“Evolution by natural selection tends generally to promote adaptations up to the edge of chaos -the boundary between order and disorder. Where all fitness-relevant regularities have been subsumed, what remains is noise, devoid of predictive utility.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“...the environment of evolutionary adaptedness is a statistical composite of the adaptation-relevant properties of ancestral environments.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“The first, pian, is an ancient self-protective signal that enables animals to navigate fitness hazards in their external and internal environments. The aversiveness of pain is designed precisely to induce action to end or escape it. The second suicidogenic adaptation is the exceptional intellect of the mature brain, which is able to obey the imperative to escape pain, effectively but maladaptively, by terminating its own consciousness. These dual 'pain' and 'brain' conditions - motivation and means, respectively - are not only necessary for deliberate self-killing but sufficient.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“Two gasps rang out. The first one came from Clara, the second from Fezzo. One moment they'd been looking at a mound of concrete, and now they were staring at two human feet. They were crossed at the ankle so that tops of the feet faced each other and rested toe to toe.”
Source: Toe to Toe
“Any animal aware that it could relieve its suffering by ending its own life would be expected to seize the opportunity. By this light, suicide can be understood as the default human response to intolerable distress.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“Depression can also serve as a signal for the abandoner that the relationship was important to the abandoned person. It may arouse so much empathy in the abandoner that they return to the relationship.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“To take responsibility is to take the pain onto yourself. It means to bear more pain than what others felt because of your mistake.”
Source: ONE OUTS 1-20
“Losing her has never stopped. While her disappearance happened fast, overnight - it's been a slow, endless transformation of our lives.”
Source: I Could Live Here Forever
“...these ten minutes had only been the opening movements in a symphony of pain that Azriel could conduct with brutal efficiency.”
Source: A Court of Silver Flames
“The first, pain, is an ancient self-protective signal that enables animals to navigate fitness hazards in their external and internal environments. The aversiveness of pain is designed precisely to induce action to end or escape it. The second suicidogenic adaptation is the exceptional intellect of the mature brain, which is able to obey the imperative to escape pain, effectively but maladaptively, by terminating its own consciousness. These dual 'pain' and 'brain' conditions - motivation and means, respectively - are not only necessary for deliberate self-killing but sufficient.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health