The Evolution of Life Worth Living: Why we choose to live

Why do most of us enjoy being alive? Psychologist Dr C A Soper argues that a zest for life evolved as a survival necessity, ultimately because our species, and ours alone, has to live with the possibility of suicide. Suicide may have been our ancestors' most formative evolutionary problem, solutions to which have shaped the construction of the human mind and touch on almost every aspect of our day-to-day experience. The emergence of anti-suicide defences by natural selection may explain our...