Sorry for the multiple comments, but I have separate points to make, and I think this makes it easier to make them clear.
There are basically two kinds of ev-psych explanations: one proposing an evolutionary origin for a present-day trait (an explanation) and one proposing a previously unknown trait based on evolutionary considerations (a prediction).
I think this is confused. Ev. psych explanations also generally make predictions which (if empirically validated) provide evidence that the ev. Psych explanation is the correct one.
One example of this is the evolutionary explanation of suicide generated by Denys de Catanzaro. He generated ev. psych explanations that led to a much stronger understanding of what causes people to commit suicide and why so many more men than women kill themselves.
This can be misleading. More women than men attempt suicide, but male deaths outstrip female due to method lethality—men are more likely to go out with a gun, women more likely to sign out with twin bottles of vodka and vikoden. This could be because more men Really Do Want To Kill Themselves For Real, as opposed to a cry for help, or it could just be that men are far more likely to own a gun and women more likely to have a painkiller addiction.
What is true is that, if diagnosed rates of depression are accurate, a depressed man is more likely to commit suicide than a depressed woman, because more women than men are diagnosed with depression. This might be due to differential rates of hormone production (I wouldn’t be able to tell you what, and since any social factors leading to depression are going to end up using hormonal mechanisms as well, the cause of it would be difficult to ascertain), but whether or not that’s there men are almost certainly underdiagnosed, since they’re less likely to seek out help for mood disorders. It’s a very thorny question.
Other factors—I’ve heard that women are apt to prefer poison over gunshot because of strong socialization to not leave a mess. I don’t have substantiation for this, but it doesn’t sound crazy.
I’ve also heard that depression manifests differently in men (more likely to appear as violence and/or alcoholism) and not get diagnosed.
De Catanzaro (sorry, my misspelling) developed a theory that suicide occurs in people who have low estimates of their ability to contribute to their own genetic fitness. So he looked at various factors that specifically contribute to lower genetic fitness, such as believing you are a burden to family, being homosexual (that surprised me), being a virgin, not having had sex in a year, and not having had sex in a month.
The survey questions he created had very high correlations with suicidal ideation and suicidal action. At least some of his predictions were apparently novel.
Separately, this evolutionary explanation for suicide also offers a possible explanation for why men commit suicide so much more often—they are much more likely to fail at heterosexual mating. Once you account for the mating difference, the difference almost disappears.
This is a nice example of the slipperiness I sometimes notice when I think about how one could test an ev. psych hypothesis. My first thought after reading your comment was ‘but won’t all those factors be just as correlated with unhappiness and depression as with genetic fitness? Surely there’s a less complex explanation here: unhappy people don’t like living as much, so they try killing themselves more.’
Then I thought a little more and realized that could also have an ev. psych basis: maybe we evolved to kill ourselves more when we’re unhappy with life. But that’s a different ev. psych argument than ‘we evolved to kill ourselves more when we have low genetic fitness.’ Or is it? Maybe we evolved to kill ourselves more when we’re unhappy because unhappiness correlates with low genetic fitness? What would it even mean in concrete terms for all of these possible evolutionary explanations to be false?
maybe we evolved to kill ourselves more when we’re unhappy with life.
I’ve noticed that psychological descriptions of suicidal depression involve not just crushing unhappiness in general, but also isolation. Is it possible that suicide evolved as a society-level equivalent to the cellular mechanism of apoptosis? A tribe whose least productive, least connected members voluntarily wander away to self-terminate might have a significant competitive advantage in terms of food production per member, without the runaway perverse-incentive stuff Enron got caught in.
This isn’t just a group-selection thing, either. Given that you’re going to be providing preferential treatment to your close relatives anyway, having a genetic predisposition for suicide means that such intrafamilial charity is less likely to be wasted on hopeless causes, since the hopeless ones don’t stick around.
Assuming that this sort of study is accurate, it backs the idea that people get emotionally entangled with each other. A General Theory of Love builds on the observation that human babies can die of loneliness to observe that many animal species and humans in particular need social contact for metabolic regulation. (Is this a Far line of thought, or what?)
In other words, even a not-very-promising member of a tribe may still be supplying non-obvious metabolic regulation services.
I’m guessing that people who live in tribes just don’t get nearly as isolated as can happen in civilization. Anyone have actual knowledge about this? Stats on suicide among hunter-gatherers?
I’m guessing that people who live in tribes just don’t get nearly as isolated as can happen in civilization. Anyone have actual knowledge about this? Stats on suicide among hunter-gatherers?
I don’t know anything about hunter-gatherers, but suicide rates among industrialized nations correlate very highly with rates of single-person households. There aren’t many social indicators on which Sweden does worse than Italy, but suicide is one of them.
The problem with the corelation with homosexuality is that homosexuals are frequently up against violent prejudice, though less so in recent years. Being bullied can cause longterm psychological damage.
I know someone who endured really bad depression for a long time [1], and it’s plausible that the major reason she didn’t commit suicide was that she had a child.
Did deCatanzaro [2] look at whether whether people actually have children? Whether abandoning children has a high correlation with suicidality? Admittedly, it would be hard to tease out the causality in the latter.
[1] She was being treated for depression. What she actually has is Bipolar 2 (bipolar with so little mania that it’s hard to notice), which is metabolically quite different from straight depression—the right meds made a huge difference.
[2] That’s how it’s spelled on his website [3]-- there’s no space between the e and the C.
[3] I think of the web + google as the larger part of my brain.
The problem with the corelation with homosexuality is that homosexuals are frequently up against violent prejudice, though less so in recent years.
Suicide rates for gay teens have been dropping like a rock for the past two decades (though they remain above the heterosexual rate.) Homophobia is still awful but it’s one of the most obvious ways in which the world is getting better.
