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EVOLUTIONARY RIDDLE
A startling evolutionary hypothesis considers why humans
harm themselves—and how they’ve kept themselves safe for millennia
W
hile co-organizing a symposium
a few years ago, a distinguished
evolutionary psychologist named
Nicholas Humphrey sought an
expert to explore a mystery dat-
ing back to the time of Charles
Darwin. “Natural selection will
never produce in a being anything injuri-
ous to itself,” Darwin wrote in On the Ori-
gin of Species.
But in humans, natural selection appar-
ently did exactly that. Suicide is the leading
cause of violent death, striking down about
800,000 people worldwide each year—more
than all wars and murders combined, ac-
cording to the World Health Organization.
Humphrey, an emeritus professor at the
London School of Economics, knew that
a handful of evolutionary thinkers had
offered ways to resolve this paradox. But
he couldn’t find an explanation he thought
fit most instances of suicide. So he decided
to explore the topic and give the presenta-
tion himself.
748 23 AUGUST 2019 • VOL 365 ISSUE 6455
PROBING AN
By Elizabeth Culotta
Applying an evolutionary eye to epidemio-
logical data and human cultures, Humphrey
concluded that suicide was likely the tragic
byproduct of a vital adaptation: the sophisti-
cated human brain. While publishing a paper
on his work after the conference, he found
that another researcher had similar ideas. A
psychotherapist named Clifford Soper, now
in private practice in Lisbon, had done Ph.D.
work concluding that the ravages of suicide
are a consequence of human intelligence and
have shaped our minds and cultures.
Such arguments may clash with the med-
ical view that suicide is driven chiefly by
psychiatric illness. And some clinicians may
worry that people at risk could misinterpret
the ideas as suggesting suicide is “natu-
ral.” In fact, Humphrey and Soper propose
that if what makes us human has put us at
risk, it has also saved us. They argue that,
faced with the persistent threat of suicide,
humans have developed a set of defenses,
For help, call 1-800-273-8255 for the
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, or visit
https://www.speakingofsuicide.com/resources.
such as religious beliefs, that are crucial ele-
ments of our culture and psychology.
“Humans very rarely die by suicide be-
cause we are superbly designed to deal with
anything life throws at us, but our anti-
suicide defenses are not fail-safe either,”
Soper says. He suggests that those hypoth-
eses may help explain why suicide is often
impulsive, and also focus attention on effec-
tive prevention strategies.
The ideas are shaking up the field, says
evolutionary psychologist Todd Shackelford
of Oakland University in Rochester, Michi-
gan. By shifting the focus to natural defenses
against suicide, Soper has “completely flipped
everything on its head,” says Shackelford,
who was an outside reader of Soper’s thesis.
ILLUSTRATION: N. CARY/SCIENCE
“He may be dead wrong. But he’s pushing the
field in challenging new directions.”
SOPER WAS A PART-TIME psychotherapist in
2014, living in Gloucestershire in the United
Kingdom, when he found himself wanting
to understand the origins of suicide in or-
sciencemag.org SCIENCE

