>>14167470>>14167471This is a direct quote from that chapter:
"Fear of any particular enemy is certainly an instinctive quality, as may be seen in nestling birds, though it is strengthened by experience, and by the sight of fear of the same enemy in other animals. The fear of man is slowly acquired, as I have elsewhere shown, by the various animals which inhabit desert islands; and we see an instance of this, even in England, in the greater wildness of all our large birds in comparison with our small birds; for the large birds have been most persecuted by man. We may safely attribute the greater wildness of our large birds to this cause; for in uninhabited islands large birds are not more fearful than small; and the magpie, so wary in England, is tame in Norway, as is the hooded crow in Egypt."
The entire chapter is about instinct being just another adaptation that gradually is selected. He explicitly includes fear of enemy animals as an example. I just simplified it by giving the "grand grand grandson" idea. The fear of snakes probably started in primates much earlier than homo sapiens, but you need to be really anally retentive to not understand this from my example.
Just read the chapter. It's not a hard read. You're gonna have to go beyond wikipedia+youtube at some point in your lives.
