The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain

by Daniel Gardner

One bit of very old wiring is sometimes called the Law of Similarity. In the late nineteenth century, anthropologists noticed that traditional cultures assumed that causes resembled their effects. The Zande people of Africa, for example, believed that ringworm was caused by fowl excrement because fowl excrement looks like ringworm. In European folk medicine, foxes were felt to have great stamina and so their lungs were used to treat asthma, while Chinese folk medicine treated eyesight ailments with ground-up bat eyes because it was (quite wrongly) believed that bats had superior eyesight. The fact that this same assumption—like causes like—could be found in culture after culture, all over the world, is a very strong indication that it has biological origins. The Law of Similarity comes in an even more basic form: Appearance equals reality. If it looks like a lion, it is a lion. Or, to put it in the modern vernacular, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. That may seem more like common sense than ancient wiring, but it is quite ancient. And it’s not always so sensible.