““While there is substantial evidence that specific phobias—particularly those based on fears that would have been adaptive in the state of nature, like phobias of heights or snakes or rodents—are genetically transmittable, or “evolutionarily conserved,” isn’t it just as plausible, if not more so, to conclude that I learned to be fearful by watching my mother be fearful? Or that the generally unsettled nature of my childhood psychological environment—my mother’s constant anxious buzzing, my father’s alcoholic absence, the unhappy tumult of their marriage that would end in divorce—produced in me a comparably unsettled sensibility? Or that my mother’s paranoia and panic while pregnant with me produced such hormonal Sturm und Drang in the womb that I was doomed to be born nervous? Research suggests that mothers who suffer stress while pregnant are more likely to produce anxious children.””
