Darwin’s wastebasket: The evolutionary purpose of suicidal behaviour
| February 11, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Evolutionary psychology, Intelligent Design |
From Matthew Hutson at Nautilus:
The second strategic model of suicidality is the bargaining model, which relies on the notion of “costly signaling.”6 A colorful example of costly signaling is the peacock. Managing a big, eye-catching tail is costly, in that it wastes energy and draws predators. But the fitter a peacock, the less costly a big tail, and so big tails have evolved to signal genetic fitness to peahens. They are attractive not despite their costliness but because of it. In addition to communicating fitness, costly signals can also communicate need. Consider baby birds. They don’t need to chirp for food if their mother is right there, and chirping attracts predators, making it costly. But the more hungry or sickly a chick is, the less it has to lose by being eaten, and the more it has to gain by being fed. So chirping louder is an honest signal of greater need for food, and the mother responds. (Anthropologists and psychiatrists have long framed suicide attempts as cries for help, but considered them pathological forms of pleading rather than the results of context-sensitive and evolved cost-benefit analyses.) Whereas the goal of suicidality in the inclusive fitness model is death, the goal in the bargaining model is help. Crucially, the vast majority of suicide attempts are not fatal. More.
What a rubbish dump. Self-evidently, one would need human consciousness in order to intend suicide because one must first know about death. Evolution before that has nothing to teach us. And when, exactly, did that happen?
The reason most suicide attempts are not fatal is so often that the attempter does not actually know how to kill himself or that ER staff will stay up all night trying to keep him alive.
If suicide advances “evolution,” should they bother? Is that not a violation of the right of the involuntary patient to be an “evolved” corpse?
Caution! When we tread on Darwin’s sacred ground, we tread on carefully treasured nonsense, and we must be careful. And tomorrow is Darwin’s Sabbath.
See also: Darwin’s wastebasket: “Evolutionary” explanation for female genital mutilation
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5 Responses to Darwin’s wastebasket: The evolutionary purpose of suicidal behaviour
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I think that News has hit on it. Obviously, suicide can’t provide a Darwinian fitness advantage. Consciousness and the ability of abstract reasoning, on the other hand, certainly can. And these require complex neurology and chemistry. Suicide may be nothing more than one of the possible negative consequences of this complex “machinery”. The fitness benefits to the vast majority of the population simply outweighs the fitness disadvantage of suicidal thoughts of the few.
DD, a reincarnated troll, states:
“Fitness”, contrary to what DD may believe, certainly does not even begin to explain subjective conscious experience. Moreover, “fitness” ensures our perceptions and abstract reasoning are illusory and unreliable. In other words, “fitness”, instead of explaining how consciousness and abstract reasoning came about, falsifies Darwinian evolution as a coherent scientific theory for explaining how our cognitive faculties came about.
Although reliable ‘observation’ of reality is a necessary cornerstone of the scientific method itself,,,
,,, Although reliable ‘observation’ of reality is a necessary cornerstone of the scientific method, the reductive materialistic foundation that Darwinian evolution rests upon undermines this necessary cornerstone.
That is to say, given materialistic/atheistic premises, not only are our personal beliefs about reality held to be somewhat flawed, and therefore in need of testing, even our perceptions/observations of reality itself are held to be untrustworthy and thus ‘illusory’ given the materialistic premises of atheism.
Richard Dawkins puts the awkward situation between Darwinian evolution and reliable observation like this:
In the following video and article, Donald Hoffman has, through numerous computer simulations of population genetics, proved that if Darwinian evolution were actually true then ALL of our perceptions of reality would be illusory.
Of related note to being Hoffman’s claim of ‘just tuned to fitness’: Fitness itself, although it figures centrally in the equations of population genetics, has no universally agreed upon measure so as to tell us exactly how fitness is to be numerically quantified into a rigorous, i.e. mathematically useful, measure:
Moreover, fitness effects cannot be predicted
Thus, although ‘fitness’ may figure centrally in the equations of population genetics, fitness is, in reality, not rigorously quantified nor even predictable.
And although Hoffman tried to limit his results to just our visual perceptions, as Plantinga had pointed out years before Hoffman came along, there is no reason why the results do not also extend to undermining our cognitive faculties as well:
Thus, in what should be needless to say, a worldview that undermines the scientific method itself by holding all our observations of reality, and cognitive faculties, are illusory is NOT a worldview that can be firmly grounded within the scientific method!
Moreover, completely contrary to what Hoffman found for Darwinian theory, it turns out that accurate perception, i.e. conscious observation, far from being unreliable and illusory, is experimentally found to be far more integral to reality, i.e. far more reliable of reality, than the math of population genetics predicted. In the following experiment, it was found that reality doesn’t exist without an observer.
Apparently science itself could care less if atheists are forced to believe, because of the mathematics of population genetics, that their observations of reality are illusory!
Moreover, as Nancy Pearcey alluded to in her ‘Why Evolutionary Theory Cannot Survive Itself’ article, given the materialistic/atheistic premises of Darwinian evolution, not only are our observations of reality itself held to be illusory, but even our sense of self, i.e. the belief that we really exist as real persons, which is the most sure thing we can know about reality, becomes illusory too.
Thus, in what I consider to be a shining example of poetic justice, in their claim that God does not really exist as a real person but is merely an illusion, the Atheistic naturalist also ends up claiming that he himself does not really exist as a real person but is merely an illusion. Here are a few quotes to that effect,,,
Thus, given materialistic premises, people become illusions whose observations of reality are illusory.
And why in blue blazes should anyone trust what illusions having illusions have to say about reality?
(of personal note: Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “Dream within a Dream” is a fitting reference at this point)
Verses:
Atheism is a mental illness:
As well, there are studies that show that people who do not believe in a soul are more anti-social (psychopathic) than people who do believe in a soul:
Moreover, atheism is rooted in emotion not reason:
BSC77:
Sorry, life is too short to read all your cut-and-pasta. But, given your claim that I am a troll, with nothing to support the claim, you can imagine the level of interest I have in whatever you have to say.