You hear it in wildlife documentaries, narrated by deep solemn voices that leave little room for doubt. You read it in articles hosted by universities. You see it in scientific opinion pieces, and you meet it in newspapers. PNAS (the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) isn't afraid of using it, and if so, why should psychologists?

I'm talking about the survival instinct. Also known as the instinct of self-preservation. I will be arguing the thesis that the survival instinct is a misnomer, a misunderstanding, a misperception, a misbelief , a ... what do you call it ... a misconception!

Two birds, one stone*

_{*No relation to 2 Girls, 1 Cup - though bird can mean girl in UK English.}

A secondary aim of this post will be to show that we can use philosophical methodology to learn things about the outside empirical world simply by studying the meanings of words. So I won't be linking to scientific literature. Much. Yes: good ol' armchair philosophizing! You know, the kind that mathematicians and theoretical physicists and theoretical biologists and theoretical everything do all the time. Nothing wrong with that. Linus Pauling worked out some of the structure of proteins while bedridden. Nothing wrong with that either. Hopefully by the time you've finished reading this, you'll agree.

Let's build an organism

I could just tell you how Nature does stuff (hint: Origin of Species), but wouldn't it be more interesting if we found out first-hand? Let's figure out how Nature did it, by doing it ourselves! Let's make an organism, built to survive!

Okay. So. How do you write a survival instinct into an organism? How do you program an organism to survive?

I know! Give it properties that will aid its survival. Let's go with a thick coat, strong long claws like an anteater's, Spiderman-like wall-scaling like a gecko, and ...

Wait a minute. If it has strong long claws, then it won't be able to use van der Waals forces to scale walls like a gecko. If it has a thick coat, it might do fine in cold climates, but it will be penalized the warmer the climate gets.

I know! My cats shed their fur when the climate adds Fahrenheits. So let's make our organism be a chameleon. Not the animal chameleon, silly you! A new chameleon that springs claws whenever it wants to destroy a termite mound, becomes a fish when it comes into contact with water, becomes a bird when it accidentally falls off a cliff. It's like The Crew 2!

There, we did it, an omni-adaptive organism!

Either a gecko's foot, or a Greek mountza.

An omni-adaptive organism is expensive

Unfortunately, what we've described in the last section, will come at a cost. We actually have to pay for all those bells and whistles. They don't come attached along with the basic model.

Consider this: if the environment is stable - let's say it's always cold - an organism that only codes for a thick coat will outsurvive an organism that can also (also = more code) shed its coat when the climate gets hotter, because less coding means less genes means less expense means less maintenance.

Of course, we could just program the organism to shed the gene that makes it shed its coat, if the environment becomes stable.

"And what if the environment becomes unstable again?"

Got it covered! We'll just program the animal to get the gene back when... Oh. The organisms can't just pick the gene off the floor. It has to make it somehow all by itself.

Plus, there's no teleology in nature, and not only have we made ourselves a designer with all this, we've made ourselves an interventionist one.

Well, it's back to the drawing board.

But before we do that, let's throw in an unrelated picture so that readers assessing this article for boringness before committing to reading it will think it's less boring than it really is.

"Oh, look, pictures! Worth reading!"

How to make an organism that will kick survival's butt - Part deux

I know what we need to do. We need to put ourselves behind a Rawlsian veil of ignorance.

Okay, a little background. Basically, the Rawlsian veil of ignorance is a way of ensuring the morality of a political system, by making you ignorant of your properties. So let's say you and everyone else sit around a table and try to decide on the best political system. It's just like regular democratic deciding, only difference is, you're ignorant of all your properties. Are you black? Are you white? Are you a woman? Are you a man? Are you an immigrant? Are you an oil tycoon? Are you a trans? Are you poor? Are you rich? Are you talented? Are you stupid? Are you happy? Are you sad? You know nothing. It will all be revealed to you only after you make your decisions. So this is supposed to lead to fairer law-making, or help you realize when your opinions are based solely on self-interest, race, sex, class, etc.

