ESPN Hunting

``She said, 'I don't like spiders and snakes,

And that ain't what it takes to love me,

You fool, you fool' ...

When country-western artist Jim Stafford wrote those lyrics in 1973, he was playing off the old story of an immature boy trying to interest a girl by showing her creepy-crawlies.

But he was also tapping into an ancient human dread — the fear of snakes and spiders — which lives on today in such films as ``Snakes on a Plane'' and ``Arachnophobia'' and explains why snakes and spiders are the top two creature phobias in the psychological landscape.

But is this horror of cobras and tarantulas something we have learned, or something we're born with?

The answer seems to be both.

Infant research being done at Carnegie Mellon University suggests that babies are born with a tendency to pay more attention to the shapes of snakes and spiders than to other kinds of creatures, but that they don't fear them until an adult teaches them to.

Carnegie Mellon's Infant Cognition Laboratory is headed by Dr. David Rakison, a British-born psychologist who uses innovative techniques to figure out how and when babies learn about the world around them.

For his work on snakes and spiders, Rakison has done two experiments so far.

With 11-month-olds, he has shown that they tend to group spiders and snakes together, suggesting that babies put them in the same mental category.

And with 5-month-olds, he has shown they pay more attention to simple drawings of spiders on a video screen than they do to scrambled versions of the same picture, implying they have an inborn orientation toward the creatures. He's about to extend that experiment to shapes of snakes.

Since neither group of babies can talk, Rakison gauges their perceptions by having student assistants track how long they look at images on a video screen.

Even though the babies pay special attention to spiders and snakes, they do not innately fear them, Rakison said.

``If you put a baby in a tank with a snake,'' he said, ``they would show no fear whatsoever.''

Instead, babies seem to have a ``perceptual template'' for the creatures that primes them to be scared of them once they see an adult showing such fear.

All of this could be rooted in our evolutionary history, Rakison said, and could even explain why we might fear spiders and snakes more than lions and cheetahs, for instance.

``It's thought our ancestors spent a great deal of time on the savannas in Africa, so you could see lions coming from a distance,'' he said.

``Spiders and snakes tend to be hidden from view, though, and you tend to see them close up. Our ancestors, particularly the women, spent a lot of time gathering food, on their knees with their infant close by, so you can imagine you're picking plants out of the ground and all of a sudden there's a snake or a spider right there.''

Rakison's baby studies build on earlier work with monkeys done by Susan Mineka at Northwestern University.

She showed that monkeys reared in a laboratory did not exhibit any fear of snakes until they were shown a picture of a wild monkey reacting fearfully to the reptiles.

She also demonstrated that when the lab monkeys watched videos of the scared monkeys in conjunction with pictures of flowers and rabbits, they didn't acquire the same kind of fear of those objects, suggesting that primates' brains are wired to react more strongly to snakes.

Not everyone buys this theory. Isabelle Blanchette, a researcher at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, has shown that adults react just as strongly to images of such modern-day threats as guns and syringes as they do to snake and spider pictures.

When it comes to phobias, said Martin Antony, a phobia expert at Ryerson University in Toronto, the social ones — fear of public speaking and meeting new people, or performance anxiety — are the most prevalent, affecting about 12 percent of the population.

In fact, some surveys show the fear of speaking in public is greater than the fear of dying, which reminded him of a Jerry Seinfeld monologue where ``he said that means if you're at a funeral, you'd rather be in the casket than delivering the eulogy.''

Phobias of creatures afflict 5 percent to 7 percent of the population, Dr. Antony said, and Rakison said that three to four times as many women as men have a spider phobia.

But snakes are the No. 1 phobia creature, Rakison said, and Antony surmised that may have as much to do with their slithering movement as with their appearance.