Contextual Antagonistic Pleiotropy of Cognitive Adaptations: A Hypothesis for Evolutionarily Counterintuitive Behaviors

Abstract

An antagonistic pleiotropy in evolutionary biology is said to occur when one gene can express itself in more than one way, and where at least one of the expression is helpful and at least one another expression of the same gene is harmful to the organism. Contextual antagonistic pleiotropy of cognitive adaptations hypothesis proposes that a similar situation exists for cognitive adaptation in terms of the contexts in which the cognitive adaptation are utilized. Proposing that the behavioral output of a cognitive adaptation in at least one context is beneficial and the behavioral output of the same cognitive adaptation in another context is detrimental to the organism’s fitness. This leads to the expression of evolutionarily counterintuitive behaviors. Accepting suicide to be an evolutionarily counterintuitive behavior the researcher in this paper has theoretically examined suicide by means of the contextual antagonistic pleiotropy of cognitive adaptations hypothesis.