Sorry for the multiple comments, but I have separate points to make, and I think this makes it easier to make them clear.
I think this is confused. Ev. psych explanations also generally make predictions which (if empirically validated) provide evidence that the ev. Psych explanation is the correct one.
One example of this is the evolutionary explanation of suicide generated by Denys de Catanzaro. He generated ev. psych explanations that led to a much stronger understanding of what causes people to commit suicide and why so many more men than women kill themselves.
(Edited to fix spelling)
This can be misleading. More women than men attempt suicide, but male deaths outstrip female due to method lethality—men are more likely to go out with a gun, women more likely to sign out with twin bottles of vodka and vikoden. This could be because more men Really Do Want To Kill Themselves For Real, as opposed to a cry for help, or it could just be that men are far more likely to own a gun and women more likely to have a painkiller addiction.
What is true is that, if diagnosed rates of depression are accurate, a depressed man is more likely to commit suicide than a depressed woman, because more women than men are diagnosed with depression. This might be due to differential rates of hormone production (I wouldn’t be able to tell you what, and since any social factors leading to depression are going to end up using hormonal mechanisms as well, the cause of it would be difficult to ascertain), but whether or not that’s there men are almost certainly underdiagnosed, since they’re less likely to seek out help for mood disorders. It’s a very thorny question.
Other factors—I’ve heard that women are apt to prefer poison over gunshot because of strong socialization to not leave a mess. I don’t have substantiation for this, but it doesn’t sound crazy.
I’ve also heard that depression manifests differently in men (more likely to appear as violence and/or alcoholism) and not get diagnosed.
What’s Denys deCatananzaro’s explanation?
De Catanzaro (sorry, my misspelling) developed a theory that suicide occurs in people who have low estimates of their ability to contribute to their own genetic fitness. So he looked at various factors that specifically contribute to lower genetic fitness, such as believing you are a burden to family, being homosexual (that surprised me), being a virgin, not having had sex in a year, and not having had sex in a month.
The survey questions he created had very high correlations with suicidal ideation and suicidal action. At least some of his predictions were apparently novel.
Separately, this evolutionary explanation for suicide also offers a possible explanation for why men commit suicide so much more often—they are much more likely to fail at heterosexual mating. Once you account for the mating difference, the difference almost disappears.
This is a nice example of the slipperiness I sometimes notice when I think about how one could test an ev. psych hypothesis. My first thought after reading your comment was ‘but won’t all those factors be just as correlated with unhappiness and depression as with genetic fitness? Surely there’s a less complex explanation here: unhappy people don’t like living as much, so they try killing themselves more.’
Then I thought a little more and realized that could also have an ev. psych basis: maybe we evolved to kill ourselves more when we’re unhappy with life. But that’s a different ev. psych argument than ‘we evolved to kill ourselves more when we have low genetic fitness.’ Or is it? Maybe we evolved to kill ourselves more when we’re unhappy because unhappiness correlates with low genetic fitness? What would it even mean in concrete terms for all of these possible evolutionary explanations to be false?
I’ve noticed that psychological descriptions of suicidal depression involve not just crushing unhappiness in general, but also isolation. Is it possible that suicide evolved as a society-level equivalent to the cellular mechanism of apoptosis? A tribe whose least productive, least connected members voluntarily wander away to self-terminate might have a significant competitive advantage in terms of food production per member, without the runaway perverse-incentive stuff Enron got caught in.
This isn’t just a group-selection thing, either. Given that you’re going to be providing preferential treatment to your close relatives anyway, having a genetic predisposition for suicide means that such intrafamilial charity is less likely to be wasted on hopeless causes, since the hopeless ones don’t stick around.
Having a family member who commits suicide increases the risk of suicide.
Assuming that this sort of study is accurate, it backs the idea that people get emotionally entangled with each other. A General Theory of Love builds on the observation that human babies can die of loneliness to observe that many animal species and humans in particular need social contact for metabolic regulation. (Is this a Far line of thought, or what?)
In other words, even a not-very-promising member of a tribe may still be supplying non-obvious metabolic regulation services.
I’m guessing that people who live in tribes just don’t get nearly as isolated as can happen in civilization. Anyone have actual knowledge about this? Stats on suicide among hunter-gatherers?
I don’t know anything about hunter-gatherers, but suicide rates among industrialized nations correlate very highly with rates of single-person households. There aren’t many social indicators on which Sweden does worse than Italy, but suicide is one of them.
Also, are we evolved to abuse people with possibly low genetic fitness? To create low genetic fitness if it gives us a genetic fitness advantage?
Interesting.
The problem with the corelation with homosexuality is that homosexuals are frequently up against violent prejudice, though less so in recent years. Being bullied can cause longterm psychological damage.
I know someone who endured really bad depression for a long time [1], and it’s plausible that the major reason she didn’t commit suicide was that she had a child.
Did deCatanzaro [2] look at whether whether people actually have children? Whether abandoning children has a high correlation with suicidality? Admittedly, it would be hard to tease out the causality in the latter.
[1] She was being treated for depression. What she actually has is Bipolar 2 (bipolar with so little mania that it’s hard to notice), which is metabolically quite different from straight depression—the right meds made a huge difference.
[2] That’s how it’s spelled on his website [3]-- there’s no space between the e and the C.
[3] I think of the web + google as the larger part of my brain.
Suicide rates for gay teens have been dropping like a rock for the past two decades (though they remain above the heterosexual rate.) Homophobia is still awful but it’s one of the most obvious ways in which the world is getting better.
If the rates are changing dramatically wouldn’t this imply they are not mainly caused by genetic components?
DeCatanzaro did look at the effect of not having children, which was significantly correlated with suicide.