Vsauce!
Kevin here.
Fighting an inflatable dragon with a plastic sword.
Which is all you can do with a dragon.
They’re fairy tale foes in the west.
But for some reason, the dragon image has existed all over the world since the dawn
of civilization.
So is the dragon just a fantasy cliché, or does it help explain our evolution, embody
our oldest fears, and unite all of humanity?
And when old maps marked unexplored territories with, “Here be dragons.”
Well...where be dragons?
Everywhere.
South America, Central America, North America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia - the dragon
is a universal ancient concept.
Long before legends of English knights besting maiden-devouring, fire-breathing dragons,
the Aztec worshipped Quetzalcoatl, a feathered serpent sky dragon god of wisdom and life.
And the ancient Greek serpent dragon Ladon was trusted with guarding immortality-granting
golden apples until he was defeated by the demigod Heracles.
Ladon, like many dragons, was very snake-y.
Wait, why are dragons and snakes so closely related?
To get to our imagination’s ultimate predator, we have to start with the first persistent
predator of our evolution.
Molecular Phylogeneticists who study DNA to date organisms, date like time not date like...y'know...
believe that our earliest placental mammal ancestors began flourishing within 400,000
years of dinosaur extinction about 65.5 million years ago.
But snakes basically as we know them today were around 100 million years ago.
They had about 20 million years of alone time eating placental mammals before predatory
birds joined the party, and had another 2 million before the first carnivorous mammals
evolved.
Snakes had been eating every iteration of our evolving ancestors for millions of years
- so by the time homo sapiens evolved and developed language, we were talking about
our oldest arch-enemy -- snakes.
In what’s considered the oldest known great piece of literature, Mesopotamia’s Epic
Of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh’s immortality is stolen by a snake.
A snake makes him mortal.
The Abrahamic origin story says that a serpent convinced Eve to eat forbidden fruit from
the tree of knowledge of good and evil by promising that, “her eyes would be opened.”
She and Adam were subsequently banished from an immortal paradise, but the mortal threat
of snakes might have literally helped our eyes.
The Snake Detection Hypothesis suggests that visual systems of primates evolved to detect
dangerous animals - primarily venomous snakes.
In The Fruit, The Tree, And The Serpent, anthropologist Lynne Isbell explains the hypothesis like
this: Snakes evolved to be difficult to see and mortally dangerous.
They coil their camouflaged bodies and remain motionless until they attack.
Surviving the peril of snakes for millions of years required selective pressure favoring
primates’ specialized visual systems.
And compared to other mammals, the pulvinar region of the brain, which helps visually
detect relevant objects, is disproportionately large in primates and humans.
Studies from different international labs have detailed the ability of humans’ enhanced
visual relay system to recognize snakes.
And this sight is preconscious.
Blindsight, which lets even those with cortical blindness respond to visual stimuli without
knowingly perceiving it, allows us to detect snakes and react without being consciously
aware of them.
Basically, we can notice and react to a snake without having to think, “There is a snake,
I’d better watch out!”
Or like explorer Percy Fawcett wrote after dodging the attack of a bushmaster, “I had
not seen it until it flashed between my legs, but the ‘inner man’ - if I can call it
that - not only saw it in time, but judged its striking height and distance exactly,
and issued commands to the body accordingly!”
Fawcett’s “inner man” was confirmed by a 1993 study on “Conditioned electrodermal
responses to masked fear-relevant stimuli.”
Not very catchy.
Consistent with the hypothesis, the lemurs of Madagascar, an early branch of primates
living on an isolated island off the coast of Africa with no venomous snakes, do not
fear snakes and have poor vision.
Armed with the vision to detect them, we quickly learn to fear snakes.
Ophidiophobia, or a fear of snakes, is one of the most common and intense phobias in
the world.
In The Dragons Of Eden, Carl Sagan notes dream studies in which almost half of the people
surveyed reported dreams about snakes.
And while modern psychologists’ studies show neither human infants nor monkeys raised
in captivity inherently fear snakes, studies of fear association showed both are prepared
to learn.
Lab monkeys showing no initial fear response were conditioned to fear live as well as toy
snakes after viewing videos of wild monkeys demonstrating a fear response to snakes.
Researchers were unable to condition the monkeys to fear non-threatening stimuli like flowers
or toy rabbits.
We notice and fear snakes as part of a co-evolution arms race for survival that eventually led
to us telling legendary stories of our origins amongst serpents.
Skeptics of the Snake Detection Hypothesis would like to see more data, like studies
done with primates reacting not just to snakes, but to other primate predators like leopards
and eagles.
And in any case, dragons don’t just look like snakes, dragons have legs, they can fly
and they have a mouth full of ferocious sharp teeth.
