Survival Instinct, Where Are You?

Neil Genzlinger reviewed the first episode of the Discovery Channel’s 11 part documentary, “Life”(New York Times, 3-20-10). The lesson, it seems, is that the “core of life is an instinct for adapting to ensure survival.” Genzlinger finds “something heartening in the notion that when faced with challenge no animal, however small or overmatched, seems content to just throw in the towel.”


How about big animals? Survival should move to the top of human priorities, judging by the warnings from persons in a position to know about nuclear proliferation and possible terrorist WMD attack. The bi-partisan Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction, Proliferation and Terrorism, former Cabinet members Kissinger, Schultz and Perry, head of the International Atomic Energy Authority for twelve years Mohamed El Baradei, and many more high officials including President Obama, insist that the world must rid itself of nuclear weapons.

A law-abiding American who has never thought about elemental survival for even a minute, if told that a gunman was stalking him, after informing the police, would change his schedules and routines in a hurry. His response would be radical, uncharacteristic, and ruthless. He would move about differently at different times, interrupt his occupation and family life, flit from tree to tree if he had to be outdoors.

Why don’t we shift radically now that we are threatened as a society? The answer has something to do with the bifurcation between our individual and our social lives. As individuals, alone in a jungle and targeted, we would turn and dodge, run and swim and claw, and exhibit the animal characteristics of our non-human cousins in the television series. As tamed and even sedated members of huge social organisms called cities and nations, on the other hand, we wait for directions from on high - Washington or Moscow or Peiking.

What about these huge brains of ours, thinking again in the context of our animal heritage? Don’t they tell us when to fall back on individual resources, and how to regroup in configurations calculated to counter terrorism and end war, configurations in addition to our configuration as war-prone, weapons-obsessed nations? It is time to summon the survival instinct and rationally evade the vaunted instinct for aggression.