An Instinct for Dragons | Hacker News Reader

An Instinct for Dragons

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40 pointsbenbreen32 comments

Is the Dragon template really specific enough that we can say it is surprising to have it occur in multiple societies? I kind of expect that when first contact occurred, if there were legends of anything vaguely reptilian or serpentine, the translator would just be like "a... dragon."

It is a fantasy creature anyway, so maybe it was just not translated too carefully.

but why is "big snake" so common? what about big rabbit? or big pigeon?

Because we eat the latter, so we like them.

But fear the former.

At some point there were giant rodent in Australia. But they were probably tasty because they disappeared after we arrived.

Is "big snake" really common?

To me it looks like it is common in places with an abundance of snakes in different sizes, which makes the creation of a fable with "an even bigger snake" as predator quite reasonable.

rabbits or pigeons were not really feared/respected, so a story about them being bigger might not be that memorable...

As for big rabbitm there's some mythology though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_rabbit

Giant Birds exist in a few fables iirc (I don't know why of all possible birds a fable would portrait a giant pigeon, Eagles or Falcons carry more ambiguity and respect I'd say)

>Is "big snake" really common?

Just off the top of my head:

* The European dragon.

* The Middle Eastern wyvern.

* The Chinese dragon and its variants throughout Asia.

* The Mesoamerican feathered serpent (Quetzalcoatl for a chief example).

And I'm sure there are many more.

If you ask me, it's far too coincidental for various unrelated peoples across the entire globe to have fundamentally the same mythical construct.

The concept of a "dragon" is one of the Lowest Common Denominators of humanity, nearly everyone everywhere knows what a "dragon" is (local equivalent term as appropriate), and the mystery behind why that is is simply intriguing.

Is that where the idea of a wyvern comes from?

European dragons come in the more lizard+avian form (more recent), and the older, more serpent-like form (probably descended from ancient mythology going all the way back to the Fertile Crescent). The former isn't really an example of a "big snake" and the latter probably is the common source of lots of serpent like creatures, reducing the coincidence a bit (in the sense that it isn't surprising that myth-makers through history were inspired by each other).

There are already big mammals that people fear and tell tales of: lion, tiger, elephants etc. they were also mythical creature in some of Europe in the medieval period. The addition of a huge reptile seems consistent. There are also big humans (giants), and big sea creatures (leviathan, kraken).

> but why is "big snake" so common?

Well, over 40% of humanity has the Abrahamic religions in its cultural background at this point, and one of the foundational myths there is the evil snake which tempts primordial man, with god cursing man and snake to be eternal enemies. So you have one cultural artifact with a single source (ok, not really, but sort of) accounting for that. And Judaism, Islam and Christianity don't have mythical evil pigeons or rabbits.

Which was probably in part influenced by other mythological early fertile crescent serpents and snakes, further reducing the coincidence.

Those species are too specific, though -- a big pigeon, no. Big birds, yeah. Big rabbit -- not so common. Big mammals? I mean there are mythological versions of wolves, lions, etc. But those do seem to be a different sort of thing (we generally seem to have an easier time telling apart different species of mammal -- I guess because they are more similar and familiar to us).

Snakes do seem a little over-represented. I wouldn't classify the really popular medieval type of dragon that this article seems to be discussing (with the wings and lizard-like body) as a big snake. But there are other big mythological serpents.

Maybe some of it is evolutionary in the sense they discuss (fear of a body-form that threatened previous hominid species). But there were also species of snake that threatened the actual people coming up with those myths, not because they were giant and really fond of eating people, but because they were poisonous and easy to trip over.

Snakes are also a really simple shape. From a distance (like on top of a mountain) a river can look like a giant snake winding across the landscape. A floating log in the waves from just the right perspective could look like a sea-serpent (which would I guess have a tendency to spread, since so much long distance trade was maritime).

Add in a little historical coincidence (the presence of snake-gods in early mythology, like that of Mesopotamia) and it seems plausible to explain this without invoking any pre-homo-sapien memories.

