Long but worth it

[spooky_nine]

Is killing yourself adaptive? That depends: An evolutionary theory about suicide

An excerpt:

In fact, a scientific understanding of suicide is useful not only for vulnerable gay teens, but for anyone ever finding themselves in conditions favoring suicide. I say “favoring suicide” because there is convincing work—all tracing back to McMaster University’s Denys deCatanzaro’s largely forgotten ideas from the early 1980s—indicating that human suicide is an adaptive behavioral strategy that becomes increasingly likely to occur whenever there is a perfect storm of social, ecological, developmental and biological variables factoring into the evolutionary equation. In short, deCatanzaro has posited that human brains are designed by natural selection in such a way as to encourage us to end our own lives when facing certain conditions, because this was best for our suicidal ancestors’ overall genetic interests.

For good-hearted humanitarians, it may sound rather bizarre, perhaps even borderline insensitive, to hear that suicide is “adaptive.” But remember that this word means a very different thing in evolutionary terms than it does when used in clinical settings. Because natural selection operates only on phenotypes, not human values, even the darkest of human emotions may be adaptive if they motivated gene-enhancing behavioral decisions. It’s not that evolution is cruel, but as a mindless mechanism it can neither care nor not care about particular individuals; selection, after all, is not driven by an actual brain harboring any feelings about, well, anything at all. In no case does this sobering fact come into sharper focus than with the case of adaptive suicide. (I notice a similar reactionary confusion, incidentally, among “New Atheists” who bleat and huff in a Dawkinsian manner whenever they hear mention of the empirically demonstrable fact that religion is adaptive, something I’ll save for another day.)

You can read the full article at the source.