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| quote: | Originally posted by Aortik
Arachnophobia, for example, is a learned behaviour - mostly irrational fear - but try to condition somebody out of it. It's possible, but deeply ingrained fears and prejudices are not things easily purged through logic, despite surmounting evidence to their utter irrationality.
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From what I have understood about "irrational fears" (such as Arachnophobia,) it is a result of Evolutionary Lag:
To restate the summary principle of evolutionary biology, "Genetic mutations that enhance one's likelihood to live long enough to reproduce become adaptations." The best estimates are that it takes a minimum of fifty thousand years for an adaptation to show up in the human genome. This is called evolutionary lag -- the time lag between when an adaptation first appears in a small proportion of individuals and when it becomes widely distributed in the population.
From what I gather, we are innately programmed to fear spiders/heights/etc. as in many cases, these things can be life threatening. As we have become more knowledgeable and technologically more advanced, these things do not pose as large of a threat as they once did. As a result, the fear begins to dissipate and the programming is lost, but in some, the innate fear remains aka evolutionary lag.
P.S. I am no expert on the subject, but this is how I understood it.
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