Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?: And Other Reflections on Being Human

by Jesse Bering

  It seems to me that one way to solve this problem while remaining true to the central philosophy of green burial is to have people buried beneath a specific tree—a little sapling of your choice nourished by your decomposing body beneath. In favorable soil conditions, a non-embalmed body, skeleton and all, can rot away entirely within about fifteen to twenty-five years. But many trees species, let’s not forget, can live for many hundreds of years (some thousands). Imagine that on making final arrangements at the funeral home someday, you and your loved ones were able to choose from among a wide variety of co-habitable tree species to find just the right tree to suit your fabulously unforgettable being—this instead of flipping through a catalog filled with caskets, coffins, and crypts as my mother found herself doing. Not only will your death nourish a new life, but you’re also saving another tree, the one that would be sacrificed for your sake in the shape of a mass-produced coffin with plastic handles.

  In addition to offering a healthy dose of symbolic immortality, this form of specific-tree burial would tap into another central aspect of our psychology. In recent years, researchers have found that human beings operate with a strong essentialist bias. We tend to reason implicitly, and often explicitly, as though a person’s unobservable “essence” were transmitted through physical contact with that individual. You’d probably cringe to think of wearing a child molester’s eyeglasses, or a serial murderer’s laundered T-shirt, but have trouble articulating precisely why donning such material causes you so much aversion. Likewise, you may have your deceased grandmother’s wedding ring or the old jersey of your favorite football player stashed away somewhere, and these objects are cherished because they’re so intimately linked to these adored individuals. In the present context, let’s say that you buried your beloved dog beneath a rosebush in your garden. If you’re anything like me, you’d have a special affinity for that particular rosebush over others, and it would be especially unpleasant should, say, someone uproot it and dangle it before you.

  Now picture an entirely new brand of cemetery, a planned, verdant, protected land tended by trained arborists and filled not with row after row of bland, lifeless, crumbling headstones but instead with row after row of living trees. Each tree, selected for regional appropriateness and other suitability factors as advised by arborist staff, would symbolize a unique human existence. (Not to get carried away, but perhaps a plaque or marker might be added too, enhancing the symbolic immortality element, but aesthetics would of course vary.) These aren’t simply trees planted in memoriam of the dead but leafy hybrids whose veins have absorbed individual human lives.

  I’ll go out on a limb here and say that even if one doesn’t believe in some ethereal or religious version of the afterlife, it’s rather difficult to escape the cognitive illusion that the unobservable essence of each person has been somehow gradually transmuted into his or her individual tree. Two massive walnut trees growing side by side with interlocking branches seem somehow more than mere trees when we learn that they’re actually growing upon what was once a husband and wife who lived centuries before. There’s no shortage of idyllic essentialist images like this—grandchildren climbing up their great-grandfather’s limbs, children who’d been sickly in life now bursting with the blazing colors of autumn, beauty queens forever fragrant with immaculate cherry blossoms, stillborn infants now magnificent oaks. It would take some time, of course, for this human arboretum to fully mature. But what’s the rush?

  In fact, our species’ notorious difficulty in imagining our own psychological nonexistence is yet another cognitive factor that makes this particular form of green burial appealing. Since we have no proper analogy for the stateless state of death (we can’t re-create consciously in our heads what it “felt like” to be under general anesthesia, or prior to our conception, or even during last night’s dreamless, non-REM sleep), the closest we can get to mentally grasping what it will be “like” to be dead inevitably reifies nothingness.

  With specific-tree burial, this simulation constraint principle of the afterlife finds a nonreligious, or even religious, outlet. For example, you might not believe that you’ve been literally reincarnated or reborn into the tree, but in envisioning its growth and rejuvenation year after year through all the socially active centuries of human affairs lying ahead, you’ll find it rather difficult to refrain from attributing some of your own emotions to this living character of the tree.

  It would sure be nice to hug a young palm tree in Florida this weekend. Of course, I’d have to worry about Mom’s health anew, about her getting a nasty weevil infestation or perhaps being rudely split in two by a thunderbolt. But we’d have worked those “acts of God” into the contract, the funeral director and I.

  PART VIII

  Into the Deep: Existential Lab Work

  Being Suicidal: Is Killing Yourself Adaptive? That Depends: Suicide for Your Genes’ Sake (Part I)

  Most psychological science is the science of being and feeling like a human being, and since there is only one human being that I have or ever will have experience in being, it is not always clear to me where my career ends and my personal life begins. And this was especially true for me recently because, like many other adult gay commentators and horrified onlookers, the raft of gay teen suicides in recent years has reawakened memories of my own adolescent battles with suicidal thoughts. There is so much I want to say about this, in fact, because I’m reminded of the many illuminating theories and studies on suicide I’ve come across that helped me to understand—and, more important, to overcome and to escape from—that frighteningly intoxicating desire to prematurely rid myself of a seemingly interminable hell.