So, let's apply this to organism-making! We're situated behind the Rawlsian veil of ignorance. We know nothing about what the world out there is like. Cold climes? Warm climes? We're very ignoramus about those things. What we'd like to do, is build an organism that will be able to maximize survival whatever the world happens to be like.

So how do we do that?

Well, let's not pretend to be completely ignorant. Let's instead take a page out of ol' Darwin's Origin of Species. Or Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. But first, let's simplify the language.

Simplifying the language

Animals have lots of tendencies, instincts, behaviors, things they like to do. Fish go into panic mode when they're taken out of the water, cats go into panic mode when they're thrown into the water. Some animals like fruits. Other animals like meat. For short, I will refer to all these tendencies, instincts, behaviors, traits, etc., by the name values. Even the need to urinate will be called a value. You value urinating when the tank's full! Values are basically units of preferences or tendencies or behaviors that can be picked out and selected for or against by the process of natural selection. In this sense, even the color of your hair will be called a value, because Nature can pick it out and favor you or penalize you for it.

So. Values. How do make organisms survive in an environment we know nothing about? Well, we just create organisms with fluctuating values. (Fluctuating = randomly varying. Cf. the Dawkins quote: "Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.") Doesn't matter how we do it. We make the copying process an unfaithful and error-prone one, so that every time you pass on your values to your offspring, there's a chance the value will be different (brown eyes become green eyes), and that might somehow be more in line with the changing environment. Or we create a big bulky star-sun that will emit radiation that will cause mutations in our "values" (genes). Doesn't matter. All that matters is that every time an organism procreates, there's a chance a mutation will occur, and there's a chance it will make its host better adapted to its environment than the earlier version.

Some more irrelevant pictures before we move on.

Let's get them into a different position this time.

Success!

There it is! We did it! We created an organism that will survive! In other words, we created an organism with a ... a survival instinct? Wait a minute...

Does will survive = survival instinct? Every organism has values. Some survive, and some don't survive. But Natural Selection could easily pick any one of them. Does it mean that an instinct exists depending on what will happen in the future? Or does it mean all organisms have a survival instinct, and some survival instincts survive, and some do not survive? That's some second-order natural selecting right there!

Let's go over what we did for a second. We made an organism that will survive. Or at least we maximized its chances. How did we do that? We made it flexible. We didn't put fixed values in it (inflexible). We put fluctuating values (flexible/adaptable). Because of this, when the environment changes, a random mutation can find itself favored.

But note that the creature we made cannot alter its values at will in order to survive. It does not see water and immediately change into a fish. That was plan A, and we ditched plan A! It required a lot of expense and a conscious designer. An organism is still fixed, until it procreates. Mutations can appear in the next generation. But a given organism's allegiance is only to its values. It will never choose life over its values. Why? Because it can't! Life/Nature/Natural Selection will choose whether to favor or disfavor the organism's values. The organism can't have an instinct of self-preservation. Preservation is what natural selection does - it's the only thing it does - it's not up to the organism. The organism parades in front of the judge, it doesn't make the ruling, it cannot self-preserve. An organism just sticks to its value-guns, and then Life/Nature/Natural Selection decides whether to preserve or kill it. The newly hatched turtle will move toward the ocean whatever happens. It has this instinct: "live or die, I will move toward the ocean".

So it seems we have made an organism that survives, but does not have survival as its goal. Who knew: there's no teleology in nature! Everything can be explained by the past, the future need not enter into it.

Cause and consequence

Here's where I think the confusion lies. A factory, as a result of its work, produces smoke. That doesn't mean that the goal of the factory's operations is to produce smoke. The factory does not have an "instinct of producing smoke". It's a by-product of its real goal, which is, let's say, to make toys. (I know, toys for children and environmental pollution. I like contrast, what can I say.)

