The Evolution of life worth living
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491_9781838343903
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Why do most of us enjoy being alive? Psychologist Dr C A Soper argues that a zest for life evolved as a survival necessity, ultimately because our species, and ours alone, has to live with the possibility of suicide. Suicide may have been our ancestors most formative evolutionary problem, solutions to which have shaped the construction of the human mind and touch on almost every aspect of our day-to-day experience. The emergence of anti-suicide defences by natural selection may explain our capacity for optimism, faith, love, charity and other delights of being human. This book explains how the most pleasing features of our psychology arise from the darkest of possibilities.Life worth living is thus traced to the evolution of suicide. A major cause of human mortality, suicide takes the lives of some million people around the world each year. The origins of the behaviour have long mystified science; despite more than a century of enquiry, science does not know why some people kill themselves, while most people dont. Progress in suicidology has been blocked, by what Soper sees as a fundamental flaw in the fields leading paradigm - the idea that suicides happen because of some, as yet unknown, predictable process of cause and effect. A new paradigm is offered, based on evolutionary science. Suicide is reframed as an evolutionary puzzle: how is that natural selection created an animal with the capacity to wilfully kill itself? The cost is extreme; measured by biological outcomes, suicide is literally a fate worse than death. Two existing evolutionary theories of suicide are critiqued and found wanting: a burdensomeness and a communication hypothesis. The behaviour is better understood, says Soper, as an unfortunate side effect of two adaptations that come together uniquely in our species. One is the aversive experience of pain, especially psychological pain - an ancient stimulus that is designed precisely to induce the animal to act to end it.
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