Suicide as a By-Product of “Pain and Brain”

Abstract

“Suicidality most likely evolved as an unfortunate side effect of two important primary adaptations in the human species, “pain and brain”: the aversive emotional experience of pain, which is biologically designed to aid self-preservation by motivating adaptive escape action, combined with a cognitive sophistication that offers most mature humans the means to escape pain maladaptively by self-killing. Suicide may thus be categorized alongside other major fitness costs of human cognition and encephalization, such as obstetric complications arising from the parturition of large-skulled infants and the necessity for human young to remain dependent on carers for many years while the brain develops, adaptive problems of such severity that they drove the natural selection of complex physiological and behavioral solutions to control their costs. Equally, the notion of suicidality as a costly by-product implies that countermeasures would expectably have evolved to prevent mature humans from using self-extinction to escape from pain. Inferences are made concerning the likely timing of the emergence of these countermeasures during human prehistory.” (Soper, 2018, Chapter Summary)