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The Evolution of Life Worth Living: Why we choose to live
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 don't.
Progress in suicidology has been blocked, by what Soper sees as a fundamental flaw in the field's 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 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 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. The other is extraordinary intelligence of the mature human, an animal so smart that it knows it can end pain by ending its own life. When these 'pain' and 'brain' elements combine, as they do in all normal human adults, suicide would be the expectable outcome. The scientific puzzle, then, is not so much why some humans die in this way, but why the great majority of us do not.
As the book explains, most of us do not take our own lives thanks to the protection afforded by ancient evolved psychological defences. An evolutionary argument of special design is used to predict some likely characteristics of anti-suicide systems - features that would be expected based on the task that they were biologically designed to fulfil. They would block suicidal trajectories by dulling emotional pain and disabling high-level cognitive functions among people suffering from chronic emotional distress. Perhaps counter-intuitively, this analysis points to diverse varieties of mental disorder - depression, addiction, psychoses, and others - as manifestations of emergency psychological defences, labelled keepers.
Other anti-suicide defences, labelled fenders, are hypothesised to operate to ensure keepers activate only as a last resort. They work to keep most of us fairly happy most of the time, in part by furnishing each of us with a benign, but semi-illusory, enhanced reality to live in. In this light, the human tendencies for religious belief and unconditional love may be understood as part of a life-preserving system of psychological buffers.
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 don't.
Progress in suicidology has been blocked, by what Soper sees as a fundamental flaw in the field's 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 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 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. The other is extraordinary intelligence of the mature human, an animal so smart that it knows it can end pain by ending its own life. When these 'pain' and 'brain' elements combine, as they do in all normal human adults, suicide would be the expectable outcome. The scientific puzzle, then, is not so much why some humans die in this way, but why the great majority of us do not.
As the book explains, most of us do not take our own lives thanks to the protection afforded by ancient evolved psychological defences. An evolutionary argument of special design is used to predict some likely characteristics of anti-suicide systems - features that would be expected based on the task that they were biologically designed to fulfil. They would block suicidal trajectories by dulling emotional pain and disabling high-level cognitive functions among people suffering from chronic emotional distress. Perhaps counter-intuitively, this analysis points to diverse varieties of mental disorder - depression, addiction, psychoses, and others - as manifestations of emergency psychological defences, labelled keepers.
Other anti-suicide defences, labelled fenders, are hypothesised to operate to ensure keepers activate only as a last resort. They work to keep most of us fairly happy most of the time, in part by furnishing each of us with a benign, but semi-illusory, enhanced reality to live in. In this light, the human tendencies for religious belief and unconditional love may be understood as part of a life-preserving system of psychological buffers.
260 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 11, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
March 29, 2022
I read a lot of books on human evolution - it's a passion of mine. But I have never read one like this. Soper proposes that we have in-built, species-typical, reliably developing anti-suicide adaptations (called keepers and fenders) that prevent us from ending our lives. Lots of books have been written on the evolutionary origins of certain cognitive capacities and proclivities: mate preferences, cheater detection modules, vigilance mechanisms, cognitive biases, etc, but all these are irrelevant if the organism is dead. It's the most important adaptive problem that had to be solved for our species: deliberate self-termination. We alone have this capacity (children, non-human animals, and people with severe intellectual disabilities are immune to suicide). A great book that will, I'm sure, change your perspective on what you think you know about human nature.
March 3, 2022
It is a pretty good book in terms of explaining the suicide preventing mechanisms that we have both internally and externally. I am completely convinced about them. I still do not think that opposing the labels is reasonable, drug treatment is as useful as other nonscientific treatments and type of therapies are almost have same amount of effects. The reasons writer gives does not bring us to the writer's conclusions. I will explain broadly in my free time.
Overall; it gains me a lot of insights, I can even say I look the world from a different perspective which does not happen commonly when I read a nonfiction book. Great work!
Overall; it gains me a lot of insights, I can even say I look the world from a different perspective which does not happen commonly when I read a nonfiction book. Great work!
