{"id":95220,"date":"2019-08-24T01:22:28","date_gmt":"2019-08-24T08:22:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/08\/have-humans-developed-natural-defenses-against-suicide"},"modified":"2019-08-24T01:22:28","modified_gmt":"2019-08-24T08:22:28","slug":"have-humans-developed-natural-defenses-against-suicide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/08\/have-humans-developed-natural-defenses-against-suicide","title":{"rendered":"Have humans developed natural defenses against suicide?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/have-humans-developed-natural-defenses-against-suicide2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>While co-organizing a symposium a few years ago, a distinguished evolutionary psychologist named Nicholas Humphrey sought an expert to explore a mystery dating back to the time of Charles Darwin. \u201cNatural selection will never produce in a being anything injurious to itself,\u201d Darwin wrote in <em>On the Origin of Species.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>But in humans, natural selection apparently did exactly that. Suicide is the leading cause of violent death, striking down about 800,000 people worldwide each year\u2014more than all wars and murders combined, according to the World Health Organization.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019t find an explanation he thought fit most instances of suicide. So he decided to explore the topic and give the presentation himself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>While co-organizing a symposium a few years ago, a distinguished evolutionary psychologist named Nicholas Humphrey sought an expert to explore a mystery dating back to the time of Charles Darwin. \u201cNatural selection will never produce in a being anything injurious to itself,\u201d Darwin wrote in On the Origin of Species. But in humans, natural selection [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":417,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/417"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95220"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95220\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}