  If only I could have reached out and gotten hold of Rutgers University’s Tyler Clementi’s shirttail before he leaped off the George Washington Bridge, or eased my fingertips between the rope and the neck of thirteen-year-old Seth Walsh before he hanged himself from a tree in his backyard, I would have pointed out to them that one day, they will find beauty even in this fleeting despair. I would tell them that their sexual orientation places them in the company of some of the greatest figures and secular angels in creative history—to name just a few, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Oscar Wilde, Andy Warhol, Leonardo da Vinci, Marcel Proust, Jean Genet, Hans Christian Andersen, and Tchaikovsky. Finally, I’d tell them about the scientific research and ideas that I’m going to share with you, razor-sharp reasoning by bright scholars that might have pierced their suicidal cognition just enough to allow them to breathe a little more easily through those suffocating negative emotions.

  A scientific understanding of suicide is useful not only for vulnerable gay teens but for all those ever finding themselves in conditions favoring suicide. I say “favoring suicide” because there is convincing work—all tracing back to Denys deCatanzaro’s largely forgotten ideas from the early 1980s—indicating that human suicide is an adaptive behavioral strategy that becomes increasingly likely to occur whenever there is a perfect storm of social, ecological, developmental, and biological variables factoring into the evolutionary equation. In short, deCatanzaro posited that human brains are designed by natural selection in such a way as to encourage us to end our own lives when facing certain conditions, because this was best for our suicidal ancestors’ overall genetic interests.

  For good-hearted humanitarians, it may sound rather bizarre, perhaps even borderline insensitive, to hear that suicide is “adaptive.” But remember that this word means a very different thing in evolutionary terms than it does when used in clinical settings. Because natural selection operates only on phenotypes, not human values, even the darkest of human emotions may be adaptive if they motivate gene-enhancing behavioral decisions. It’s not that evolution is cruel, but as a mindless mechanism it can neither care nor not care about particular individuals; selection, after all, is not driven by an actual brain harboring any feelings about, well, anything at all. In no case does this sobering fact come into sharper focus than with adaptive suicide.

 
; Saying that suicide is adaptive may also sound odd to you from an evolutionary perspective, because on the surface it seems to fly in the face of evolution’s first rule of thumb, which is to survive and reproduce. However, as the evolutionary theorist William Hamilton’s famous principle of inclusive fitness elucidated so clearly, it is the proportion of one’s genetic material surviving in subsequent generations that matters; and so if the self’s survival comes at the expense of one’s genetic kin being able to pass on their genes, then sacrificing one’s life for a net genetic gain may have been adaptive ancestrally.

  Before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s first ease into the suicide-as-adaptation argument with a few nonhuman examples, which come mostly from the insect and arthropod worlds. Take male Australian redback spiders (Latrodectus hasselti), for instance, which seem content to be cannibalized by—to say the least—sexually aggressive female redback spiders during sex. Aside from putting a damper on an otherwise enjoyable act, being eaten alive while copulating would seem rather counterintuitive from an evolutionary perspective. But when biologists looked more closely at this spidery sex, they noticed that males that are cannibalized copulate longer and fertilize more eggs than males that are not cannibalized; and the more cannibalistic a female redback spider is, it turns out, the more desirable she is to males, even rejecting more male suitors than her less cannibalistic counterparts.

  Another example is bumblebees (Bombus lucorum), a species that is often parasitized by invidious little conopid flies that insert their larvae in the bee’s abdomen. Once infected, the bumblebee dies in about twelve days, and the parasitical flies pupate until their emergence the following summer. What’s interesting about this, however, is that parasitized bumblebees essentially go off to commit suicide by abandoning their colony and spending their remaining days alone in faraway flowery meadows. In doing so, these infected bumblebees are leading the flies away from nonparasitized kin, increasing inclusive fitness by protecting the colony from infestation.

  What is critical to take away from these nonhuman examples is that the suicidal organism is not consciously weighing the costs of its own survival against inclusive fitness gains. Redback spiders and bumblebees aren’t mindfully crunching the numbers, engaging in self-sacrificial acts of heroic altruism, or waxing philosophical on their own mortality. Instead, they are just puppets on the invisible string of evolved behavioral algorithms, with neural systems responding to specific triggers. And, says deCatanzaro, so are suicidal human beings whose emotions sometimes get the better of them.

  So let’s turn our attention now to human suicide. To crystallize his position, I present deCatanzaro’s “mathematical model of self-preservation and self-destruction” (circa 1986): Ψi = ρi + Σbkρkrk,

  where Ψi = the optimal degree of self-preservation expressed by individual i (the residual capacity to promote inclusive fitness); ρi = the remaining reproductive potential of i; ρk = the remaining reproductive potential of each kinship member k; bk = a coefficient of benefit (positive values of bk) or cost (negative values of bk) to the reproduction of each k provided by the continued existence of i (−1 ≤ b ≤ 1); rk = the coefficient of genetic relatedness of each k to i (sibling, parent, child = .5; grandparent, grandchild, nephew or niece, aunt or uncle = .25; first cousin = .125; etc.).

