Can they suffer?

We should treat sentient nonhuman animals as worthy of moral consideration, not because we share an evolutionary history with them, but because they can suffer. As Chapman & Huffman (2018) argue, humans are not uniquely disconnected from other species. We should minimize the suffering we inflict on sentient beings — whether human or nonhuman — not because they, too, are tool-makers or have sophisticated communication systems, but because they, too, can suffer, and suffering is bad

If nonhuman animals can suicide, why don’t they?

An evolutionary analysis suggests that selection is unlikely to have tolerated the capacity for intentional self-killing in nonhuman animals. The potential to escape pain by suicide would have presented a recurrent and severe adaptive problem for an animal with a reproductive future to protect. If the potential for suicide arose in the evolutionary past, anti-suicide mechanisms may have co-evolved, as we believe they have in adult humans. Peña-Guzmán’s (2017) argument that some nonhuman animals can suicide is incomplete without an account of the defences that result in the vast majority opting not to

“Attached” or “Unattached”: With Whom do Men and Women Prefer to Mate, and Why?

A mate poacher is an individual who has sexual relations with someone whom the poacher knows is already in a nominally exclusive, long-term relationship. This article reviews research in which participants were asked to rate the likelihood that benefits and costs exclusively associated with poaching would motivate them to attract, respectively, an attached or an unattached individual, assuming that the potential mates are equally attractive. The results indicated that for men and women to be motivated to poach, the attached individual must be perceived as being more attractive than the unattached individual. Discussion suggests that mate poaching may sometimes be pursued as an alternative to coercive mating strategies, by individuals who are unable to secure unattached mates of acceptable attractiveness. We further hypothesize that individuals may pursue a hierarchy of conditional mating strategies from attracting unattached individuals, through poaching, to coercion. Additional findings of sex differences in perceptions of benefits and costs exclusive to poaching also are discussed

Why the adaptationist perspective must be considered: The example of morbid jealousy

Abstract: We describe Delusional Disorder-Jealous Type ("morbid jealousy") with the adaptationist perspective used by Darwinian psychiatrists and evolutionary psychologists to explain the relatively common existence and continued prevalence of mental disorders. We then apply the "harmful dysfunction" analysis to morbid jealousy, including