Research Program / Claims / biological-integrity-5
When survival conditions are not conducive to maintaining basic quality of life, species purposefully avoid survival or even die, or destroy offspring to avoid low-quality survival.
当生存条件不利于维持基本生活质量时，物种会目的性地回避生存甚至死亡，或毁灭后代以避免低质量生存。
Concept biological integrity · Domain Belief Dynamics and Mind–Body Regulation · testable prediction · interface 3/3 · testability 3/3 · status untested · ★ fundable
This program treats the Seth Material as a source of hypotheses, not as doctrine to be validated. Lead dossiers are AI-compiled from the corpus with a book-and-session citation after every statement; literature reviews are AI web-search summaries whose references were all DOI-verified against Crossref; the agenda draft is an AI synthesis. None of it is Seth's original text, and none of it represents scientific consensus. English fields are machine-translated; the Chinese text is authoritative.
Seth sources (book §session)
Adjudicating experiment
In fish with parental care, manipulate mild resource limitation, offspring survival prospects, and future reproductive opportunities in about 180–240 independent parent/nest units in crossover fashion, tracking nest abandonment, egg cannibalism, and subsequent reproduction for 6–12 months. Compare parental investment models with a predefined quality-of-life threshold model; also conduct reversible environment selection and recovery experiments, avoiding lethal conditions to test seeking death. Even if filial cannibalism occurs, behavior alone cannot be attributed to subjective purpose or species will.
Suggested paper title
Environmental Quality and Reproductive Prospects Predict Offspring Abandonment and Filial Cannibalism
What it would overturn
If independent confirmation shows animals act with expected quality of life as a goal, after excluding physiological exhaustion and reproductive benefits, this would revise the model that these behaviors are fully explained by physiological constraints and parental investment trade-offs.
Candidate labs / funders
Aneesh P. H. Bose — 亲代食幼与动物行为生态学; Hope Klug — 亲代照料与食幼演化; Michael B. Bonsall — 亲代投资与数学生态学
Specificity of Seth's formulation
Observable reductions in reproduction, offspring abandonment, or cannibalism are already covered by existing theory; the truly additional purposeful refusal to survive lacks criteria distinguishing adaptive behavior from subjective death intention.
Note
The rating targets the purposefulness interpretation; filial cannibalism itself has evidence, but individual behavior cannot directly be taken as species-level decisions; [Bose research homepage](https://aneeshbose.com/) provides related research leads.
Evidence (1, DOI-verified via Crossref)
Cite: Future Mind Institute, Seth Material Research Agenda, claim biological-integrity-5, https://www.seth.org.cn/en/research/claims/biological-integrity-5