Do rational fears exist?

[paulpablo]

Do rational fears exist, or are they all irrational?

For example, I say that it is silly to fear plane crashes, while others would call it normal and logical and suffer from that fear, despite the extremely low number of plane crashes/plane malfunctions that occur around the world each year.

I think whenever a fear isn't rational its a phobia, technically, as for every single fear out there whether or not they are rational is a difficult question because there's a vast spectrum of fears.
The fear of plane crashes is illogical but it's completely logical that we would have these fears as part of the evolution of our brain.
It's only been in the last hundred years or so mankind has been able to fly though the air at such high speeds in what is basically a metal container blasted from one continent to another so our brains still aren't used to the fact that is safe.

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This thread is FUCKING fascinating by the way. I love stuff that involves evolution of the brain. You were talking about spiders and snakes and how this fear could easily be irrational because we see spiders on a day to day basis that aren't dangerous. But for millions of years spiders and snakes were deadly to us as a species.
I was listening to an audio book recently that talked about this exact same sort of thing but it was about why women sometimes seem to like guys who are very bad for them, something to do with the fact that for millions of years the best guy for them to breed with was always the most aggressive male, and even though some aggressive traits are logically seen as bad, the female brain still reacts positively to some things that are logically bad but that their brain has evolved to see as good . The audio book also mentioned something about how birds do this same sort of thing, even if they have been bred on an island without birds of prey they still have it evolved in their brains to recognize and be afraid of birds of prey.
So again i would say SOME fears are illogical but it's still logical as to why we would have these fears. And some which obviously aren't logical at all which are called phobias, when guys are deadly afraid of drain pipes or whatever.