Is it so hard to believe a flying reptile might have existed at one point? In the full tree of life, it doesn't seem incredibly farfetched.

We have many flightless dragon-like animals on earth, and decent evidence of flying reptiles like pterodactyls.

Obviously the fire breathing part sounds a little more fictitious.

It is hard to believe a flying reptile existed, was common enough to have inspired myths about dragons around the world, and yet somehow left behind no physical evidence whatsoever.

Particularly when you consider how many creatures get lumped into the "dragon" taxonomy. Not all of them fly. Some of them fly, but don't have wings. Arguably, not all of them are even reptiles.

Didn't flying reptiles exist? We had pterosaurs at one point. The timing doesn't match current understanding, but there's at least a possibility.

The question is, if evolution covers a reptile in feathers to give it better traits for flying and nature selects smaller specimen as flying consumes alot of energy, how much would a flying reptile actually differ from a bird today...?

Pterosaurs were entirely distinct and evolved flight independently from the Aves lineage, indeed they weren’t even dinosaurs (they were related to dinosaurs via common superclade Archosauria, like modern reptiles and crocodilians). They generated lift with flaps of skin much more similar to bat wings than bird wings. Had they survived the K/Pg extinction, we might indeed have flying reptiles that don’t look much like wings.

Birds are as much "flying reptiles" as pterosaurs. Animals with powered flight on the reptile branch of the tree stop looking like what most people think of as "reptiles". Powered flight requires a high metabolism, a high metabolism leads to insulation (fur, feathers), furry or feathery animals don't get called reptiles (even if they are, phylogenetically speaking).

Pterosaurs almost certainly wouldn't be called reptiles if they existed today.

"...and claims that the common traits of dragons seem to be an amalgam of the principal predators of our ancestral hominids...".

In forested areas of the world, there usually is* at least one very large feline predator which hunts by climbing up onto tree limbs which extend over a trail, then leaping onto unsuspecting prey as it wanders past. Having a "regularly check for danger above you" instinct in such areas could prove quite beneficial.

*Before more-modern humans drove them to, or nearly to, extinction.

Even if fear for some "thing" would be encoded in our DNA, how on Earth would that make us draw images of it? The only good thing about this theory is that I learned about the Dorothy Parker quote.

The Wikipedia article doesn't argue that this fear is encoded in our DNA.

> explains ... why Chinese dragons are considered basically good and representative of government, but the great majority (although not all) European dragons are evil and often represent chaos.

This statement seems to make some underlying assumptions...

1. Government = good (including middle-ages monarchies)

2. The opposite of government (and particularly, existing government) is chaos.

3. It is evil to oppose the government.

I wonder if these assumptions are baked in to dragon myths, or whether they're tacked on retroactively

These assumptions are baked into Confucianism, which along with Buddhism formed the basis of Chinese philosophy and culture. I can't speak to the association between government and dragons specifically beyond the fact that dragons were associated with the Imperial family, in a way that seems to mirror the common motif throughout history of nobility claiming an association with the divine (as Chinese dragons are seen as divine/godlike entities rather than mere creatures.)

Meanwhile, Western philosophy and culture are based on Christianity, in which Satan is depicted as a serpent in Genesis and a dragon in the book of Revelations. Also Greek, Roman and Norse mythologies, each of which heavily influenced Western literary canon, contain dragonlike beings representing primordial chaos, or evil monsters to be slain by the hero, such as Jormugandr and the Lernean Hydra or Typhon.

And there is a common narrative thread with Western mythology called "Chaoskampf," possibly descended from a now lost proto-indo-european mythological root, which involves a storm god or sky god doing battle with and defeating a dragon that represents the primordial order before creation/the current pantheon. Traces of this can even be found in the Old Testament, with God battling and subduing Leviathan.

But if that's the case, then these assumptions are (royal/imperial) government propaganda, with immediate political use. And people who are displeased with the current monarch (all-Chinese or part-of-China, depending on the period) would see the dragon as the disagreeable symbol of a corrupt/unjust ruler, wouldn't they?

