Natural Selection in Progress

[Lithp]

I kill Daddy Longlegs on principle. They are disgusting, useless, & constantly make their way inside my house. Also, I once saw one humping a raspberry.

Otherwise, I'm pretty meh on spiders unless they reach a certain size or proximity to me. But I do not agree that they are useful. They leave the corpses of their victims hanging all over the damn place.

[Valerius]

Wow. Some of the comments  in this thread regarding bugs and animals that the posters encounter actually make me glad I live this far north. The worst I have to deal with is the occasional wasp that flies a little too close for comfort when I'm sitting still for any period of time, but they never do anything so they're pretty easy to just ignore.

Some people are just afraid of some things.  No rationality behind them. Could be some deep seated connection their brain subconsciously makes.   Just ...phobias.  *Shrugs*
Fear from ignorance is what irks me.

That's actually the case. It's known as "Preparedness Theory." It basically means that way back in our evolutionary past, we encountered a lot of dangerous things like poisonous animals (snakes, spiders, things like that) so the individuals whose brains developed in such a way that they learned things like "Stay the hell away from this scary-looking snake!" a lot faster than others tended to survive and reproduce more. Over generations, this became hardwired into our brains so that we learned these things faster than other things. In people who have irrationally strong phobias of, for example, harmless insects that look vaguely like the dangerous, poisonous ones, it's this evolutionary preparedness misfiring and overgeneralizing.

[SpaceProg]

Sounds right to me, anyway.  Makes sense.  Another example of natural selection.

[PosthumanHeresy]

Agreed. Evolutionary Psychology does have some fucking horrible applications, but here, it's right.

[Leafy]

I kill Daddy Longlegs on principle. They are disgusting, useless, & constantly make their way inside my house. Also, I once saw one humping a raspberry.

Otherwise, I'm pretty meh on spiders unless they reach a certain size or proximity to me. But I do not agree that they are useful. They leave the corpses of their victims hanging all over the damn place.

Wut.

So long as I know they're not dangerous and they stay well away from me, I've no problems with spiders.  Hell, they're downright helpful.

Yeah, if they're up in the corner of a room, I don't care. I'm too lazy to kill those ones. Any on objects or the floor are doomed.

Same here, other than black widows.

*shivers*

[PosthumanHeresy]

I kill Daddy Longlegs on principle. They are disgusting, useless, & constantly make their way inside my house. Also, I once saw one humping a raspberry.

Otherwise, I'm pretty meh on spiders unless they reach a certain size or proximity to me. But I do not agree that they are useful. They leave the corpses of their victims hanging all over the damn place.

Wut.

So long as I know they're not dangerous and they stay well away from me, I've no problems with spiders.  Hell, they're downright helpful.

Yeah, if they're up in the corner of a room, I don't care. I'm too lazy to kill those ones. Any on objects or the floor are doomed.

Same here, other than black widows.

*shivers*

Yeah. Those bitches get vacuumed.

[Valerius]

Agreed. Evolutionary Psychology does have some fucking horrible applications, but here, it's right.

I'm curious; what are these "horrible applications" you're thinking of?

[Sigmaleph]

A fair bit of evolutionary psychology involves people postulating adaptive hypotheses for things that are a) clearly cultural* or b) have very weak selection pressures, in order to justify their prejudices. Also a quite a lot of sexism and occasional racism.

I've seen a number of people completely dismiss most evolutionary psychology because of this (notably, PZ Myers). While I wouldn't go that far, it's true that it's a quite abused field.

*Someone proposed that women like pink because it helped them find berries, completely ignoring the fact that there's zero evidence that 'pink is a girl colour' is biologically hardwired and it is a relatively modern development in Western culture.

[Valerius]

That makes sense.

[SpaceProg]

Indeed.  Especially since way back when blue was the color for girls.

[PosthumanHeresy]

Exactly that. It can be used for racism and sexism, but if you focus solely on the reasonable stuff, it's good. It's one thing to go "Humans evolved to be scared of X, causing phobias" and another to try to make all black people violent because of evolution.