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^ They may have deleted the DNA coding where fear responses are programmed into the mind. Their brains may not know to interpret fear as what we define as fear as a result.
Risk-taking behavior is already known to be heavily influenced by genes in humans (that can be determined by comparisons of identical twins adopted and raised separately). That's just the flip side of fear. So yeah, you could genetically engineer humans to be excessively fearful or fearless. Gregariousness is another heavily genetically influenced trait, and I'll bet there are lots of others.
"People have thought mice are fearful of cats because cats prey on them, but that's not the case," Kim said.
This article must be from the scientific journal DUH. Have the researchers never noticed that mice also run away from them? Yet humans don't hunt mice for food. When my kitties bring me live mice as presents, the little ingrates run away from me, even though I'm trying to rescue them. Dolts.
Here's an even simpler example: ever been scuba diving? Approach a shoal of fish, and they flee. Why? They've probably never seen a scuba diver before. They just have an instinct to flee anything big that's moving towards them. There are many species whose brains are so rudimentary that they couldn't survive if they had to "learn" to flee predators (and no, they aren't all in TNZ) rather than having it hard-wired from birth. Didn't the scientists consider all the species that are left to fend for themselves from birth and don't have parents to learn from in the first place? Why should it be surprising that mammals haven't shucked the instincts that allowed their brainless ancestors to survive?
^ Yeah, ditto. But, finding and proving the mechanism is still illuminating, and helps us to realize that we're on autopilot some of the time in our responses to adversity.