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According to anthropological philosopher René Girard (1923–2015), an important human adaptation is our propensity to victimize or scapegoat. He argued that other traits upon which human sociality depends would have destabilized primate dominance-based social hierarchies, making conspecific conflict a limiting factor in hominin evolution. He surmised that a novel mechanism for inhibiting intragroup conflict must have emerged contemporaneously with our social traits, and speculated that this was the tendency to spontaneously unite around the victimization of single individuals. He described an unconscious tendency to both ascribe blame and to imbue the accused with a sacred mystique. This emotionally cathartic scapegoat mechanism, he claimed, enhanced social cohesion, and was the origin of religion, mythology, sacrifice, ritual, cultural institutions, and social norms. It would have functioned by modifying the beliefs and behaviors of the group, rather than of the accused, making the act of accusation more important than the substance. This article aims to examine the empirical evidence for Girard's claims, and argues that the scapegoat hypothesis has commonalities with several other evolutionary hypotheses, including Wrangham's execution hypothesis on self-domestication, Dunbar's hypothesis on the role of storytelling in maintaining group stability, and DeScioli and Kurzban's hypothesis on the role of non-consequentialist morality in curtailing conflict. Potential implications of the scapegoat hypothesis for evolutionary psychology and psychiatry are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suicide is widespread amongst humans, unique to our species, but difficult to reconcile with natural selection. This paper links the evolutionary origins of suicide to the archaic, but once widespread, practice of human sacrifice, which like suicide, was also unique to humans, and difficult to reconcile with natural selection. It considers potential explanations for the origins of human sacrifice, particularly René Girard's mimetic theory. This states that the emergence in humans of mimetic (imitation) traits which enhanced cooperation would also have undermined social hierarchies, and therefore an additional method of curtailing conspecific conflict must have emerged contemporaneously with the emergence of our cooperative traits. Girard proposed the scapegoat mechanism, whereby group unity was spontaneously restored by the unanimous blaming and killing of single victims, with subsequent crises defused and social cohesion maintained by the ritualistic repetition of such killings. Thus, rather than homicide being the product of religion, he claimed that religion was the product of homicide. This paper proposes that suicidality is the modern expression of traits which emerged in the ancestral environment of evolutionary adaptedness as a willingness on the part of some individuals, in certain circumstances, to be sacrificial victims, thereby being adaptive by facilitating ritualistic killings, reinforcing religious paradigms, and inhibiting the outbreak of more lethal conflicts. Using Hamilton's rule of inclusive fitness, it is argued that risk factors for suicide can be understood in terms of victim selection and social circumstances, which would have maximised inclusive fitness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thank you for publishing the interesting debate on the ethics of diagnosing psychiatric disorders in public figures.[1] Langford correctly draws attention to the inevitable stigmatisation of all those with mental illness which such public diagnoses would entail, but arguably a more pertinent issue here is that of scapegoating. This posits that psychosis emerged as an adaptation that provided early human groups with efficacious scapegoat victims, about whom unanimity was more likely. Admittedly, his argument invokes narcissistic personality disorder rather than psychosis, but such diagnostic nuances are most likely lost on the general public. [Extracted from the article]