Dragons are more like a snake mixed with a leopard and an…eagle.
The three predators monkeys are screaming about.
When Anthropologist David Jones studied howler monkeys, he noticed they use three distinct
alarm signals that lead to specific instinctive safety actions.
One call alerts the group to a snake and they stand up on their hind legs to look at the
ground and then climb to safety in the tops of trees.
Another call identifies a hunting bird or raptor and monkeys abandon the trees, hit
the ground and take cover in bushes.
Finally, a call for a leopard or large carnivoran causes them to run into the trees and out
onto the thinnest branches that can’t support heavier meat-eating mammals.
In An Instinct For Dragons, Jones writes that the dragon is a composite creature of the
three major predators of primates -- serpent, carnivore and raptor.
He believes combining them into one monster is a natural indexing mechanism performed
by the brain to consolidate a message.
That message is to recognize, beware, and honor what Georgess McHargue called in her
1968 book The Beasts Of Never, “the oldest, the first, and the most basic monster.”
McHargue was right.
The Epic Of Gilgamesh not only mentions dragons but featured the demigod Humbaba, whose dragon-like
characteristics included the head of a lion, the claws of a vulture, a body covered in
thorny scales, and a tail that ended in a snake’s head.
Also, a phallus that ended in a snake’s head.
Phallus means weiner.
Conquering or harnessing the power of this symbol of nature’s chaos granted the hero
the power to create order.
Chinese emperors are said to be descended from dragons, and adorned their kingdoms with
dragon imagery.
In the East, civilizations were created with the blessing of dragons.
In the West, civilizations drew power from tales of defeating them.
But something weird happened to dragons in Western culture over the last hundred years
- these manifestations of evil that needed to be vanquished to secure our future became
friends with our future.
Dragons became playmates for children.
The Reluctant Dragon, written by Kenneth Grahame in 1898, was the first popular western story
in which a dragon is a sympathetic character.
It tells the tale of a bookworm child who befriends and defends a peaceful, poetry-loving
dragon from the stubborn, ideological local villagers who believe all dragons must be
destroyed as tradition demands.
The valiant dragon slayer of legend, St. George, is summoned to kill the dragon but the child
successfully convinces the knight to spare his harmless friend.
To appease the blood-thirsty villagers, they stage a fake battle in which George innocently
pierces a fold of skin on the dragon’s neck.
George then parades the dragon through town and declares he is no longer a threat.
The knight, the child and the dragon walk away peacefully, hand-in-hand into the night.
Peter Green wrote in a 1959 biography of Grahame that he grew up in the countryside of Berkshire
during a time so simple kids entertained themselves by playing games like “push the heavy log.”
As an adult, Grahame was reluctantly forced into banking in the booming city of London
after being unable to afford his dream of going to Oxford University.
At the height of uncontrolled development of manufacturing during the industrial revolution,
the whimsy and serenity of Grahame’s rural youth contrasted starkly with the rigid responsibilities
of banking in polluted, urban 19th century London.
The Reluctant Dragon represents the inner turmoil Grahame felt between his creative,
artistic self -- the dragon -- and his dutiful, banker self embodied by the fabled dragon
slayer St. George.
In the end, the knight, the child and the dragon make peace with one another at a time
when Grahame reconciled with his own struggle between being an artist and being a prominent
member of The Establishment.
The first friendly dragon story is a negotiation between the rigid control of modern humanity
and the anarchist entropy of nature brokered by the precocious innocence of adolescence.
The dawn of modern science and human advancement required a compromise between our past and
our future.
We became friends with an enemy we had fought for time immemorial.
An enemy who represents time immemorial.
The ouroboros, a serpent or dragon eating its own tail, symbolizes the infinite cycle
of nature -- creation from destruction.
A fundamental truth recorded by the earliest civilizations.
Life and death eternal.
Today, we don’t need dragons.
Not like we used to.
The millions-year war is over and we’re still here.
Living and breathing the fire of curiosity and courage.
Instinctively exploring the deepest, darkest, depths of the unknown.
And overcoming the impossibly powerful enemy guarding the most valuable treasures imaginable.
Using our minds to detect problems and invent ways to conquer challenges.
It’s how we evolve.
But into what?
Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche warned, “He who fights too long against dragons becomes
a dragon himself...”
Devoid of the monsters that strengthened us for this moment, we’re left with the power
to decide.
“Am I the knight?
Am I the child?
Or am I the dragon?”
And as always - thanks for watching.
Don't you know?
You were brave with a free-talking mind and a voice that is still a cry for life.
And no matter what we want, we want to be loved.
Yes we were here.
We were afraid.
We paid them for the right to commit our own ego suicide.
But I believe it's just a ride.