LONDON: Researchers have revealed that the fear of spiders aka arachnophobia is a finely tuned survival instinct that is tuned into our DNA.
According to the researchers of Columbia University in New York, arachnophobia – which affects around 4 per cent of people globally – is something that became an evolutionary necessity and it is a direct result of the powerful threat that spiders in Africa presented to our survival while humans were evolving.
To test how quickly people could pick out a spider even when dealing with a range of other visual stimuli, Joshua New of Columbia University in New York and his colleague Tamsin German asked 252 people to study computer screens containing abstract shapes and data. They introduced images known to induce disgust or fear, such as needles and flies.
They found spiders were spotted fast, even if their shape was distorted.
“A number of spider species with potent, vertebrate-specific venoms populated Africa long before hominoids and have co-existed there for tens of millions of years,” said New as quoted by The Sunday Times.
“Humans were at perennial, unpredictable and significant risk of encountering highly venomous spiders in their ancestral environments.
