Abstract
How the potential for suicide – intentional, deliberate self-killing – came to evolve in the human species is a puzzle: it seems to defy the Darwinian axiom of natural selection, “survive and reproduce.” Suicide appears to offer the three levers by which natural selection could disfavor the trait: suicide seems almost self-evidently and catastrophically to damage the individual’s reproductive fitness; it is reported to be heritable; and the risk of suicide varies, between individuals and groups. That suicide could have been eliminated by natural selection, but has not, points to the existence of forces that have actively maintained the behavior in the species. Suicide appears universally across the human cultures and is found in no other species, patterns which point to the trait’s ancient origins, probably dating sometime between the dawn of human speciation and the dispersal of modern humans from Africa. A bargaining model of suicide’s evolutionary origins is specifically challenged. The book’s aims, objectives, and methodological issues are discussed.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
“This preservation, during the battle for life, of varieties which possess any advantage in structure, constitution, or instinct, I have called Natural Selection ; and Mr. Herbert Spencer has well expressed the same idea by the Survival of the Fittest. The term ‘natural selection’ is in some respects a bad one, as it seems to imply conscious choice; but this will be disregarded after a little familiarity” (Darwin, 1868, p. 6).
- 3.
E. O. Wilson argues a case for accepting suicide, or rather the mind that can contemplate suicide, as ultimately a biological phenomenon from a philosophical stance at the beginning his book, Sociobiology:
“Camus said that the only serious philosophical question is suicide. That is wrong even in the strict sense intended. The biologist, who is concerned with questions of physiology and evolutionary history, realizes that self-knowledge is constrained and shaped by the emotional control centers in the hypothalamus and limbic system of the brain. These centers flood our consciousness with all the emotions – hate, love, guilt, fear, and others – that are consulted by ethical philosophers who wish to intuit the standards of good and evil. What, then, made the hypothalamus and limbic system? They evolved by natural selection . That simple biological statement must be pursued to explain ethics and ethical philosophers, if not epistemology and epistemologists, at all depths. Self-existence, or the suicide that terminates it, is not the central question of philosophy. The hypothalamic-limbic complex automatically denies such logical reduction by countering it with feelings of guilt and altruism . In this one way the philosopher’s own emotional control centers are wiser than his solipsist consciousness , “knowing” that in evolutionary time the individual organism counts for almost nothing.” (Wilson, 1975, p. 3)
- 4.
This does not mean, as the point can be easily misread, that, say, 43% of suicides are caused by genes but rather that 43% of the deviation from mean suicide risk in the studied population may be heritable.
- 5.
- 6.
Illustrating the scale of the gap between the mortal fitness risk taken in a suicide attempt and the questionable bargain value of its supposed fitness rewards, the latter posited in Syme et al. (2016) include “swayed parents” and, perhaps most oddly, “prevented ear modification.”
- 7.
Symons (1992) draws particular attention to the scope for misunderstanding in the use of word “altruism ” in genetics and sociobiology: “altruism” in these contexts relates entirely to the propagation of genes, whereas such genetic self-interest has nothing to do with altruism in the ordinary sense.
- 8.
Dennett (2013) wishes the word “designoid” was available to describe biological patterns that have every appearance of design but are produced by automatic, blind processes.
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Soper, C.A. (2018). Introduction. In: The Evolution of Suicide. Evolutionary Psychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77300-1_1
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