der to help people bereaved by it. As he
combed through the scientific literature, he
was captivated by the power of evolutionary
thinking, which “seemed more useful than
anything else,” he says.
Soper eventually earned a Ph.D. from the
University of Gloucestershire’s School of
Natural and Social Sciences in Cheltenham
in 2017. “What I was thinking about was so
strange that I knew I needed peer review,”
he says. “I needed people to talk back.”
Soper calls his model pain and brain:
When faced with agonizing pain, a sophisti-
cated mind can think of death as an escape.
In developing the model, he started with fa-
miliar facts. All organisms feel pain, which
is vital to avoiding threats. But humans are
arguably unique in our big brains, which al-
low us to have complex social lives, culture,
and an awareness of death.
Humphrey followed similar reasoning.
He and Soper say the combination could
explain why suicide is both unique to and
widespread among humans, having been
reported in all types of human society, as
varied as hunter-gatherer groups and indus-
trialized nations. A 4000-year-old Egyptian
poem mentions suicide, as do historical re-
cords from every era since. Humphrey also
notes that suicidal thoughts and behaviors
are vastly more common than the act itself.
In the United States in 2017, about 4% of all
adults, or nearly 10 million people, thought
seriously of suicide, according the National
Survey on Drug Use and Health. That’s
more than 200 times the number who died
by suicide that year.
In contrast, Humphrey and Soper find
no convincing evidence that other animals
intentionally end their lives. And although
suicide rates are rising among U.S. ado-
lescents, suicide remains exceedingly rare
among children: Of the more than 47,000
people in the United States who died by sui-
cide in 2017, only 17 were ages 8 to 10; no
such deaths were reported at younger ages.
Although suicide appears across human
cultures, it is also a rare event. Soper and
Humphrey point out that many cultures
attempt to counter suicide by stigmatizing
it or making it unthinkable. All major re-
ligions prohibit at least some forms of sui-
cide, Soper says, as do many tribal customs.
For example, Soper notes that the Baganda
people of Uganda destroy the homes of peo-
ple who die by suicide and banish their kin,
as other scholars have documented.
SUCH DEFENSES are perhaps easiest to see
PHOTO: TERESA PETRINI
when they break down. Physicians and
others have long worried about suicide
contagion—for example, after the widely
publicized death of a celebrity. Actor Robin
Williams’s death was associated with
SCIENCE sciencemag.org
NEWS | F E AT U R E S | U NRAVELI NG SUIC IDE
1800 additional suicides in the following
months, according to a study in PLOS ONE
last year. Research cited by both Soper and
Humphrey reported shockingly high annual
suicide rates, as high as 1.7%, in certain vil-
lages on the island of Palawan in the Philip-
pines. There, anthropologists reported that
suicide was discussed casually and that vil-
lagers had little belief in an afterlife. And
in a 2014 longitudinal study, researchers
found that U.S. adolescents exposed to sui-
cide in friends and family are more likely
to experience suicidal thoughts and, some-
times, attempts. “There are existing cultural
protections against suicide, and you can
see them when they weaken,” says socio-
logist Anna Mueller of Indiana University
“… we are superbly designed
to deal with anything
life throws at us, but our
antisuicide defenses are
not fail-safe either.”
Clifford Soper, psychotherapist
in Bloomington, who co-wrote that study in
the American Sociological Review.
Religion’s role can be complex, cautions
sociologist Bernice Pescosolido, also of In-
diana University. Her studies in the United
States suggest that whatever a religion’s
doctrine, it may be most likely to protect
against suicide when it nurtures close-knit
social networks.
Most controversially, Soper proposes that
mental illness itself can be a safeguard against
suicide. He suggests certain mental disorders
are associated with suicide because they were
designed by natural selection to be last-line
defenses against it. For example, he argues
that the lack of initiative that accompanies
depression may help prevent suicidal acts.
That argument is plausible for some kinds
of depression, says Riadh Abed, who chairs
the Royal College of Psychiatrists’s evolu-
tionary psychiatry group in London. But he
and some other psychiatrists are skeptical of
Soper’s arguments about other disorders—
for example, that compulsive drug use and
For help, call 1-800-273-8255 for the
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, or visit
https://www.speakingofsuicide.com/resources.
addiction can sometimes dull unbearable
pain and so may reduce suicides.
Even Shackelford says such ideas need
more testing, and other scholars find them
fringe. One critic is psychologist and lead-
ing suicidologist Thomas Joiner of Florida
State University in Tallahassee. Joiner’s in-
terest deepened during his graduate school
years, when his father died by suicide, and
he has explored suicide’s evolution because,
like Soper, he thought the resulting under-
standing could help patients. But Joiner ve-
hemently disagrees that suicidal behavior is
a result of a natural human condition.
Rather, he suggests suicide may represent
a misfiring of altruistic and self-sacrificing
behaviors, something akin to honey bees
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that voluntarily sting intruders and die
to protect the nest. Some suicidal people
may mistakenly think they are reducing a
burden on their loved ones. To Joiner, “it
couldn’t be clearer” that those deaths are
driven by psychiatric illness and that sui-
cidal impulses must be treated as such.
Evolutionary psychiatrist Randolph Nesse
of Arizona State University in Tempe says he’s
“intrigued, but by no means convinced,” by
Soper’s idea that humans have been shaped
by tendencies to avoid suicide. Nesse empha-
sizes that suicide “is a behavior that can have
many possible causes and motives,” so no
unified evolutionary theory can adequately
explain it.
Despite such critiques, Humphrey hopes
this work may help patients. “I like to think
that it might help a person if she could see why
she has evolved to have a brain that is vul-
nerable to opting for this disastrous, short-
term solution,” he says. “A person who can
see through the logic behind her suicidal im-
pulses may be best placed to resist them.” j
23 AUGUST 2019 • VOL 365 ISSUE 6455 749
Probing an evolutionary riddle
Elizabeth Culotta

Science 365 (6455), 748-749.

DOI: 10.1126/science.365.6455.748

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