> It's incredibly unnatural. There isn't a single organism on the planet that tries to do this.

This isn’t directly analogous to the proposal, but broadly speaking I think that it is natural for living sub-units of organisms to seek death in certain situations. For example, pancreatic insulin-producing cells collectively choose to die when they think there is too much glucose in the blood — this leads to late stages of type two diabetes. My understanding of the possible logic behind this is: a bad thing that cells can do is evolve to be cancerous (replicate too much) and insulin-producing cells are supposed to replicate more when there is lots of glucose (to make more insulin, to process the glucose). Cells that mutate to perceive extra glucose will then replicate dangerously, so at a certain point it is evolutionarily favourable for them to kill themselves instead.

So when the whole organism optimizes for life, it might lead to sub-units that seek death in certain situations. I think this occurs in various other biological contexts too.