Examples Of Instinct In 'Is Survival Selfish'

What is an instinct, the definition of an instinct is “an innate, typically fixed pattern of behavior in animals in response to certain stimuli.”(Oxford Languages) When faced with a survival situation many people without high-quality natural survival skills will most likely perish. Without a high-quality natural response (instinct) most individuals would be incapable of outliving a survival crisis. Good natural survival instincts are the most important thing to surviving a crisis. To survive you need to have good survival instincts and courage. In the story ‘Is Survival Selfish’ one friend has to decide to cut the rope and drop the friend, to survive. (Wallace pg.#441) This is an example of instinctive survival because his instinct was to cut his friend off so that he could have a chance to survive. This would have also taken a lot of courage to potentially kill his friend, and most definitely put him in danger to

Self-preservation is crucial, without surviving you obviously will not survive. Anna Avalon kept herself alive while performing an act by grabbing onto a braided wire to save herself and her kid. (Erdrich 426) This was an excellent example of this instinct, because without the self-preservation instinct, she would have not grabbed the wire, and although the wire ended up burning her hands(Erdrich 426) and hurting herself she was able to keep herself alive. Which in the end was all that mattered. Another example of self-preservation is Alvarenga. Alvarenga was stuck on a small boat at sea for thirteen months, before he found land and was found by civilization. (Oleniuk) with being the only person to survive that long at sea in those conditions eating raw fish, and jellyfish, and drinking turtle blood. (Oleniuk) This is an extreme example of someone using self-preservation, to insure survival, he was willing to do whatever it took to survive, and true self