I saw that interesting video too. I remember being taught that humans are instinctively afraid of snakes (and spiders, heights and strangers) but that wasn't consistently true.
I was told that the link between Satan and snakes in the Bible was related to being evil and cursed or whatever. Snakes were cursed to crawl on their belly and eat dust (my dachshund does that too!) because of the snake's role in the Fall. It's all so dumb. The Bible has done much damage to how we view animals, IMO.
A healthy respect for the defense and survival mechanisms of all plants and animals needs to be learned. Nature can be so brutal, hidden in beauty.
Your mileage will vary with babies. Most of them will put anything in their mouth. My kids seemed afraid of different things when they were babies. There are a lot of cues the baby learns from others apparently. Infant developmental psychology must be an interesting profession.
> I remember being > taught that humans are instinctively afraid of > snakes (and spiders, heights and strangers) but > that wasn't consistently true.
There's also a temporal dynamic at work. Fear of those things usually does not manifest until 6-9 months of age--and that is true of monkeys and apes as well as humans.
Studies have found, moreover, that it is relatively easy for an infantile human or a monkey to develop a fear of those four categories of entity than of other stimuli.
What this suggests is that there is a hard-wired propensity to develop those fears but that experience and observation of adult sensitivities influence their emergence and extent.
As for Soft Machine's affection for snakes, well, that's between him and his (hopefully non-Freudian) therapist.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/06/2025 08:25PM by Lot's Wife.