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Overriding Instinct

by
Scope Correspondent
Jurassic Park: The Ride was introduced to Universal Studios Hollywood as an adrenaline-junkie innovator. Based on the popular film, passengers were paraded through the forest-themed scenes in a large, yellow water raft, modeled on the film’s ill-fated Jeeps. Twisting past spitting dinosaurs through dark tunnels bedecked as an office, the raft narrowly avoids collisions while voiceovers alert of an immediate evacuation of Jurassic Park. An attacking Tyrannosaurus Rex swoops in to attack the raft as a terrified voice yells, “It’s in the building!” The only escape is a plunge, free-fall, down 84 feet.

In 1997, the ride’s ideal patron took the form of my ten- and twelve-year-old Californian cousins and, by extension, their foolish Minnesotan ally. A nine-year-old sucker, my sole ambitions were Advanced Math class and snowpants without shoulder straps. I was a sitting duck.

Standing in front of the gates of the ride, watching crying children and drenched adults exit from the other side, I was frozen in fear when presented with a ticket. Blame electrical activity in the lateral amygdala. Blame early ancestors’ cultivation of impulses. Blame too much ice cream after lunch.

Somehow the chump—the pushover—was forced onto a raft and strapped in for five-and-a-half minutes of terror. The cousins, courage embodied, left me silent and gaping at their terrible bravery. (I wondered: early exposure to R-rated movies? Genetic disposition? Living over a decade near a tectonic plate fault?) I was incapable and unarmed, turned silent before their jeers.

I had sweaty palms. Rapid heartbeat. Accelerated breathing. Physiological adaptations to terror.

Fear activates the brain’s limbic system, a complex orchestra, evolved in reptiles and mammals that needed such circuitry to decide to fight or flee. Helping conduct this chaotic symphony of shuffling hormones are the almond-shaped amygdalae, hidden near the base of the brain. Prompting these clusters of cells with a rabid dog or a dust storm cloud causes a swelling crescendo of immediate responses. Chemicals flood the brain, tag-teaming receptors that transform their signals into a repeating canon of physical adaptations. Heart rate doubles, contractions pumping harder, blood pressure soars.

The feedback loop is a monstrous glutton: the mind stimulates the body to stimulate the mind to conjure the headline, “Freak Accident Claims Life of Child Tourist.”

This intricate chain is no accident; it is preordained. As Michael Davis of Yale University wrote in 1992, “Complex fear behaviors … were hard wired during evolution.” Fear joins a family of customized bodily devices. Just as without cough there can be pneumonia and without vomit there can be poison, without fear there can be death. Fear is essential to a species’ survival.

They say we fear public speaking because we fear social rejection. We fear dark because we fear predators. We fear heights because we were made to fall. It is an evolutionary advantage: we are the product of our forbearers, hunter-gatherers’ whose fears spared them from starvation, fatal weather, and uncharted cliffs. Instinctive fear answered the question, “Will I eat you, or will you eat me?”

We are survival machines, fine-tuned and carefully calibrated to interpret and respond to threats. Carved by natural selection, fear is nothing more than an intricately hewn response pattern. Darwin’s discovery harassed our ancestors, reminding us that a loss of reproductive resources—whether life, reputation, or property—could mean our end. Fear’s conservation through the deviating branches of the evolutionary tree indicates what we instinctively know: it is a “universal survival strategy.”

Yet, for all fear’s good intentions, society could care less for the deliberate, careful precision of adaptation. It is the fearless who are our most powerful. (Or is it the most powerful who must be fearless?) The Ancient Greeks considered courage one of their four cardinal virtues, and the Romans included it as part of their universal virtus. Today’s bleacher parents cheer from half-court, prompting sons and daughters, “Don’t be afraid,” and we elected a president who would most famously tell us that, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

So we learned to eliminate it. We taught rats to be fearless through behavioral training. After conditioning them to associate a bell with an electrical shock, we can (somewhat maniacally) reverse it. If enough bells toll without a trailing zap, the rats’ fear responses, usually freezing, will disappear. We call this “extinction”—the fear has been lost to the advancement of experience and time.

My cousins high-fived and grinned as the raft climbed the mechanical hill. The pronounced whirring and clanking left me anxious and sweaty. Homo sapiens’ survival instincts, the very ones that had brought me to the park, standing upright, opposable thumbs and all, had betrayed me. Eighty-five million years of meticulous hardwiring had shaped me into a very tall chicken.

The wet leather of the seat pressed against my neck, an unpleasant reminder of how this ride was to end. In an inescapable position, I closed my eyes and imagined the tough armor I imagined lined their gut. To be brave, I thought, was to be invincible.

Why do we place such a reverence on those without fear?

Perhaps because we know that organisms have always been victims of their environments, but we want to believe we’re different by jumping in Lake Michigan amidst the January frost. We want to think we can shape our own path, that evolutionary destiny will not dictate what we will and will not do. I’ve been led to believe that a life fully-lived, fully-experienced, inexorably plundered from birth to last breath, is a life of risks and falls. But to take such risks, to live such a life, requires backdoor negotiations with that vestigial fear. To survive requires fear. To live, we think, requires a freedom from it.

Or perhaps society deserves more credit: it simply figured the instinct to fear was less important than the instinct to have courage. While fear is motivated by the gut, courage is motivated by the social surroundings. Courage may have ensured our population would survive by increasing our insatiable appetite to conquer those around us. Evolutionary experts postulate bravery brought great wealth to those in early societies—more mates for the men and more resources for the women. My lineages may have swooned over the valor of its fighters and revered the agricultural divas that protected their tracts of land. By asserting their dominance over others, they ensured their genes would go on. But the buck stops here: all signs indicate I would have made an abysmal tribal hunter-gatherer.

This desire to pass on genes has shaped human society into a fickle being. The sliding scale between competing evolutionary traits is no zero-sum game—even the courageous must exercise caution. We ask you to be modest, but insist you assert your dominance. Be suspicious of motives but trust those around you. It’s microevolution within the macro scale. These traits we’ve adapted become predictors of reproduction; the winning combination is the mate we like the most. We may like bravery more than we like fear, but somewhere the scales will tip in my favor. What about the organized? The calm? The optimistic? We’re a weird one, our species, but our procreative-driven desires have worked out so far.

I wasn’t thinking about sexual selection as the feeling of weightlessness overcame me. All thoughts of social hierarchy or street cred were erased as my hands clutched the bar and my stomach clutched my lunch. The raft slipped down the water-sluiced slope, and my silence was louder than anyone else’s scream. My cousins, now grown into charismatic leaders, are grinning in the souvenir photo. I am the weird one, looking away from the camera with my jaw clamped tightly shut. Staring at the photo I can remember the swooping feeling, how my knees approached my chest and I counted, three Mississippi.

Touching ground, the body’s wobbly legs were balanced by the mind’s victorious parade. Confetti ribbons of adrenaline unraveled and floated through my system. I was thrust a shirt that read, “I Survived Jurassic Park: The Ride.” Size medium, I demanded, feeling bigger than myself. Without the imminent threat of death, a sense of power overcame me: bring it evolution, my scale is tipping toward brave. I knew I wasn’t a warrior, but perhaps, with a few more rides, I could be a rat.

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