerous situation. We call this pathway of activating fear the “cortical,” or “high.” It’s an analytical assessment of the real state of the threat, the consequences, and thus the appropriateness of the response and actions taken.
This is a good point at which to explain why I distinguish between the concepts of fear and anxiety. Many laypeople treat them as synonyms, but scientists define them more precisely. Fear is a set of physiological and behavioral reactions that appear as a result of feeling threatened. It starts from the release of stress hormones, whose actions cause a halt in digestion, the release of glucose to the bloodstream, contraction of the sphincter, opening of the nostrils, faster breathing, goosebumps, and many other phenomena in the body.
Fear occurs as a result of a real threat. Anxiety, meanwhile, is an irrational emotional state. Both feelings are strongly tied together, and intertwine so much that it’s hard to examine them separately. Before going into the forest at night, we may feel anxiety at the thought of meeting a wolf. Once we’ve made the decision to enter and then meet one, we’re overcome by fear. Setting aside the fact that there’s nothing to fear, I myself have walked in the woods at night, and sometimes I’ve encountered wolves. But I’d be lying if I said I was fully in control at the time. I’ve always had some atavistic anxieties, and the first time I came across a wolf, I even felt a slight fear.
The Anxious Ape
Homo sapiens is an exceptionally anxious creature, significantly more timid and depressive than our ancestors. The cause of this behavior lies in the distant past. Initially evolution favored neurotic and fearful individuals, which may have shaped our unique cognitive and emotional traits, as well as defined behaviors. But today it seems that this is more a problem than an advantage. Millions of years ago, in the case of a humanoid ape on the African savannah, fear increased the likelihood they would survive, while among contemporary humans it causes, above all, pain and suffering.
We fear many things. Some anxieties we learn, while others we carry with us from birth. Knowledge about some of them is passed down from generation to generation, for hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years. They were acquired by our ancestors, other Hominini, because this was simpler from the evolutionary point of view. Rather than learning from their parents certain constant threats, the descendants started to simply be born with encoded anxieties. Inborn fear protected us (and still protects us) not only from predators—of whom there are significantly fewer today, because we have killed off most of them—but also against hostile members of our own species. It also allowed us to avoid such threats as loss of social status or ostracism (the consequences of exclusion were usually tragic: without the support of the group, we were doomed to die).
The example of specific stages of human development ideally illustrates how many fears are programmed into our genes. Incapable of moving independently or defending themselves, babies react with the greatest horror to the absence of their caregivers and the presence of others. Such individuals may potentially have bad intentions, so it’s best to fear them on principle. What’s more, already at six months children have the ability to recognize dangerous animals. At the sight of spiders or snakes, their pupils clearly dilate. From our earliest years, the human mind is wonderfully adapted to quickly identifying and recognizing the shape of snakes and spiders, as well as assessing them as a potential threat. These abilities most likely evolved in Africa, before the first people left that continent. That means at the time we must have had a great deal of contact with these animals, and they must have been very dangerous for us. That’s why this concrete knowledge became embedded in our genetic code and passed down to later generations. It worked back then—and it’s lasted until today, even though in many places these animals aren’t so dangerous for humans anymore, or simply aren’t present. Arachnophobia, a strong fear of spiders, affects a few percent of the total population, even though only about 0.1% of the roughly fifty thousand spider species on the planet can be dangerous to humans. A greater share of the population suffers from fear of snakes (ophidiophobia).
When children begin to move around independently, they develop a fear of heights. This comes in handy to keep from falling and breaking bones, or even dying. At the age of about four years, we begin to understand what death is, and to be aware of its irreversible effects. This coincides in time with more intensive exploration of our nearest surroundings, which long ago made the youngest humans more subject to predatory attacks. Even today, children are afraid of monsters lying in wait in the dark, and are fascinated by dangerous animals. Interestingly, the circumstances they’re brought up in don’t matter—whether in highly urbanized areas or in the wild corners of the jungle, all children fear similar things, specifically the aforementioned snakes and spiders, as well as lions and tigers. Even today, these predators arouse greater fear than street traffic, so the foundation for it must truly lie in prehistory, when wild animals posed an omnipresent threat to our ancestors. The predator spirits remain alive in our minds.
In middle and late childhood there also appear fears of injury, accidents, and catching diseases, while in early adulthood the most important are social threats. Teenagers tend to strongly fear losing social status or friends, as well as ostracism. This is a time when one’s peers start to be more important than their parents, and the main challenge for young people turns out to be finding their own social niche and building stable emotional ties. During this period, rejection by the group is the greatest danger.
Fear, Our Friend
For millions of years, fear and anxiety allowed us to survive. They’ve always had great adaptive significance, allowing individual bodies and entire populations to adjust to changing conditions. If it weren’t for the fear of losing their lives, people and other animals wouldn’t have a motivation to act and to overcome problems. But a lack of ability to deal with threats would be catastrophic, leading to the disappearance from the face of the Earth of individuals without fear and anxiety. So it’s better to be frightened many times of something unthreatening, such as a backfiring car, than not to fear a true threat, ending your life.
Fear is our friend, but it has an ambiguous nature. Usually we don’t like it, and we’d prefer it to stay far away from us. But sometimes we want to experience it, for it to penetrate our mind. Of course, we only want to experience fear in controlled conditions—tied to a bungee cord, or watching a horror film. Sometimes it saves our lives, and other times it allows us to have fun. These two faces, so vastly different, are what make it so fascinating.
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