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Survival Essay: Is Survival Selfish?

1199 Words5 Pages

Is Survival Selfish? “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change” (Darwin). When pondering about the question if survival is selfish or not it comes with varied reactions and answers. Some may say “survival of the fittest (metaphor),” but is that really true? Not necessarily, it takes common sense, and how you react to determine how the situation will end. In survival situations, people act out in different ways depending on how one grew up. Faced with threatening situations so may act out in the “fight or flight” mode and others may instantly freeze and tense up and don 't know how to comprehend what is going on. Survival is not selfish because it is considered a natural instinct, imperative to one 's life, and it helps to go on to and save peoples lives. To some, survival is considered a “natural instinct,” and it comes naturally to one, so when faced with a dangerous situation we often tend to go to refer to this. For example, during “The 1972 Andes Flight Disaster,” some of the people that survived only did it by “collectively making a decision to eat flesh from the bodies of their dead comrades, beginning with the pilot” (CommonLit staff 7) If some people wouldn 't have done this, everyone would have died and that would make this horrifying tragedy even worse than it was. According to the story, Is Survival Selfish?, “Self- preservation is supposedly an instinct” (Wallace 317).

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