Anna,
If you’re talking about real dragons, the theory that made the most intuitive sense to me (I think I read it in an E.O. Wilson writing?) is that dragons are an amalgamation of things we’ve been naturally selected to biologically fear: snakes and birds of prey (I think rats may have also been part of the list). Dragons don’t incorporate an element of them that looks like a handgun or a piping hot electric stove, probably because they’re too new as threats for us to be naturally selected to fear things with those properties.
Anna, If you’re talking about real dragons, the theory that made the most intuitive sense to me (I think I read it in an E.O. Wilson writing?) is that dragons are an amalgamation of things we’ve been naturally selected to biologically fear: snakes and birds of prey (I think rats may have also been part of the list). Dragons don’t incorporate an element of them that looks like a handgun or a piping hot electric stove, probably because they’re too new as threats for us to be naturally selected to fear things with those properties.