You may know this is the Year of the Dragon. Not attentive to the Chinese zodiac, I wasn’t aware of it until a couple of weeks ago. Now old memories surface. Savoring dragon imagery in North American Chinatowns. Playing Dungeons and Dragons with old-fashioned graph paper and pencil. Watching dragonflies hover above the pond, and dragon kites soar into the sky. Singing “Puff, the Magic Dragon” by the campfire. Reading tales of King Arthur, son of Uther Pendragon.

In general, a dragon (from Greek drakon and Latin draco, “large serpent”) is a giant, mythical reptile with long sharp claws and fangs, four legs, a long tail, often with wings and horns and fiery breath. Comprising all the traits of great predators built onto an enormous serpent, it was powerful enough to give protection (as in China and Wales), threaten enemies (as on the bow of Viking ships), or devastate the countryside until slain by Saint George or some other valiant hero.

The puzzle about dragons, to me, is why such similar scaled beasts took shape in so many disconnected parts of the globe—including places that don’t have crocodiles, iguanas, or traces of Tyrannosaurus Rex. There are theories but no consensus. One that intrigues me lies in the human genome. Although people of many lands faced more danger from bears than snakes, the opposite was true in Africa where their early ancestors evolved. Fear of snakes (and spiders, and heights) promoted survival. Like monkeys, humans are born with an instinctive fear of snakes. Small wonder such fear became the basis for fantastical super-predators around the world.

​Images (all cropped): (left) Aztec era stone sculpture of feathered serpent, National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City; (middle) Drawing from original gypsum bas-relief, from beside door in Babylonian temple, now in British Museum; (right) Carving on choir stalls in Chester Cathedral, England, 1380.

Age-old tradition treats reason and emotion as opposites. Whether in balance or in tension, they get paired with other dualisms: masculine and feminine, sun and moon, yang and yin, sophisticated and primitive, left brain and right brain. René Descartes famously wrote, “I think, therefore I am.” But if you only think, without also feeling, decisions are impossible. Logic may explain how to pursue a goal, but it can’t discern which goal to pursue. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio says, “It is emotion that allows you to mark things as good, bad, or indifferent.”

Damasio calls emotions an integrated set of rapid bodily changes that evolved for survival in response to danger or opportunity. In front of a charging tiger or truck, our bodies prepare to fight or flee. Our muscles tense, our pulse and blood pressure rise, our pupils dilate, our breath becomes rapid, all before our brains can formulate that we’re afraid. Later, as time allows, we can reason whether the danger is real or whether a reward is worth the risk.

“Life is not a series of calculus problems. Life is about movement,” New York Times columnist David Brooks writes. “Emotions guide the navigation system.” To teach children the alphabet but ignore story characters’ motives misses the boat. To estimate potential based on test scores alone is to overlook emotional judgment. To build a machine that processes data a zillion times faster than humans doesn’t mean it will replace us. To pit reason against feeling is self-defeating. We need both, working in tandem.

​Images: Symbols of reason and emotion.