Similarly, because animals' values (behaviors, instincts, etc.) by and large and almost exclusively and with pin-point accuracy lead to survival, we are often fooled into thinking that survival must be the goal of these animals. It's a logical error - a fallacy, in fact - the same one Freud made when he observed that all living organisms die, therefore death must be the ultimate goal of every living being! (Instinct of death? Instinct of self-annihilation?)

I guess he put a nail to that coffin.

I mean, is Freud wrong? If we're gonna call something a survival instinct simply because it has survived, it's only fair to call those instincts that didn't survive, death instincts. And if we do that, it's pretty clear which instincts are more prevalent. After all, 99% of all species that ever existed have gone extinct. It appears we're living in a world whose primary guiding force is death!

That's steam, not steem. There's no way you can profit from this.

How do we survive, if survival isn't our goal?

Natural selection, female dog!

Nature selects (not consciously, of course!) those "values" that are more adaptive to the current environment, so that the end-impression is that those values aim at survival. Is a squirrel hoarding nuts because it's preparing for the winter? No it's not! That's an extra assumption! Squirrels who engaged in nut-hoarding behavior were selected by nature. That's all there is to it. No teleology necessary. A lion doesn't think about survival: it just likes the taste of fresh deer. And if that value of his wasn't good for survival (if, say, deer were poisonous), that lion would go extinct, and the lion that would survive would be the one that developed the mutation to avoid deer. Those two lions have different instincts/values, but they don't have different survival instincts. Nature's favoritism could have easily gone the other way. Truth is, the internal world and constitution of the lion that has gone extinct would be exactly the same even if it had survived. Whether or not the deer is poisonous or healthful determines whether the lion will survive, but it does not determine whether the lion has a survival instinct. Let's not confuse consequence with cause. Many investors would wish that only their winning investments were called investments, but unfortunately it's not the result that determines whether or not you made an investment. I can't wait for the ticket to win to claim I bought it afterwards. Organisms appear, they are what they are, and Life decides whether they'll survive. Everyone has bought their ticket, and we can't sell it back.

Consider this picture, relevant this time:

Pictured are a moth with a Freudian death instinct and a moth with a biological survival instinct. Too bad it's one and the same moth: Biston betularia.

Study question: Do instincts come and go according to factory polution?

Study question 2: Are moths internally conflicted, or do they abide only by their values, which are then selected for or against by Life/Nature/Natural Selection?

The worm and the hook and the fisherman

Jesus made his fame on parables. So let me try my hand at one. The parable of the worm and the hook and the fisherman! Who knows, maybe I'll inspire a cult.

Suppose humans have been made privy to an imminent massive poisoning of the world's seas and lakes, which will kill most of the world's marine life. In their attempt to save the world's marine life, governments pay fishermen a certain amount of money for every fish caught and kept alive. Being caught by the fishermen ensures the survival of the fish. If what the fish value is attached to the fisherman's hook, the fish will live. If not, they will die. But the mere fact that fish get caught on the hook does not mean that the fish aimed for the hook. The fish aimed for the worm - the thing attached to the hook. The fish didn't want the hook, they simply wanted to satisfy their hunger.

Unpacking the parable (that looks already half-unpacked), we get this:

The fisherman = Natural Selection
The hook = Survival
The worm = (the object the organism) Values

The fish cares about its hunger, not about the fisherman. Being caught by the fisherman (selected by Nature) is not the fish's goal. Its goal is to catch and eat the worm.

No organism cares about survival ("the hook")—but it may well happen to value things that lead to survival ("the worm").

End of parable.

Hmm. I think I'll have to do better than this if I'm ever to gain Jesus-status.

