Read Online Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters by Matt Kaplan - Free Book Online

Chimera. Regardless of where and when the monster was first imagined, it is not hard to envision the discoverers of a tar pit fossil spreading word of a terrible creature with a goat’s body, a lion’s head, and a snake for a tail.
    The possibility of Chimera having arisen in the eastern Mediterranean is further supported by Homer, who specifically states that the monster dwelt in Lycia, a region distinctly outside ancient Greece. It would be wonderful—not to mention a tremendous boon to the tar pit argument—if Lycia contained tar pits full of fossilized predators, but Lycia does not have any oil or tar pits. Lycia does have interesting geologic features that are worth noting, though. Both Homer and Hesiod say that Chimera had the ability to breathe fire. Homer specifically describes it as “snorting out the breath of the terrible flame.” Intriguingly, Lycia is one of a few places where natural gas slowly leaks out of Earth’s crust to the surface. Today, people light this gas and, because there is a limitless supply seeping out from below, the flame never goes out. Before human mastery of fire, people would have been unable to light this gas, but a single wildfire in the area resulting from a lightning strike, could have changed that in a hurry. Once lit in such a way, the flames would have kept on burning, leadingthose who discovered them to wonder what could cause fire, with seemingly no source, to burn for such a long time.
    For traders and travelers coming from communities along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, Lycia was on the way to Greece. Grains, copper, iron, dates, and wine all migrated along Greek and Phoenician trade routes that started where Israel and Syria are today and hugged the southern Turkish coastline. Some traders would have undoubtedly stopped for rest and resupply in Lycia. Did those who saw strange mixtures of bones in stinking blackened petroleum-filled rocks in the Middle East make a connection with the stench of burning petroleum gas at Lycia and bring the two elements together in the form of the fire-breathing Chimera? The possibility is a tantalizing one. Certainly the initial discovery of strange-looking bones and flames leaping out of the earth all on their own must have scared the hell out of people. The ingredients were there for the birth of a monster, but there is even more to fear in the creature when deeply seated psychological tendencies are taken into consideration.
Monstrous mélange
    At its core, Chimera is an aberration, a creature that deviates from normal biology in an extreme way. Make no mistake, it likely arose from fears of the unexplainable features that people were finding in the natural world, but it endured because these natural observations led to the imagining of something quite horrible. Chimera’s weird blend of animals made it a vile sight to behold, and science is now suggesting that humans may be hardwired to react negatively to its alien body structure.
    A topic of frequent discussion among researchers who study human mate selection and health is symmetry. A number of studies over the years have explored how people view others with perfectly symmetrical faces and faces that are somewhat asymmetrical. It turns out that people associate symmetrical faces with increasedhealth and are more attracted to them. In contrast, asymmetrical features are seen negatively.
    Growths that make one part of the face become deformed, mutations that cause people to develop six fingers on one hand, wounds, jagged scars, and malformed spines that cause one shoulder to become significantly higher or lower than the other are all, sadly, viewed with various levels of distaste. The evolutionary reasons for this are widely thought to be associated with fitness. Like all animals, humans are driven to reproduce with partners who will help them have lots of healthy children. If a potential partner has numerous scars and/or malformations, these could be associated with poor