The Evolution of Ophidiophobia

Eve, the Serpent and Death. Painting by Hans Baldung.

2015 has been an incredible year for snake evolution research with the discovery of the oldest known fossil of the stem-snake line Portugalophis lignites (Caldwell et. al, 2015) and a remarkable paper that details the of the origins of snakes from Yale has found that the ancestor of snakes was a nocturnal snake-like lizard that still retain their hindlegs (Hsiang, et. al, 2015). This stem-snake first appeared around 128 million years ago around the same time that stem-therian mammals were starting to appear as well (Hsiang, et. al, 2015).

Remarkable news indeed, but today I won’t be talking about the evolution or the systematic history of snakes. In fact, I am going to be talking a bit about a different kind of evolution, one that focuses on perhaps the most common and reported phobia that humans have - Ophidiophobia, which a third of the total population of humans have (Isbell, 2009). The causes varies among individuals but it is interesting how some individuals have this phobia, even though they might have not see one in the flesh (Isbell, 2009).

Indeed our instinctive fear of snakes can probably be traced to our primate ancestors beginning around 65 million years ago (Isbell, 2009). Indeed primates are a major food source for some of the larger species of serpents. This natural fear of snakes in our human nature accounts for the various cultural depictions of these animals - the most infamous is the serpent tricks Eve to eat the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden story and untold stories of giant underwater serpents across the globe. The anthropologist David E. Jones had argued that same evolutionary fear of snakes might explain the independent creations of dragons across the globe (Jones, 2002). This orgy of primal fear and human creativity have produced some of the most astonishing works of fantasy.

Now with these two papers out, perhaps our primal fear of snakes goes further in time. Ophidiophobia might have been an ancestral fear in therian mammals. Like these ancestral snakes, the earliest therian mammals were also nocturnal animals. They would have been a nice meal for these stem-snakes, which the root of ophidiophobia appeared as a survival mechanism for mammals. But as mammals begin to diversify and evolved into the various groups we see today ophidiophobia was certainly lost in different groups. We primates were not one of those mammals that have lost our fear and this is how ophidiophobia came to the world.

References

• Hsiang, Y. Allison et. al (2015). The origin of snakes: revealing the ecology, behavior, and evolutionary history of early snakes using genomics, phenomics, and the fossil record. BMC Evolutionary Biology, 15
• Caldwell, M. W., Nydam, R. L., Palci, A., & Apesteguía, S. (2015). The oldest known snakes from the Middle Jurassic-Lower Cretaceous provide insights on snake evolution. Nature communications, 6.
• Isbell, L. A. (2009). The Fruit, The Tree, and the Serpent. Harvard University Press.
• Jones, D. E. (2002). An Instinct for Dragons. Psychology Press.