The parable of dogs playing fetch - another attempt at infinite fame

Imagine dogs playing "fetch" in a land where the ground is invisible. Every time a dog jumps it does not know whether it will land on solid ground or in a swamp that will devour it whole. All the dogs want to do is to catch flying sticks that are launched in different directions. The dogs have their preferences: some prefer sticks that are launched in a northerly direction, others prefer sticks that are launched in a southerly direction; some prefer longer sticks and others prefer shorter sticks; etc. When a dog leaps, it does not know whether it is leaping toward its death. Since the ground is invisible, no dog can aim for life (that is, no dog can aim for solid ground). They can only aim for sticks. Only after they have landed do we know whether they are standing on solid ground ("have survived"). This process of "leaping for the sticks" some prefer to describe as a "struggle for life" or a "struggle for survival." If these terms mean "the struggle to find solid ground" then I find them objectionable. If they mean "leaping for the sticks" then I embrace these terms.

There, lasting fame achieved.

Wait, is that a parable or an analogy? Let's compare it to something that's definitely an analogy.

The pigeon analogy

To say that a certain animal exists because it has a survival instinct, is like saying that the white pigeon exists because it has an "I want to satisfy humans' color-preferences" instinct.

The human does the selecting, choosing which colors ("values") to preserve. The pigeon does not aim to get selected.

By using artificial selection, I make the wolf into a poodle. That doesn't mean wolves have a "poodle instinct". What natural selection does is select who will survive. That doesn't mean organisms have survival instincts.

*Note that the last three examples are not arguments. They are, rather, what Daniel Dennett calls intuition pumps.

Falsifiable?

It's perfectly possible to lack an instinct. I for example lack the instinct of spraying my urine on trees so that other humans passing by will know I was there. This makes the hypothesis that I have instinct X falsifiable. I.e. testable. Let's say I make the hypothesis that an animal has a flight (in the sense of fleeing) instinct: whenever it's attacked, it runs away. Let's formulate my hypothesis as an "if...then..." conditional statement: "if the animal is attacked, it will run away." So if the animal is attacked and does run away, that's evidence that my hypothesis is correct. If it's attacked and instead of fleeing, it fights, then my hypothesis is wrong, and the animal does not possess a flight instinct.

But what happens when we try to falsify a survival instinct? If the animal runs away, it's a survival instinct. If it stays and fights, again it's a survival instinct. It appears everything is a survival instinct! An unfalsifiable statement is anathema to science!

Did the Dodos lack a survival instinct when they curiously followed the sounds of gunshots and stepped over their dead relatives and stared into the barrel of a gun to see what was going on? What if humans had never visited them, would Dodos' survival instincts be vindicated? We can check whether Dodos have a curiosity instinct, a flight instinct, a fight instinct, a fear instinct - but how do we check whether they have a survival instinct?

Why this misconception bothers me

Human brains are suckers for teleology. Darwin's theory of Natural Selection put a final end to any of that. Life is decidedly not teleological. In his chapter Struggle for Existence of The Origin of Species, Darwin says that he uses the term "Struggle for Existence" in a metaphorical sense. Take the examples Darwin uses right after this admission: it is clear that the canines are struggling for food, not survival; that the plant is struggling for light and water, not survival; etc.—Nowhere in nature is there any evidence of any struggle for life. (But it is true that beings may struggle for life: that is, for the duration of their life!)

However, some argue teleological language is unavoidable. That's why I take no issue with the words themselves - they could be serving some utility - as long as the people using them know they are only meant metaphorically.

All teleological terms can be replaced by causal terms. Doesn't mean they have to, but when we do use teleological language, we should be aware of it:

Teleological thinking conceals a (mistaken) linear concept of evolution, an evolutionary change endowed with an (unconfessed) functional essence. Terms like "function" and "purpose" (or "objective") can be replaced by terms such as "consequence" or "result," indicating an absence of direction. Evolutionary linearity and functionality lead to the underlying - and mistaken - notion that in the process of natural selection the survival of the species is more important than its elimination. The non-teleological, non-purposive characteristic of the theory of natural selection was brilliantly summarized by Stephen Jay Gould (1977, p.90): "Extinction is the fate of most species."

