Evolutionary explanations for suicide as behavior in humans:>Proposition A: Suicide as an evolved adaptatioThe capacity for self-killing itself was selected because it sometimes increased genetic fitness of the group.Observable in cells - cancer is partially the resolt of a cell failing to kill itself when it should."I am a burden to my kin" is rational behavior and might help your genes in others - brothers, sisters, children, have better outcomes once you aren't around to weight them down.This makes sense for severally ill or injured people, who are past productive and reproductive physical state, and require extensive care or otherwise consume scarce resources.>Proposition B: Suicide as a malfunction in social signalingIf you are signalling that you need help, and your signals are ignored, an attempted suicide is a last ditch effort.This would explain why most suicide attempts fail - the goal isn't death, the goal is for others to notice you need help and help you.Sometimes this strategy fails, and you actually die - this would make suicide a failed attempt at a cry for help.Also makes rational sense.>Proposition C: Suicide as the intelligent person abusing an escape mechanismHumans have many mechanisms for escaping physical and mental pain, and suicide might be such a system.An intelligent, rational mind might conclude that death is a way out of suffering. This is using the evolutionarily advantageous urge to escape pain, and the evolutionarily advantageous intelligence and reasoning systems, to come to an evolutionarily bad outcome. However, both those systems are useful enough that they persist, and therefore this buggy behavior remains.Any other ideas?
>>18653910>The capacity for self-killing itself was selected because it sometimes increased genetic fitness of the group.There are actually two propositions here:>Individuals' survival was a net negative to the group often enough to evolve a solution>Suicide is exactly that evolutionary solutionThere are dozens of uses for infertile weak stupid individuals in a group. And if they require extensive care, then suicide wasn't evolutionally necessary, they would die when a crisis was approaching anyway. I would argue it would be risky to implement the suicide solution because then the fitness of the entire group is in the hands of its least fit member and his obedience to his evolutional drives. The other two options seem to make sense.
Evolution does not need to explain every emergent property lol.
>>18654196suicide is behavior, not property, and evolution needs to explain why such behavior emerged and wasn't selected against
I think its because you can't move around as much.If you are locked in your group and can't fuck off, find a new place and try and start over. You might be more willing to pull the trigger.But isn't suicide in such big numbers a modern day issue? Like back then, you could die from random bullshit and you had God to cope with.
>>18654318romans and greeks seem to have killed themsleves all the time over suffering or indignitieschristianity put as top on european suicides, by making it a crime and a sin
>>18653927You are right for the most part. The suicide described in that case would be more like "i will kill myself so you dont need to kill me", but of course such a person could just be abandoned, which equals murder more or less.Dropping Proposition A also leaves us with PB and PC, which are more human-centric, and won't apply to other animals.
>>18654333Maybe, but wasn't this a more upper class thing to kill yourself over?Like how mainly samurai would cut their belly open and kill themselves for x or y, in Japan?It seems its a more predisposed thing to upper and higher classes, not the lower classes.But its not like I have the data to back it up.
>>18654339The surviving records are records of what upper class people did. So yes, suicides we know of were of upper class people.Absence of evience is not evidence of absence, of course. Maybe the poors did it as often, or more, and nobody cared to write it down.
Most suicide victims are white male virgins (chuds/incels). That is the vast majority of suicide victims.Evolution is all about removing genes that do not reproduce and suicide assist in that. One of the features promoted by evolution is literally sex appeal lol.
