    4

    his

    themselves off of a New York City roof hand in hand, the investor who

    poured flammable liquid on himself and lit a match.4  But these were

    exceptions, not the rule.  Once the Depression hit its stride in 1930, '31,

    '32 and '33, however, the number of suicides skyrocketed.  In 1932

    alone, it tripled.5 The men and women who killed themselves

    contributed very little to their own survival or that of their closest

    relatives.

    Back in 1897, the seminal French sociologist Emile Durkheim

    compiled a set of statistics that demonstrated the rise of self-inflicted

    deaths after the market crashes of 1873 and 1882, and coined the term

    "altruistic suicide."  Durkheim seemed to sense that beneath the

    surface, the suicide was destroying himself to rid the wider social

    group of a burden.6    Sociologist  and  ethnologist  Marcel  Mauss,  a

    relative and follower of Durkheim, was even more specific.  He noted

    an occasional "violent negation of the instinct for self preservation by

    the social instinct...."7

    If our actions are geared to increasing the odds that our personal

    genes or those of our near relatives will make it into the next

    generation, what is the reason for suicide's existence?

    And what about the other bits of death-in-life built into the

    human psyche?  Why do humans get depressed?  Why do they

    sometimes feel like crawling off into a corner and dying?  There is an

    answer but it doesn't quite square with the notion of genes fighting for

    themselves no matter what.  We are parts of a larger organism and

    occasionally find ourselves expendable in its interests.

    This idea is not very fashionable at the moment.  Evolutionists,

    myself included, believe that competition is vital to the creation of new

    species.  The beast with the bigger brain, the sharper claw, or the

    cleverer way of building a nest outdoes his or her clumsier rival and

    has more children.  His offspring inherit his advantageous cranial

    capacity, natural weaponry, or architectural skill and in turn have

    plentiful broods of their own.  Within a few hundred thousand

       firm's chief product, the two stock speculators who flung

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