Todd K. Shackelford - Evolutionary Perspectives on Death

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The interdisciplinary conference, Evolutionary Perspectives on Death, truly represented a breakthrough forum at Oakland University.

Held over 2 days in April 2018, the gathering of international scholars represented a compelling range of viewpoints and disciplines, including psychology, anthropology, biology, medicine, English, and philosophy. The probative and provocative scholarship discussed at the conference presents an expansive examination of death in the latest installment in the Evolutionary Psychology Interdisciplinary Conference Series.

Expertly collected and edited by Oakland University Psychology Professors Todd K. Shackelford and Virgil Zeigler-Hill, the volume represents the scientific and intellectual richness that emerges when scholars employ an evolutionary perspective as the means to deepen their understanding of the role death plays in nearly every organism.

The presentations are focused on a wide range of fascinating topics, including philosophical approaches to understand death, sexual cannibalism in spiders, and how nonhuman primates respond to the death of conspecifics.

Exploring the connections and contrasting fundamental approaches of a range of disciplines has the effect of strolling through a hallway with many doors, each door presenting a unique entryway to the changing nature of how we contemplate and study the mechanisms, forensics, social aspects, and archetypal stories of death.

Collectively, the thoughtful and provocative views included in this volume establish new intellectual pathways and offer a profound contribution to the scholarly catalog of how opinions and experiences of death derive from an inextricable relationship among culture, customs, personal psychology, and science.

Indeed, the exciting, productive, and intensely interdisciplinary nature of Evolutionary Perspectives on Death offers an engaging complement to the four-volume collection of scholarship presented in the last several years at Oakland University conferences on the evolution of violence, sexuality, morality, and psychopathology.

The deep connections among the scholarship herein spotlighted by Shackelford and Zeigler-Hill serve notice of fertile interdisciplinary approaches that will find a wider audience when shared with the broader scientific community.

In April 2018, we welcomed dozens of scholars from North America, Europe, and Africa to join us at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, for a 2-day interdisciplinary conference on Evolutionary Perspectives on Death. We invited some of the leading minds from disciplines such as psychology, anthropology, biology, medicine, English, and philosophy to serve as panelists for this conference. These scholars have conducted and published substantial work addressing various aspects of death and mortality from an evolutionary perspective. This volume showcases the groundbreaking empirical and theoretical work from several of these panelists and other distinguished conference guests.

The volume opens with a wide-ranging contribution from Pyszczynski, The Role of Death in Life: Exploring the Interface Between Terror Management Theory and Evolutionary Psychology. The author discusses the areas of compatibility between terror management theory (TMT)which argues that anxiety about the inevitability of death serves as a driving force in shaping many areas of human cognition and behaviorand evolutionary perspectives concerning human nature. Pyszczynski acknowledges that evolutionary psychologists have been critical of TMT, but he provides a thorough review of the considerable empirical support for TMT that has accumulated over the decades and how these findings may be integrated with evolutionary perspectives. He concludes by arguing that TMT and evolutionary perspectives on human behavior should be viewed as compatible and complementary rather than as opposing frameworks.

In Chapter , Evolutionary Perspectives on the Loss of a Twin, Segal reviews recent research concerning comparisons of grief intensity ratings provided by bereaved monozygotic (MZ or identical) and dizygotic (DZ or fraternal) twins. This researchwhich was guided by kinship-genetic theoryoffers a novel way for gaining insights into the effects of genetic and social relatedness on bereavement. She presents evidence that genetically identical (MZ) twins tend to experience more intense grief following the loss of their co-twin than do genetically nonidentical (DZ) twins which are consistent with kinship-genetic theorizing. Furthermore, both genetically identical (MZ) and genetically nonidentical (DZ) twins reported experiencing more intense grief for their deceased co-twins than for other relatives who had died during their lifetimes. Segal argues that the bereavement responses of twin survivors serve as something akin to the wail of frustrated genes.