Denesha writes:
A troubling fact is that Australian natives lives in the world region where the most venomous snake species exist. But these snakes are important actors of their belief and culture.
Though I know little of the belief could it be the old pattern that you worship in order to appease? That by working the snakes into the religious practices it’s showing it a respect or even warding off of its danger?
I think the obvious evolutionary link comes into play when you look at such things as phobias and disgust factors. A phobia is the development of a completely irrational fear and one that is often very destructive. The vast vast majority of phobias develop over stressors that would have been present in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness. I am not sure if there is a clear cut case of a phobia developing over an evolutionarily novel stimuli.
I think normal fear responses can be built up by proximate learning of dangers associated with specific things in the present environment. This novelty is necessary and important. But novel sources of fear take longer to develop anxiety about, are not developed intrinsically (you have to have some sort of information about why it’s a distinct danger, and often it has to be fairly dramatic. Like plane crashes or child abductions. Rather than abstract figures about car crashes), and rarely develop into full blown phobias.
I think the disgust factor is interesting in this regard as well. Humans develop a disgust factor only to things that are biological in nature. We have adaptive psychological modules in how we differentiate our reactions to other species. Young children very early on develop fairly complex models of animal interactions such as predator/prey models and "contagent" models.
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