January 3, 2023
إن خطر الانتحار يأتي من كونك إنسانًا. ربما كان الأمر كذلك على الدوام. يمكننا أن نستنتج ، كنقطة أساسية ثانية ، أن الانتحار هو خطر بيولوجي كان موجودًا في المشهد طوال تطور جنسنا البشري. لقد ظهر عندما أصبح أسلافنا أذكياء بما يكفي لفهم حياتهم. إما أنهم تكيفوا مع التهديد الجديد أو ماتوا. من الواضح أنهم لم يموتوا ، لأننا هنا. نحن ذرية أولئك الذين نجوا. لقد ورثنا طرقًا للعيش مع القدرة على اختيار الموت. في لغة علم التطور ، الانتحار مشكلة تكيفية. إنها مشكلة شديدة الخطورة لدرجة أنني أعتقد أنها أدت إلى إعادة تشكيل شامل للنفسية البشرية. غالبًا ما يُطرح السؤال: ما الذي يجعلنا متميزين عن الرئيسيات الأخرى؟ المشي على قدمين؟ تساقط الشعر؟ اللغة ، الوعي ، صناعة الأدوات؟ هذه سمات مهمة بلا شك. لكن أيّا منها لن يحدث فرقاً كبيراً إذا مات الكائن الذي لديه هذه السمة أو تلك. كان اختيار العيش ، ولا يزال ، التحدي البيولوجي الأساسي لكل إنسان بالغ.
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C. A. Soper
The Evolution Of Life Worth Living
Translated By #Maher_Razouk
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C. A. Soper
The Evolution Of Life Worth Living
Translated By #Maher_Razouk
January 26, 2024
Soper is an evolutionary psychologist who works on suicide. In this book he tackles suicide not from the perspective of philosophy or psychiatry but from evolutionary psychology. As I understand it, his argument is that rather than viewing suicide as the symptom or consequence of a mental illness, it can be seen as a by product of our evolution of consciousness - by and large, children do not commit suicide and neither do animals. We are the only species capable of contemplating our own demise and able to understand that we have the option to end it. In this context, mental disorders are warning signs that develop in order to prevent suicide, alerting us the the fact that something is ‘wrong’.
I enjoyed reading this book, but bear in mind it comes from a PhD thesis and this is very apparent in the chapter structure and progression and in the way the arguments are laid out in detail. This isn’t really a criticism. My criticism would be that he tried to apply the idea to too much. A technical but not sense read, recommended for anyone interested in suicide.
I enjoyed reading this book, but bear in mind it comes from a PhD thesis and this is very apparent in the chapter structure and progression and in the way the arguments are laid out in detail. This isn’t really a criticism. My criticism would be that he tried to apply the idea to too much. A technical but not sense read, recommended for anyone interested in suicide.
September 7, 2022
One of the best explorations of suicide I've ever read.
May 26, 2022
As I have reviewed Dr. Soper's book on the American Amazon instance, so I will review it here.
I read this book after a lifetime interest in evolutionary psychology going back to reading the Moral Animal.
I also read basically all of Steven Pinker's work, Stephan Jay Gould, and of course Darwin himself, but also basically all of Freud in a huge Freud reader I had once owned.
What I find most poignant about Dr. Soper's work, which elevates him beyond all the author's cited and even beyond Richard Dawkins, is both Dr. Soper's compassion, no doubt stemming from his grief counseling practice, but also on a strictly intellectual level this book really makes so much sense it is scary how it deprecates most other theories of the human mind, consciousness, and motivation.
It totally makes sense to me, after thinking about Soper's argument about the importance of the knowledge of suicide to our species coping mechanisms, that basically all socalled mental health ailments that especially America loves to classify and then medicate to make a lot of people money, are not ailments at all but adaptations to difficult circumstances.
Do youself a favour: read this book, and put all other mental health people and their twisted theories out to pasture.
Dr. Soper himself has saved countless lives this is obvious.
I read this book after a lifetime interest in evolutionary psychology going back to reading the Moral Animal.
I also read basically all of Steven Pinker's work, Stephan Jay Gould, and of course Darwin himself, but also basically all of Freud in a huge Freud reader I had once owned.
What I find most poignant about Dr. Soper's work, which elevates him beyond all the author's cited and even beyond Richard Dawkins, is both Dr. Soper's compassion, no doubt stemming from his grief counseling practice, but also on a strictly intellectual level this book really makes so much sense it is scary how it deprecates most other theories of the human mind, consciousness, and motivation.
It totally makes sense to me, after thinking about Soper's argument about the importance of the knowledge of suicide to our species coping mechanisms, that basically all socalled mental health ailments that especially America loves to classify and then medicate to make a lot of people money, are not ailments at all but adaptations to difficult circumstances.
Do youself a favour: read this book, and put all other mental health people and their twisted theories out to pasture.
Dr. Soper himself has saved countless lives this is obvious.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews