Conrad Montell
Pinker titles a section of How the Mind Works, “The
Smell of Fear”, in which he lists ancient and still
common fears: snakes and spiders, and “large carni-
vores, darkness, blood, strangers, confinement, deep
water ... The common thread is obvious. These are
the situations that put our evolutionary ancestors in
danger. Fear is the emotion that motivated our an-
cestors to cope with the dangers they were likely to
face” (Pinker 1997, p386). In this he lumps human
fears with those of other animals. He does not distin-
guish “of mice and men”, of that human apprehen-
sion put forward in Robert Burns poem To a Mouse;
“The present only toucheth thee; But och! I back-
ward cast my e’e, On prospects drear! An’ forward,
tho’ I canna see, I guess an’ fear!” Pinker does not
mention apprehensions: fear of future sickness or
future death, fears not based on current dangers. He
speaks of phobias, many of which, he suggests, we
share with other animals. “The world is a dangerous
place, but our ancestors could not spend their lives
cowering in caves” (Pinker 1997, p388). True. But
shouldn’t an overview of how the mind works in-
clude human apprehensions?
Fear of eventual death, fear of dangers not in the
workable environment, fears which could only be
offset by imagined sources of protection, these fears
only can be disadvantageous and potentially debili-
tating to the individuals lacking imagination. There
is nothing “right” that they can do under those cir-
cumstance, but there is much they can do that is
wrong for their survival. There are innate functional
properties of the phenomenon of fear which evolu-
tion delivers ready made; “the individual must ac-
cept them as he must the form of his cranial bones.
actively avoiding or fleeing from dangers offers the
individual better prospects of survival than passivity.
It does, however, also contain the possibility of do-
ing the wrong thing” (Leyhausen 1973, p250). The
functional properties of human fear, of course, were
and are highly complex in nature, and beyond the
scope of this paper. One large topic, untouched here,
is the relationship between fear and aggression
(Becker 1973; Leyhausen 1973). However, it does
seem reasonable to conclude that for the hominid
lacking imagination, fear of an unavoidable danger,
would surely increase the possibility of his doing the
wrong thing—which, in the instance of a devitaliz-
ing fear, would include doing nothing in a situation
that calls for action.
There have been some five million generations
in the evolution of primates, increasingly aware of
themselves as prey, and developing neurological
structures to increase their security. Consider Homo
sapiens, late in that stage of evolution, when, super-
imposed on those structures for security, there de-
veloped apprehensions, an awareness of mortality
and an awareness of themselves as a kind of prey for
which there seemed no way to increase security.
Without the power of imagination, such awareness,
I suggest, would be an impediment. Individuals en-
cumbered with fears for which precautions could
not be taken would be less successful. I suggest that
an individual with such apprehension would be
more hesitant in hunting big game, and less willing
to take the necessary risks. The individual begin-
ning with such fear would be less fit in making a
living. The hunter who starts out hungry but appre-
hensive would tend to be less successful than one
who starts out merely hungry. In the aggregate, en-
tire tribes of such hungry but fearful hunters would
tend to be less successful. What adaptation could
be developed in response to such fear? Who would
now be fittest to survive? Natural selection might
favor “lesser-brained” individuals who, still secure
in their ignorance, lacked awareness of impending
death. Instead, a genetic spark might somehow ap-
pear, natural selection might somehow “stumble
upon” a brain companion of sorts: a device or pro-
cess whose function would be to hunt out, via im-
ages, ways and means of mitigating the debilitating
fear.
The Language of Imagination
Symbolic language ability would undoubtedly be a
necessary part of in this new kind of “hunting”.
Utilitarian communication, complex calls and ges-
tures for use in hunting, most likely long predated
this stage of evolution (Donald 1991; Mithen
1996). With awareness of mortality, the task for
newly developing thought and language would be
to make death livable, to formulate mitigating con-
ceptions around death that would become the pre-
cursors to magic and religion and also to imagina-
tive stories. These would be impossible tasks for
communication systems based on calls and ges-
tures (Deacon 1997). Via imagination, perception
of the external world could be altered. Via stored
images and symbolic expression of thought, appre-
hension of death could be ameliorated (Hocart
1954). What better way to spend countless genera-
tions of long cold nights, countless winters of dis-
content, than around the warmth of the communal
fire, struggling to discover ways to make the newly
experienced fears bearable? Perhaps there was
something within the body that did not die. Per-
Evolution and Cognition ∣ 15 ∣ 2002, Vol. 8, No. 1