Helen Saul - Phobias - Fighting the Fear

A mixed bunch of academic publishers, scientific editors and advertising sales staff ate dinner together at the end of a conference. One editor was regaling the table with tales of her previous career as an Avon lady. She lost one of her clients, she said, when she took a swipe at the woman’s budgie with her cosmetics bag. Everyone looked up, amazed. ‘It was coming straight at me,’ she said, by way of explanation. This confident, bright young woman had ornithophobia and was not going to stay in the same room as a free bird.

One of the sales staff was listening with particular interest. ‘I know exactly how you feel,’ he said with feeling. He was afraid of butterflies and moths, and they started discussing the intricacies of the unpleasantness of wing flapping. Suddenly other diners were vying to compare the strength of their fears. His boss chipped in with a fear of heights and a publisher managed both a fear of spiders and of flying.

The conversation unearthed five phobias in four people among the twelve at the table. Doubtless a psychologist could have found more by interviewing us individually – those mentioned were specific and without much stigma attached – but even this tiny straw poll was telling. The phobias discussed so freely in the restaurant were all directed at threats in the natural world.

No scientist would be impressed by the dubious methods of this survey, but the results are surprisingly reproducible. Whenever a group starts talking about phobias, notice the fears people describe. Occasionally someone has a weird phobia of buttons, cotton wool or wallpaper, and if they do this may dominate the conversation. But most people fear a limited range of creatures or situations. They fear spiders, snakes, the dark, open or closed spaces; creatures and situations that pose few real problems in the West today but which could be dangerous if we lived less cosseted lives.

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.