# The Lure of Death: Suicide and Human Evolution - Author: **Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences** - Document Note: from the perspective of evolution - Document Tags: [[phylosophical suicide]] - [URL link](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2017.0269)  ## Highlights - psychiatrist, Erwin Stengel has put it: ‘At some stage of evolution man must have discovered that he can kill not only animals and fellow-men but also himself. It can be assumed that life has never since been the same to him’ [[1](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2017.0269#RSTB20170269C1), p. 37]. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hxcka1z89pr6c4wn6g17zy86)) --- - When times were hard, some individuals would have been bound to see death as an attractive option. Yet killing themselves would usually—if not always—have been a maladaptive act. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hxckcamtt41b5z1c6jdwf5bd)) --- - Humans as a species are notoriously imitative. Perhaps, every suicide is at some level a ‘copy-cat suicide’ (which I'll return to later in the paper.) ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hxckek5k49hrrwjfsctkbfyt)) --- - But, now, to go deeper: when you think ‘I can kill myself’, who is this ‘self’ and what do you imagine will result from ‘killing’ it? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hxckey136ncdxren7x57mjgj)) --- - But the most salient change is in the dead person's role as an actor in the physical or social world. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hxckhrk77a1eerqrh105bkha)) --- - Once you are no longer an actor in the public realm, can you no longer be a thinker or feeler in the private one? This is not of course something you or anyone else can discover from direct observation. But it is perhaps something you can deduce from circumstantial evidence. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hxckj9423yn5xt3zmhc3h72j)) --- - True, absence of evidence is not entirely reliable as evidence of absence. But, in fact, you yourself have had plenty of direct experience of your own mind going absent at a time of pseudo-death. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hxckk2vmaf2n5461cy5ea826)) --- - Today no fewer than 1.4% of all deaths worldwide are attributed to suicide, making it the world's leading cause of violent death. Across the world more people—some 800 000 yr−1—die from suicide than all wars and homicides combined. Many more make the attempt. In total, 2.7% of the world's population have tried to take their own lives. Even more plan it. Fourteen per cent, of report, have had suicidal ideation at some stage. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hxcknje05c6tap748m2xgnjq)) --- - Common sense would say that self-killing must be the ultimately disadvantageous act, a sure path to genetic oblivion. But maybe this is wrong. Could suicide be biologically adaptive after all? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hxckpb0qcf7v5z2rnetc58vt)) --- - seem to be two broad classes of suicide, distinguished by their motivation: those concerned with benefiting other humans and those concerned with benefiting primarily the one who dies. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hxcn48j6v1qpv9tws42eaxd2)) --- - ‘altruistic’ and ‘egoistic’ suicide. I want to suggest they can be distinguished at another level: they correspond to the two different conceptions people have of what their death will immediately achieve. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hxcn4s19mef4zgsnx3ggjqdn)) --- - But humans are nonetheless genetically primed with feelings of love and obligation for family and friends. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hxcn6gk78z6sp29x8ywxmsk1)) --- - Across the world the great majority of suicides are egoistical. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hxcn8mweeb339khe15sjzf5q)) --- - suicides are often unplanned and impulsive. A survey of 306 Chinese patients who had been hospitalized following a suicide attempt found that 35% had contemplated suicide for less than 10 min and 54% for less than 2 h ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hxcnd7g6gpmnxeraqezy4jng)) --- - The philosopher Wittgenstein once told a friend that ‘all his life there had hardly been a day in which he had not thought suicide a possibility’ [[14](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2017.0269#RSTB20170269C14), p. 155]. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hxcng05x4g4nckvbzr5bvey6)) --- - George Santayana spoke for too many, when he wrote: ‘That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions' [[16](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2017.0269#RSTB20170269C16)]. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hxcngj7bb21xryxck4z0ez0k)) ---