I'm the first one, as far as I know, to apply this teleology argument to the idea that survival instincts do not exist. Biologists, however, as can be seen from the quote, have been at it for a long time. I don't mind teleological language. What I do mind is teleological thinking. And, along with language, unfortunately, often the thinking creeps in. This is why I think this topic is important, and why this misconception bothers me.

And it's not just the sciences

This pervasive idea that organisms struggle for survival has misled thinkers from many disciplines, philosophers included. Nietzsche, for instance, did not realize that our separation from life is absolute and irreversible, and so he thought that the Christians alone were guilty of putting their values before their life. Truth is, like an animal who loves us only so long as we feed it, so we only love life so long as it coincides with our values. Otherwise, there will be nothing left to love. This error has also caused philosophers to overlook the role values play in ethics, in the meaning of life, in issues of personal identity, etc. It has surely affected the understanding of psychologists too. I will touch on some of this issues now.

So let's now walk away from science, and see how this new understanding of Life vs Values as I have presented it can help us make sense of some features of human life, like love of life, but also depression and suicide. Generally, what we call meaning in life. This will further underscore why getting the facts straight about teleology is important.

Life as a goal

"Are you saying life isn't our primary goal, or are you saying that it's utterly impossible to aim for survival?"

I'm saying it's utterly impossible! No evolutionary trait can be equated with survival. There is no necessary relation between value/trait/behavior A, B, C, etc. and survival, because survival is contingent upon circumstances: here survival is promoted by doing A, there by doing B, somewhere else by doing C.

It cannot be said that he who survives is "thus-and-thus" (say, is bulky and has a thick coat), because "thus-and-thus" is something particular and unchanging, whereas what one needs to be in order to survive varies depending on the circumstances. Thus, the properties one needs in order to survive in a given environment cannot be universalized: there cannot be any property that promotes survival always and everywhere.

You cannot aim for a priori survival, for it means nothing out of context. The concept of survival becomes meaningless when it is removed from a specific context. We have already seen that an organism is fixed. Everybody has made their bets. There's no bettors with a "winning instinct". There's a bet, and there's the result of the bet. That's it.

Life's guiding principle

If the will to life is life’s guiding principle, then it is one that can never be violated. This idea is contradicted by the facts, for it does not explain why so many people are willing to sacrifice their life for the sake of freedom or democracy or some other ideal. It is simply not true that man wants to live no matter what. In other words it is not true that man wants to live above all else or unconditionally. If we are looking for the meaning of life, or life's guiding force, then we are looking for something inviolable. Values satisfy the criterion of inviolability. Since man would rather abandon life than live under a regime that contradicts his values, it does not make much sense to claim that the will to life is the driving force behind all his actions. Rather, the will to maintain our current values is the strongest force in all life, and it comes before the so-called "will to life", as the existence of suicides conclusively demonstrates.

"But I love life!"

"Then you'd love to live as an E. Coli."

After millions of years of evolution, valuing certain things (like sex and food) and surviving have become almost identical. The two paths meet, so it is easy to confuse them for the same path.

But tell any person that in order to live they will have to stop doing anything that gives their life its positive flavor, and they will revolt against life as passionately as if it were their most hated enemy! Thus is reached the apparently absurd—but entirely true—conclusion that nothing desires to live. This does not mean that any creature desires to die. It simply means that creatures do not care one way or the other. Now people will object, they will say things like: "But I do genuinely want to live: I want to travel to so many places, I want to meet interesting people, I want to learn new things, I want to see what the future holds in store." I will then simply point out that nothing of what they have just said has any necessary connection to life itself: one can die from traveling, die from meeting new people, die from having fun, etc. That one does not customarily die simply because one has met an interesting person is a fact (though people do die from germs after shaking people's hands), but it is a boring and irrelevant one. The point is that people do not want to live: they simply want to do things that are only accidentally—only contingently—associated with life and survival.

