It’s intuitively obvious to me that suicide served some evolutionary benefit in the past; you don’t get such complex behavior in such predictable clusters without there being a reproductive benefit. As I understand, suicide has three different mechanisms each from different evolutionary pressures.
Negotiation suicide is attempting to get high status by threatening suicide. This is the teen suicide, jilted lover suicide, or ‘cry for help’ suicide. These are usually accompanied by vocal warnings and are generally done in flashy, ineffective manners. This suicide strategy is usually adopted by currently low status individuals who have the potential to be high status in the future (eg teens). The theory is that this form of suicide is a mixed strategy to achieve higher status and allotment of resources by threatening suicide. It has to be mixed strategy because if you never committed suicide you wouldn’t get the increased resources (food/attention/status/etc), but if you always committed suicide you’d kill off the genes that caused it pretty quick. Unfortunately, humans are set to ‘risk’ suicide for status at a rate that used to be helpful 100,000 years ago, and not so much now.
Apoptosis suicide is when people sacrifice themselves so that their genes (children/family/tribe/country) can have better chances of propagation via kin selection. Note that these suicides are rarely preceded by any sort of warning and are usually done in very effective, premeditated manners. The prototypical example would be an elderly blind man with health problems choosing to die-with-dignity, and poisoning himself after having a chance to visit his grandkids one last time. Rates of suicide go up with advanced age and go up with disability. Suicide rates dramatically go up with vision impairment, which was a pretty huge hindrance in hunter-gatherer times.
The last type of suicide is just when something goes wrong in the brain. Drugs, alcohol, etc can cause this (eg Cobain). Brain damage is a cause of suicide as well, like in football players and boxers (eg Jr Seau). Bipolar, schizophrenia, and other mental illnesses also are massive risk factors in suicide, though this may arguably be apoptosis instead. Malfunction suicide could also partially account for some teen suicides, given how wild a ride hormones are.
NB: I’m working off memory of a past LW post that I can’t seem to locate now on the evolutionary basis of depression and suicide, which had the actual cites.
Edit: To more directly address your point, it doesn’t make sense to “say that you are too good for this game and check-out”. This is almost negotiation suicide except you’re using a shitty, losing strategy to do so. You only check-out if there’s an advantage to be gained. It’s effective to credibly threaten to check out if that can secure you more resources with the threat. The only way your brain can credibly threaten is if it’s prepared to actually go all the way and some percentage of people go through with it. However, life is a game you can only win if you keep playing.
Aside from firearms in the US, the big methods of suicide are hanging/strangulation, drowning, poison, and fall from heights. Of these, poisoning and falling seem limited in the EEA depending on where you live. Although I have no idea how common poisonous plants were.
However, given that there existed wild animals, zero medical treatment, low population density, and little rescue capability, I assume that it would be significantly easier to commit suicide back then than today.
That’s the only one of those factors that can kill you directly. Are there any recorded cases of people committing suicide by letting wild animals rip them apart? My guess is that it would take a lot of willpower to overcome one’s fight-or-flight instinct, and I doubt that extremely depressed people have that kind of willpower. (Consider the story in this article about a guy who was unwilling to cross a car-filled street to jump off a bridge, and all the bits about people who realized they didn’t want to die right after beginning the process of committing suicide… to me, this suggests that letting a wild animal slay you would be unlikely to work.)
Cutting/starving oneself seem both more plausible and substantially less deadly. Personally, I suspect that neither was all that common, and desire to kill oneself is a manifestation of an extreme submission move. (Consider that extremely depressed people frequently seem to think they are worthless, no one cares about them, and they have nothing to offer others. If I’m not pulling my weight and I have no friends and everyone in my tribe knows it, it’s hardly a good idea for me to lord it over them and act high status… much better to make it absolutely clear that I know my place.)
Regarding your traffic example, there’s a striking difference in the behavior between young adults who want to signal (and sometimes go through with) committing suicide and older adults who actually want to die.
According to a report released by the American Association of Suicidology1, there are 25 attempts at suicide for every one success.
In young people (aged 15 − 24), the odds are between 100 and 200 to 1 against. The elderly seem a lot more successful at 4:1.
For someone who actually wants to die in the EEA, suicide seems trivially easy. Pick a direction and start walking, if you find water you can drown; if you don’t find water, you’re dead anyways. If you find animals, some of them want to kill you; if you don’t find animals, the environment probably wants to kill you. If you hurt yourself in any way (cutting self, fall from height, eating poisonous food, etc) then you can easily die even if you change your mind and even if somebody can find you (which they won’t if you just walked for a day).
For young adults who want to signal suicide, I imagine things would look relatively similar to modern life (minus guns). Jump off high things, eat a lot of things that ‘should kill you’, self-harm, etc. By a factor of 200:1, the goal of suicide isn’t to succeed, it’s to make a credible threat (and arguably, that 1-in-200 just messes up). You can make that threat just as easily in the EEA. You don’t have to beat your own survival instinct for suicide to be successful, you just have to beat your tribesmates in chicken.
Jumping off a high place in the EEA seems a lot more likely to leave you irreparably handicapped than it is in the present. Possibly eating harmful things as well, depending on what harmful things are available.
