ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2022
As soon as there was life, there was danger: the deep history of survival behaviours and the shallower history of consciousness.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The effect of emotional arousal on visual attentional performance: a systematic review.Psychological research · 2024Pooled it
- Effectiveness of Multidisciplinary Rehabilitation in Chronic Low Back Pain: A Pragmatic Study With a Waiting List Control Group.European journal of pain (London, England) · 2026Trial
- Sensory maps in the telencephalic pallium of goldfish.Brain structure & function · 2026Article
- Consciousness, subjectivity, and aging in western thought.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Review
- Qualia as control-theoretic constructs for autonomous agents: event phase space as an action-oriented semantic safety layer.Frontiers in robotics and AI · 2026Article
- What the functions of consciousness are depends on what one thinks consciousness is.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Consciousness at sea.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Loudness and Sound Category: Their Distinct Roles in Shaping Perceptual and Physiological Responses to Soundscapes.eNeuro · 2025Article
- Trait anxiety is associated with reduced reward-related replay at rest.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Article
- Extending insights from LeDoux: using movies to study subjective, clinically meaningful experiences in neuroscience.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Comparative Physiology and Morphology of BLA-Projecting NBM/SI Cholinergic Neurons in Mouse and Macaque.The Journal of comparative neurology · 2024Article
- Aligning consciousness science and U.S. funding agency priorities.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Comparative physiology and morphology of BLA-projecting NBM/SI cholinergic neurons in mouse and macaque.Research square · 2024Article
- Metacognition as a window into subjective affective experience.Psychiatry and clinical neurosciences · 2024Review
- Visual looming is a primitive for human emotion.iScience · 2024Article
- Threat Memory in the Sensory Cortex: Insights from Olfaction.The Neuroscientist : a review journal bringing neurobiology, neurology and psychiatry · 2024Review
- The Human Affectome.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2024Review
- The risks of unconcern: low sensitivity to threat can have unfortunate consequences.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Neural correlates of recalled sadness, joy, and fear states: a source reconstruction EEG study.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
It is often said that fear is a universal innate emotion that we humans have inherited from our mammalian ancestors by virtue of having inherited conserved features of their nervous systems. Contrary to this common sense-based scientific point of view, I have argued that what we have inherited from our mammalian ancestors, and they from their distal vertebrate ancestors, and they from their chordate ancestors, and so forth, is not a fear circuit. It is, instead, a defensive survival circuit that detects threats, and in response, initiates defensive survival behaviours and supporting physiological adjustments. Seen in this light, the defensive survival circuits of humans and other mammals can be conceptualized as manifestations of an ancient survival function-the ability to detect danger and respond to it-that may in fact predate animals and their nervous systems, and perhaps may go back to the beginning of life. Fear, on the other hand, from my perspective, is a product of cortical cognitive circuits. This conception is not just of academic interest. It also has practical implications, offering clues as to why efforts to treat problems related to fear and anxiety are not more effective, and what might make them better. This article is part of the theme issue 'Systems neuroscience through the lens of evolutionary theory'.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.