"A best-selling book by Concordia University marketing prof Gad Saad is called Suicidal Empathy (2026).
Published by Broadside Books in 2026
The Montreal professor’s book is centered on evolutionary psychology, the idea that evolution can explain human psychology.
It’s been a bestseller; one thing that probably helped elevate its status was that the basic thesis has been panned by just the people you’d expect.
Suicidal empathy is a purported phenomenon in which excessive, misdirected and pathological forms of empathy are claimed to be destructive for the party that exhibits it. This is often claimed to happen through prioritizing compassion, understanding and empathy over logic and long-term consequences. – Wikipedia, July 19, 2026
You can hear the elite sneering, right?
As it happens, many people understand the gist of what Saad is talking about. A counselor friend once told me, “I have women in my practice who are harboring and protecting men who will probably kill them one day.” That’s pretty much a definition of the phenomenon.
My take on evolutionary psychology is that it is obviously ridiculous. The reason that Darwinism has any cachet whatsoever with the public is that most of the explanations that Darwinists offer involve issues of cladistics, speciation, and molecular biology, that the public doesn’t really know anything about. So they just take them at their word.
*But when you tell people that the reason that men have more propensity to promiscuity than women, is because male apes were able to spread their seed, but they didn’t have to or carry the babies for 9 months or take care of them after they were born, everybody knows it’s kind of nonsense.
If Darwin’s theory of evolution were true, there would be in every species a constant and ruthless competition to survive: a competition in which only a few in any generation can be winners. But it is perfectly obvious that human life is not like that, however it may be with other species.
This inconsistency, between Darwin’s theory and the facts of human life, is what I mean by ‘Darwinism’s Dilemma’. The inconsistency is so very obvious that no Darwinian has ever been altogether unconscious of it. There have been, accordingly, very many attempts by Darwinians to wriggle out of the dilemma. But the inconsistency is just too simple and direct to be wriggled out of, and all these attempts are conspicuously unsuccessful. They are not uninstructive, though, or unamusing."
*But when you tell people that the reason that men have more propensity to promiscuity than women, is because male apes were able to spread their seed, but they didn’t have to or carry the babies for 9 months or take care of them after they were born, everybody knows it’s kind of nonsense.
Evolutionary psychology just lays bare
the fairy tale nature of Darwinian theory
If Darwin’s theory of evolution were true, there would be in every species a constant and ruthless competition to survive: a competition in which only a few in any generation can be winners. But it is perfectly obvious that human life is not like that, however it may be with other species.
This inconsistency, between Darwin’s theory and the facts of human life, is what I mean by ‘Darwinism’s Dilemma’. The inconsistency is so very obvious that no Darwinian has ever been altogether unconscious of it. There have been, accordingly, very many attempts by Darwinians to wriggle out of the dilemma. But the inconsistency is just too simple and direct to be wriggled out of, and all these attempts are conspicuously unsuccessful. They are not uninstructive, though, or unamusing."
MindMatters