If life were indeed our sole goal and purpose, then we would value it in all its forms, and would find none of its forms objectionable. There would be no such thing as displeasure or suffering, so long as the need for survival were satisfied.

If I'm right, and life is only a vehicle for the realization of our values, then life would be desirable only so long as it promoted our values, and would cease to be desirable as soon as the opposite became the case. This is what we see happening in fact.

We are our values

There is no caring for ourself over and above caring for the values that make up who we are. One cannot abandon one's values in order to save oneself, for there is no self to be saved after one's values have been abandoned.

Suicide vs survival

We feel betrayed when Nature no longer favors us. She used to cultivate our minds, helped them reach ever-greater subtleties of spirit. Investment determines the direction of growth. When Nature suddenly pulls out her resources the structure can no longer be sustained. It falls, loudly. Nature has changed her mind. She has built a road but no longer uses it. Our values and Nature no longer walk along the same path. She has chosen another, an opposite, direction. Now to follow our values means to walk away from life.

When we lose all hope it is useless for others to urge us "you have to keep going," "keep your chin up," "you have got to be strong." These are empty words, and unless translated into something concrete they will fail in their mission. No one cares about survival. A person comes equipped with certain tools, with a certain meaning. His environment either rewards or punishes his meaning. Say for instance that I enjoy eating plankton, and plankton helps me survive. Plankton is the meaning of my life. For a long time I eat plankton and I survive. But presently circumstances suddenly change, and there is a worldwide shortage of plankton. Now I feel my life no longer has meaning. It will not help one bit if someone tells me that despite the shortage of plankton I should find some other meaning in life, for my body is so constituted that I can only live eating plankton. My stomach cannot process any other food, nor can my mind take pleasure from any other taste. I never longed for survival: I longed for plankton. Without plankton, life has no meaning to me. I hope you all get the metaphor.

Why we sometimes give up a value

Whenever life opposes a value, it is not the value that loses its significance or meaning, but life. Life no longer relates positively to our values, so we cease to care about it.

But there are circumstances under which a value that is opposed by life does lose its significance and is abandoned as a result, and that is when the value conflicts with other, more important or more numerous, values; or else when, even in the absence of direct conflict, it is still the case that in order to save the many one has to sacrifice the few. But such "utilitarian" reasoning should not be confused with our preferring life over value.

Again, a metaphor: The centipede will rather part with one of its legs than die. Some will say it chose to live and be crippled rather than die. I say it chose to lose one leg rather than one hundred.

So in instances where we seem to choose life over value, in fact we choose the many over the one (we sacrifice a lesser number of cherished values for the sake of a greater number of cherished values), or the more important over the less important (we sacrifice an item of smaller value in order to salvage an item of greater value).

Curtain

This is my entry for @suesa's challenge. Check it out here: https://steemit.com/science/@suesa/suesa-s-science-challenge-2

Study questions

_{or comment prompts}

1. What do you think, is armchair thinking worthwhile? I'd venture that even field scientists are actually just thinking most of the time!

2. Do you agree that the survival instinct does not exist? If not, can you point out an example of a survival instinct that (a) is not just another instinct and (b) merits the term "survival" instead of, let's see, any other word from the dictionary?

3. Is the term "survival instinct" a scientific concept? Is it falsifiable? How would we go about proving that a certain organism lacks it? Can this instinct be studied under lab conditions?

4. The instinct that makes turtles go for the ocean is to be found in their brains, in their DNA, etc. Where is the survival instinct to be found? Do some of these turtles have a stronger survival instinct than others? If a turtle goes the wrong way, does it have a damaged survival instinct? If that wrong way proves to be a good roundabout way of reaching the ocean while avoiding the predators that lie in wait at the beach, and if this mutated turtle subsequently has more offspring and its wacky instinct spreads, has it then proved that in fact not only did it possess a survival instinct, but in fact possessed it in droves, and that it was the other turtles that had a damaged survival instinct?

