Evolutionary Suicide

Evolutionary suicide is an evolutionary mechanism where adaptation at the level of the individual results in a situation where the entire population goes extinct. This process is different from group selection, and arises where individual fitness is coupled with the fitness of the population.

An example of this would be an individual animal who learns to eat buds or seedlings of a food crop, destroying the normal supply of food that would later be available from mature plants. The adaptation of a single animal would cause the entire group to starve to death.

Models of evolutionary suicide have generally come from scientists using the mathematical modeling technique known as adaptive dynamics, where models of evolution can be combined with models of population dynamics. This allows the scientist to predict how population density will change as a given trait invades the population.

Evolutionary suicide has also been referred to as "Darwinian extinction", "Runaway selection to self-extinction" or "Evolutionary collapse". The idea is similar in concept to the Tragedy of the Commons or the Tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

As such, evolutionary suicide remains a theoretical possibility. Very few studies have actually demonstrated it, either in the laboratory or in nature, but this is due to the difficulties associated with observing the exact causes of an extinction.