solitary flight

§104 Suicide is evolutionary strategy

Suicide is evolutionary, strategic, and beneficial. Suicide is our animal nature shining through.

Denys de Decantanzaro presents human suicide from a biological standpoint. Suicide is not a defect, unnatural and defiant of the imperative of preservation. Suicide is natural and useful.

He begins by integrating three evolutionary theories: reproductive value, senescence (decline as aging), and inclusive fitness maximization — the fitness to promote the well-being of oneself and one’s offspring, and their fitness to promote the well-being of others.

Decantanzaro suggests a correlation between individuals within high suicide-risk groups — elderly, psychiatric, criminal psychiatric, and homosexual — and a biological expression of suicide, not as a failure of self-preservation, but as manifestation of preservation in the larger social and speciel sense.

Suicide is a self-applied human endeavor to filter the gene pool.

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D. de Catanzaro, “Human Suicide: A Biological Perspective,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3, no. 2 (1980).