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Humans have many unique behaviors among animals. For instance, we have a formal language that permits unparalleled communication about things that exist in the past, present, and future. We can be especially jealous and can feel schadenfreude. Yet we share at least one fundamental emotion with many other species: fear. That primordial emotion, as I describe in my latest book, The Nature of Fear, binds us to our past. We are the descendants of a long lineage of successful individuals who got their risk assessments right.
While many evolutionary psychologists focus solely on our hominin ancestors to understand why we act as we do, I suggest that we go much farther back in time and beyond our branch on the tree of life. All animals, past and present, must assess life-threatening predation risks and make decisions to avoid or otherwise manage those risks. It’s a delicate ...
