Lio by Mark Tatulli for October 18, 2014

Fear of spiders and snakes is a survival instinct, because both of those things are aggressive, bite, and many are poisonous, some lethally so. A human child (or adult) who just happily walks up to spiders and snakes and tries to play with them would probably not live very long in more primitive times, and sometimes even today. Thus, the instinctive fear evolved.