  For the mathematically disinclined, this can all be translated as follows: people are most likely to commit suicide when their direct reproductive prospects are discouraging and, simultaneously, their continued existence is perceived, whether correctly or incorrectly, as reducing inclusive fitness by interfering with their genetic kin’s reproduction. Importantly, deCatanzaro, as well as other independent researchers, has presented data that support this adaptive model.

  In a 1995 study in Ethology and Sociobiology, for example, deCatanzaro administered a sixty-five-item survey including questions about demographics (such as age, sex, and education), number and degree of dependency of children, grandchildren, siblings, and siblings’ children, “perceived burdensomeness” to family, perceived significance of contributions to family and society, frequency of sexual activity, stability/intimacy/success of relations to the opposite sex, homosexuality, number of friends, loneliness, treatment by others, financial welfare and physical health, feelings of contentment, depression, and looking forward to the future. Respondents were also asked about their suicidal thoughts and behaviors—for example, whether they had ever considered suicide, whether they had ever attempted it in the past, or whether they ever intended to do so in the future. The survey was administered to a random sample of the general Ontario public but also to targeted groups, including elderly people from senior citizen housing centers, psychiatric inpatients from a mental hospital, male inmates incarcerated indefinitely for antisocial crimes, and, finally, exclusively gay men and women.

  Many fascinating—and rather sad—findings emerged from this study. For instance, the greatest levels of recent suicide ideation were in male homosexuals and the psychiatric patients, whereas the prison population showed the most previous suicide attempts. “It gets better,” sure, but we’re always at risk, and this evolutionarily informed model helps gay individuals to face and understand that lamentable reality. But the important takeaway message is that the pattern of correlational data conformed to those predicted by deCatanzaro’s evolutionary model. Although the author offers the important disclaimer that “the observational nature of this study limits strong causative inferences,” nevertheless: “The profile of correlations agrees with the notion that suicidal ideation is related to conjunction of poor reproductive prospects and diminished sense of worth to family. Concordance of the data with the hypothesis is apparent in reliable relationships of reproductive and productive parameters to suicidal ideation.”

  One noteworthy thing to point out in such data is the meaningful developmental shift that occurs in the motivational algorithm. Whereas heterosexual activity is the best inverse predictor of suicidal thoughts among younger samples, this is largely replaced among the elderly by concerns about finances, health, and especially the sense of “perceived burdensomeness” to family. A few years after this Ethology and Sociobiology report, a follow-up study in Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, conducted by an independent group of investigators seeking to further test deCatanzaro’s model, replicated the same predicted trends.

  As persuasive as I find this model, I still had a question left unanswered by deCatanzaro’s basic argument, so I asked him for clarification. Basically, I wanted to know how the suicidal patterns of contemporary human beings relate to those of our ancestral relatives, who presumably faced the conditions in which the adaptation originally evolved, but who in many ways lived in a very different world from our own. After all, even with guns, knives, and drugs at our disposal, committing suicide is not always an easy thing to do, practically speaking.

  In an article published in Psychological Review, for instance, the psychiatrist Kimberly Van Orden and her colleagues cite the case of a particularly tenacious suicidal woman: “[She] was described as being socially isolated when she attempted suicide with an unknown quantity and type of pain medication and also opened her wrist arteries. This action led to some degree of unconsciousness, from which she awoke … She then threw herself in front of a train, which was the ultimate cause of her death.”

  Now consider the suicide methods that would have been available to our ancient relatives in a technologically sparse environment—perhaps a leap from a great height that, if one weren’t successful, might have at least led to wounds sufficient enough for the person to eventually die from infection. Starvation. Exposure. Drowning. Hanging. Offering oneself to a hungry predator. Okay, so maybe there were more methods available to our ancient forebears than I realized. You see what I mean, though. Today, moving your fingertip but a hairsbreadth on a trigger is a surer route to oblivion than anything our species has ever known before; gun owners might as well have an “off” button, it’s so simple now. (This is one
of the many reasons that I don’t own a gun; deCatanzaro’s suicide algorithm is stochastic, which means that the figure it generates for a given individual is in a constant state of flux.)

  But deCatanzaro doesn’t see technological advances as particularly problematic for his model. Fossils of suicidal australopithecines or early Homo sapiens aren’t easy to come by, of course. But as he wrote to me:

  Evidence indicates appreciable rates of suicide throughout recorded history and in almost every culture that has been carefully studied. Suicide was apparently quite common in Greek and Roman civilizations. Anthropological studies indicate many cases in technologically primitive cultures as diverse as Amerindians, Inuit, Africans, Polynesians, Indonesians, and less developed tribes of India. Self-hanging was one of the most prevalent methods of suicide in such cultures. There are also data from developed countries comparing suicide rates from the late nineteenth century through the twentieth century. These data show remarkable consistency in national suicide rates over time, despite many technological changes. So, the data actually do not show a major increase in suicide in modern times, although this inference must be qualified in that there may have been shifts in biases in recording of cases. Interestingly, the methods of suicide have changed much more than the rates. For example in Japan, hanging prevailed until 1950, after which pills and poisons became the primary method. In England and Wales, hanging and drowning were common in the late 19th century, but were progressively replaced by drugs and gassing. Motives may have been more constant than means.