It’s intuitively obvious to me that suicide served some evolutionary benefit in the past; you don’t get such complex behavior in such predictable clusters without there being a reproductive benefit. As I understand, suicide has three different mechanisms each from different evolutionary pressures.
1) Negotiation suicide
2) Apoptosis suicide
3) Malfunction suicide
Negotiation suicide is attempting to get high status by threatening suicide. This is the teen suicide, jilted lover suicide, or ‘cry for help’ suicide. These are usually accompanied by vocal warnings and are generally done in flashy, ineffective manners. This suicide strategy is usually adopted by currently low status individuals who have the potential to be high status in the future (eg teens). The theory is that this form of suicide is a mixed strategy to achieve higher status and allotment of resources by threatening suicide. It has to be mixed strategy because if you never committed suicide you wouldn’t get the increased resources (food/attention/status/etc), but if you always committed suicide you’d kill off the genes that caused it pretty quick. Unfortunately, humans are set to ‘risk’ suicide for status at a rate that used to be helpful 100,000 years ago, and not so much now.
Apoptosis suicide is when people sacrifice themselves so that their genes (children/family/tribe/country) can have better chances of propagation via kin selection. Note that these suicides are rarely preceded by any sort of warning and are usually done in very effective, premeditated manners. The prototypical example would be an elderly blind man with health problems choosing to die-with-dignity, and poisoning himself after having a chance to visit his grandkids one last time. Rates of suicide go up with advanced age and go up with disability. Suicide rates dramatically go up with vision impairment, which was a pretty huge hindrance in hunter-gatherer times.
The last type of suicide is just when something goes wrong in the brain. Drugs, alcohol, etc can cause this (eg Cobain). Brain damage is a cause of suicide as well, like in football players and boxers (eg Jr Seau). Bipolar, schizophrenia, and other mental illnesses also are massive risk factors in suicide, though this may arguably be apoptosis instead. Malfunction suicide could also partially account for some teen suicides, given how wild a ride hormones are.
NB: I’m working off memory of a past LW post that I can’t seem to locate now on the evolutionary basis of depression and suicide, which had the actual cites.
Edit: To more directly address your point, it doesn’t make sense to “say that you are too good for this game and check-out”. This is almost negotiation suicide except you’re using a shitty, losing strategy to do so. You only check-out if there’s an advantage to be gained. It’s effective to credibly threaten to check out if that can secure you more resources with the threat. The only way your brain can credibly threaten is if it’s prepared to actually go all the way and some percentage of people go through with it. However, life is a game you can only win if you keep playing.
Were there really suicide methods easily available in the EEA?
Aside from firearms in the US, the big methods of suicide are hanging/strangulation, drowning, poison, and fall from heights. Of these, poisoning and falling seem limited in the EEA depending on where you live. Although I have no idea how common poisonous plants were.
However, given that there existed wild animals, zero medical treatment, low population density, and little rescue capability, I assume that it would be significantly easier to commit suicide back then than today.
That’s the only one of those factors that can kill you directly. Are there any recorded cases of people committing suicide by letting wild animals rip them apart? My guess is that it would take a lot of willpower to overcome one’s fight-or-flight instinct, and I doubt that extremely depressed people have that kind of willpower. (Consider the story in this article about a guy who was unwilling to cross a car-filled street to jump off a bridge, and all the bits about people who realized they didn’t want to die right after beginning the process of committing suicide… to me, this suggests that letting a wild animal slay you would be unlikely to work.)
Cutting/starving oneself seem both more plausible and substantially less deadly. Personally, I suspect that neither was all that common, and desire to kill oneself is a manifestation of an extreme submission move. (Consider that extremely depressed people frequently seem to think they are worthless, no one cares about them, and they have nothing to offer others. If I’m not pulling my weight and I have no friends and everyone in my tribe knows it, it’s hardly a good idea for me to lord it over them and act high status… much better to make it absolutely clear that I know my place.)
Regarding your traffic example, there’s a striking difference in the behavior between young adults who want to signal (and sometimes go through with) committing suicide and older adults who actually want to die.
For someone who actually wants to die in the EEA, suicide seems trivially easy. Pick a direction and start walking, if you find water you can drown; if you don’t find water, you’re dead anyways. If you find animals, some of them want to kill you; if you don’t find animals, the environment probably wants to kill you. If you hurt yourself in any way (cutting self, fall from height, eating poisonous food, etc) then you can easily die even if you change your mind and even if somebody can find you (which they won’t if you just walked for a day).
For young adults who want to signal suicide, I imagine things would look relatively similar to modern life (minus guns). Jump off high things, eat a lot of things that ‘should kill you’, self-harm, etc. By a factor of 200:1, the goal of suicide isn’t to succeed, it’s to make a credible threat (and arguably, that 1-in-200 just messes up). You can make that threat just as easily in the EEA. You don’t have to beat your own survival instinct for suicide to be successful, you just have to beat your tribesmates in chicken.
Jumping off a high place in the EEA seems a lot more likely to leave you irreparably handicapped than it is in the present. Possibly eating harmful things as well, depending on what harmful things are available.