I don't know. Do Americans see Christ as the disagreeable symbol of their corrupt and unjust rulers? The intersection of politics, religion and culture is complicated, and calling it all propaganda would probably be too reductionist. According to Wikipedia dragons as a mythological entity likely predate their use as a political symbol[0].

I do know only the Imperial house was allowed to display symbols with a five-clawed dragon. All other dragons depicted anywhere had to have fewer than five fingers. [1]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_dragon

[1]https://scalar.usc.edu/works/exhibiting-historical-art/five-...

I'd say that Arachnophobia (fear of spiders) could be explained in somewhat similar terms. While very few spiders have venom potent enough to be directly lethal to a healthy person...if you do not have modern medical care available, and the bite "only" causes tissue death in a small area, then bacterial infections get established in the dead tissue...the end result will still often be major disability or death.

>> He also notes that it cannot be demonstrated that the fears of ancestral hominids are coded into the human brain

I am pretty used to see harmless European spiders but I still can get an adrenaline burst if one shows up a bit too close. And it is not just surprise, because very few other "insects" cause that reaction. I believe there is a "reflex arc" in our brains for this.

Pretty cool fable by Nick Bostrom: https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon and the animated version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY

which is not really connected to this topic at all, except that word dragon is used in both

Here’s a cool story about dragon hunting: https://bedejournal.blogspot.com/2009/08/dragons-of-swiss-al...

That's pretty interesting, but I'm now wondering if there is another interesting story behind there being someone who feels strongly enough about it to downvote.

After having seen the dragons in the Americas, and how they in some way relate to other parts of the world, I believe that the hypothesis in the book captures part of the story, not sure how much, though.

Too good to spoil so I won't go into any more details, but anyone who's here should read Childhood's End by Arthur C Clarke.

The main question seems to be "are we biased to use certain animals in mythologies, and on top of that to mix and match specific animals?" and the secondary question seems to be "if so, why those animals?" I can imagine the former might be true, but have a hard time seeing how one might prove it. Let alone even try to answer the secondary question.

I mean, sure, we have a bunch of different mythical animal amalgams in various cultures. For the sake of the argument we can assume these cultures came up with their hybrids in isolation (because if not that would already answer our secondary question). Even then it is still possible that by chance they may end up with hybrids that have partially overlapping "source animals". So basically a mythological equivalent of a hash collision (except in reverse: the "input" would be the mythical beast and the "hash" would be the source animals). Then these cultures meet, and the natural thing to do is to use the same word for these mythical creatures because of said hash collision. And looking at how we apply the name "dragon " to various mythical beasts we just needed two out of three or more animals overlap, so our odds of a collision is pretty high.

Then there's the question of why these hash collisions happen. Note that we're already skipping the option of "because a bad hashing algorithm makes it statistically likely".

This book argues it's an "innate evolutionary fear". Innate fears are a very controversial topic within evolutionary psychology. This blog post dissecting another "innate fear of snakes" article[0] does a good job of laying out the issues. Basically, there is a difference between "innate" fear and predisposition to acquire a fear. We only have evidence for the latter: babies, as well as animals raised in a lab, do not have an innate fear of snakes or spiders (or anything really). We look to adults to teach us what is safe and what is dangerous. IIRC we do have some evidence that the predisposition to acquire fear is innate (basically, using doctored footage showing a chimpanzee that appears to freak out at the sight of a flower doesn't succeed in teaching other chimpanzees to be afraid of flowers. It does work for snakes and snake-like shapes). Of course this leads to the question of "why snakes and spiders, but not other predators that our ancestors should have been afraid of?" AFAIK no such predispositions have been shown for the other supposedly common source animals in dragons, and there's lack of spider-like features in these universal "dragons".

So this explanation really comes with a ton of issues - it's a typical "reason backwards from the explanation" thing, a just-so story.

[0] https://neuroanthropology.net/2008/03/07/innate-fear-of-snak...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story

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