I won't reply to the other comments cos I simply have no time. I'm sorry. I'm even gonna try to keep this one brief, cos I've reached the conclusion that there's no point debating you without an objective referee.

The entirety of the animal kingdom operates on instincts. Our DNA has hardwired those behaviours in order to aid our survival. This is why they are often referred to as "survival instincts". They are simply behaviours that aim towards the preservation and propagation of an organism through various mechanisms of natural selection such as the one of group selection.

I agree with the content, in the sense that of course there are instincts, of course there are fixed action patterns, etc., like I said many times. I disagree with what you MEAN by those things. Like I also said many times: There is no literal IN ORDER TO in nature. No teleology in nature. There is no literal AIM TOWARDS in nature.

And, my own theory, there is no survival/self-preservation instinct in nature. An organism can only be preserved by Natural Selection. It cannot preserve itself. No instinct of SELF-PRESERVATION! No survival instinct. To argue that there is, is to argue that there is an additional force in nature, besides Natural Selection, that determines whether an organism will survive, and this voodoo force comes from inside us. Like Daniel Dennett has said and all Biology agrees: there is only one game in town. Only Natural Selection. Nothing else. Survival is not up to the instincts. They are blind. They simply are what they are. An organism is what it is. A pigeon doesn't spring a white feather IN ORDER TO get preserved by humans who want to make a dove. If there are (literally) survival instincts in nature, then there's an "I want to be a dove" instinct in pigeons.

I'm okay with biologists using the term "survival" and "self-preservation" etc. cos it may make talking easier, so it has some utility, as long as the biologists know that you don't need anything more than Natural Selection to explain why and how organisms survive.

Instincts exist, but they get selected for or against just like everything else, like the shape of our cells, the color of our hair, etc. It makes no more sense to call something a survival instinct than to call my hair color a survival color. It's simply the color that has survived.

This is why a cat will run away if you attack it when there are no newborn kittens for her to defend but will stand her ground even if it causes her own death if she has some.

I'm just picking this one out of the many examples you gave. Whether the cat flees or fights, you would still call it a survival instinct. That's why your theory is unfalsifiable. But if I call it a "fight instinct", then it's falsifiable, because if it doesn't fight, then I'm wrong, and there's no such instinct. If I call it a "flight instinct", then again, if the cat flees I'm right, if it fights I'm wrong. It's a falsifiable concept. The survival instinct isn't. And that's why survival instinct =/= specific instinct. Especially the way you use it, like some kind of universal force in nature that permeates all life and, according to your own words, "is the meaning of life".

For the sake of discussion I would like to challenge anyone to come up with a human behaviour that is not directly bound to a fixed action pattern. Please make sure to support your argument with evidence.

There is no human behavior that isn't either the result of Natural Selection OR has simply "slipped through the cracks" or "piggy-backed". If that's what you mean, then you're right.

I just want to mention again something I mentioned in my post, cos I knew it directly from Darwin but now I googled it and found an interesting word (it's to be found between square brackets): the struggle for existence. Darwin explicitly mentions, in his chapter of the same name in the Origin of Species, that he means it metaphorically. I'm not sure whether in the link the stress is on "competition between living things" or "to survive", or if both are taken to be the same thing. Whatever it is, Darwin clearly realized it was a metaphor: organisms can't literally struggle for existence/life (i.e. to survive). It's just a useful metaphor.

Like I said, this is pointless without a referee, so I'm moving the discussion to steemSTEM, cos that's what they asked of us: a scientific debate. If I ask them to read our posts, no one will. They're long and rambling anyway. So I'll just make these points there, and hopefully there'll be a biologist who might be interested in offering his views.