I’m pretty sure suicide can also be explained in evolutionary terms, in some cases. Something about giving other members of your species/close relatives a better chance of survival. Or something. In some cases.
I’m not gonna kill myself based on the same principle, I don’t want any of you to get a better chance of survival die bitches!
Remember, though, that many living organisms also died or failed to reproduce in the process, and probably at least 10 times more. What you see today in society - many, many human surviving and reproducing - is very strange to nature.
I think the most important thing evolution-wise nowadays is selecting best culture and moral, not selecting individuals. And, in that sense, I believe society nowadays has great chance of changing for the best. The key is education, moral is a consequence.
I think at the moment money and power are more selective traits than culture and morals.
Back on topic…
The truely sad part is that people wind up making it into a joke. Remember the “an hero” meme? Dear God was that tasteless.
Death is a topic no one is truly ready to discuss. About the closest I’ve been to it was being dehydrated in an amusement park and walking into someone else’s nine-iron mid-backswing. Suicide is equally difficult to discuss in pragmatic terms, since no rational organism would willingly wish to destroy itself.
And yet we get quotes like this:
“Man is free to choose not to be conscious, but not free to escape the penalty of unconsciousness: destruction. Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.” - Ayn Rand
Of course, the above is more a socieo-economic example rather than that of a self-destructive individual. Unfortunately I know someone who has tried to commit suicide in real life. It is a very real, very serious problem, and merits mature, thoughtful discussion.
I can think of an evolutionary explanation for suicide. When it appears to benefit the species, or at least close relatives, in some way, and sufficiently so, it can appear a viable option in evolutionary terms.
And that quote is simply incorrect. Chimpanzees, for example, are known to wage wars. Basically any territorial animal can act destructively towards its own species.
Self-destructive behaviour is often the result of a feeling of guilt or a lack of a sense of self-worth, which fits nicely with the explanation above.
There is also the Komodo Dragon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komodo_dragon
Oh, and many more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibalism_(zoology)
This idea that “animals don’t sin” because “only humans have free will” is just another irrational theory inflicted by religion.
Well, I always understood that it wasn’t so much about the survival of your species, but rather the survival of your own genes. So the chimpanzees wouldn’t care about killing the other chimpanzee groups, as long as it meant their group would survive.
Not necessarily. That does not explain why crows always tell their group when they find food. Or why human babies, contrary to most monkeys, have the habit of dividing their food with other babies when they are satisfied (not always, mind you, but many times).
I believe I could even find more examples if I looked at wikipedia.
Perhaps that behavior is because the group (or pack) is considered essential for the survival of the individual’s genes, but that doesn’t mean that the individual is interested in the survival of the entire species.
Do mind that I don’t actually know any facts about the matter, this is just what seems logical to me.
Survival of the fittest goes beyond the individual, at least with social animals.
There is an equation of sorts, which shows that an individual will help another at the cost of its own survival relative to how closely the other is related.
For example, an individual will sacrifice itself more for a sibling than for a cousin. I can’t remember what the equation (for lack of a better word) was called or anything though, or else I might be able to explain it better 
Is that really it though? You don’t strike me as the type to care if you insult anyone.
That’s not the same as a verbal insult though.
In most of the instances where I hear of suicide, it is more of a “get me out of this place or feeling”. Sometimes you hear of wanting to move forward to the next stage, but more often than not it seems it is as a result of simply wanting what is going on right now to STOP. Feeling back, getting abused, getting picked on, feeling depressed or worthless… suicide to me seems to be more about running away from something you dont want in your world anymore rather than running towards something else.
That’s how many of my friends saw it, but thankfully they’re still with us.
Hm maybe it’s time to tell my story. I had a depression for nearly half a year and on it’s maximum I sometimes thougt of killig myself. When you are depressive you can’t see that everything will get better when your depression is over. For depressive people everything in their life is shit and they have no hope to be cured sometime. I never really wanted to kill myself but I didn’t know how to live on with my depression. I cried all the time, had the weirdest thoughts in my had and yes, depressive people don’t think in al logical way. I never understood how people could kill theselves until I had my depression.
I guess everyone has its own limit when it comes to depression. While you are a happy (or not so happy) person it’s hard to imagine how you would behave in extreme depression situations.
From what has been said in this thread I concluded depression is different from having a hard time in your life like starving to death, it must be the feeling that your life is not what you expected. If you are starving but you are not expecting much else from your life, you won’t have a depression. However, if you have a job and plenty of food on the refrigerator and you are a simple workman but you expected to be, say, a doctor, that might cause you a depression unless you are able to say to yourself “Okay, I’m a simple workman, big deal, there is still plenty of things in my life that make me joy.” And depression can go deeper if you don’t deal with it.