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).

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We now return to the Mutara Nebula where Kirk and Khan are still prowling around the vast and dusky darkness to blow each other to bits. They will eventually come face to face in mortal combat to settle it, which is exactly what needs to happen in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. While they hunt we might ruminate on the film and the television episode, titled Space Seed (Season 1, Episode 22, originally airing on February 16, 1967), that the film built on. Individually each is nearly perfect, but taken in concert there is a meaningful characterization of the conflict that bridges the two and deepens each.

In Space Seed a proud and vital Khan, bred by eugenics to be a strongman on Earth, attempts to seize the Enterprise. The uprising is put down and Khan is banished by Kirk to the barren planet of Ceti Alpha V. Captain Kirk was your host!, rebukes Mr. Checkov. You repaid his hospitality by trying to steal his ship and murder him.

Now Khan has escaped from imprisonment on this wasteland to film the movie as he pursues Kirk from aboard the starship Reliant. But after decades of harsh survival and hard liberty his clothes are tattered and he is tattered too. The raven hair and burnished skin and burning eyes are now gray and dimmed and etched with weariness. Khan is still powerful but he is no longer a young Alexander or even Caesar in his prime.

Kirk is older too. He no longer commands the Enterprise. His rank is now admiral and his calling is administration and teaching a new generation of Starfleet officers from the safety of a starbase. Galloping about the cosmos is a game for the young, Kirk says to Bones. Of course circumstances will bring Kirk back to the Enterprise and require that he play the hero just one more time to defeat Khan once and for all.