5. It is possible to use artificial selection to make an instinct stronger. (a) Describe an experiment whereby you strengthen an animal's survival instinct using artificial selection. (b) Explain why strengthening the exact opposite quality to the one you strengthened in (a) would not also count as a strengthening of the animal's survival instinct.

6. I once quipped, "What is a survival instinct? It's an instinct that has survived." Do you think there's more to the survival instinct than that?

7. Natural selection can explain all of life as we know it. It's the only theory that explains the presence of life, "the only game in town" as Richard Dawkins called it. How do you think the instinct of survival relates to the theory of natural selection? Is it the same theory rebaptized? Is it an additional force that gives further impetus to organisms to survive (thus making it "two games in town")? If an organism lacks a survival instinct, and another one possesses it, does Natural Selection look more favorably upon the latter? Is it Nature's way of lowering her workload, because she got so tired of selecting organisms manually, that she decided to put an instinct of survival inside the organisms, an instinct that would do her work for her, while she followed her true calling in life, to be a ballerina?

8. Do you think @suesa's challenge will get a weirder more unorthodox or longer entry than this one?

Sources

The first pic is modified from this. The quote is modified as well. It's my translation of a translation into Greek by Aris Dikteos, whose translation of Zarathustra is my favorite one. Here's his wiki in Greek. The English translation by Graham Parks for Oxford's World Classics reads "Only, where Life is, there too is will: though not will to life, but–thus I teach you–will to power!" Nietzsche was basically contrasting his theory of Will to Power to Schopenhauer's Will to Life. The quote bears no relation to the survival instinct, but is the result of me simply trying to find statements that can, out of context, serve as epigrams for my ideas.

The other Nietzsche quote is from his Will to Power, as translated by Walter Kaufmann. [The Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1967.] What did Nietzsche mean exactly? The quote starts with him accusing physiologists not of inventing a useless term, but of positing it as a cardinal drive. And then in the very second sentence he talks about it as completely superfluous. Was Nietzsche just brainstorming? The note wasn't published, after all. Will to Power is a collection of unpublished notes, and it was compiled by Nietzsche's Nazi sister, and heavily edited and possibly altered to agree with Nazi ideology. Another quote from Zarathustra, this time a published work, reads: "the living creature values many things higher than life itself", lending credence to the interpretation that Nietzsche didn't think self-preservation was completely impossible (like I do), but merely not a cardinal drive. At any rate, Nietzsche didn't expand on these thoughts. These couple quotes are as much as you're going to get from him.

Gecko's foot

Leaf frog.

Stretching frog.

The image source for Freud's quote is this, and the book source is Anthony Storr's Freud: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 66.

Moths. Modified.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:(1931)Peppered_Moth(Biston_betularia)_(14308485779).jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Biston_betularia(js)01_Lodz(Poland).jpg

White pigeon, also known as a dove.

Karl Popper. Modified. Quote is from his book The Logic of Scientific Discovery.

The quote that mentions Stephen Jay Gould is from:
Ribeiro, Manuel Gustavo Leitão, Larentis, Ariane Leites, Caldas, Lúcio Ayres, Garcia, Tomás Coelho, Terra, Letícia Labati, Herbst, Marcelo Hawrylak, & Almeida, Rodrigo Volcan. (2015). On the debate about teleology in biology: the notion of "teleological obstacle". História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos, 22(4), 1321-1333. Epub January 16, 2015. https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0104-59702015005000003

What you wouldn't mind being if you really valued survival above all else. Come on, the right buttock can be a perfect place to live!

The orange pics are my own words made with quozio.com.

There's a quote in the movie The Holy Mountain that says "The fish thinks about its hunger, not about the fisherman." It's a comment on selfishness and capitalism, not survival, but, like I said, I like to illustrate my ideas with irrelevant quotes. Though I didn't with this one cos I couldn't find a Holy Mountain pic with a free license!

Still working on my parables.

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