Drives, wills, and horny toads

[luckyme]

I don't think animals have a will to live or a drive to procreate, those are just umbrella concepts that we see/apply from the outside but that don't actually have a counterpart on the inside.

We have many minor instincts, urges, drives, reactions that added together tend to result in our resisting death ( most of the time) and leaving offspring.

Anyone have some recent research to the contrary that could sway we over?

luckyme

[soon2bepro]

I agree with you, luckyme

Maybe this can be considered as covered in your OP, but I want to add that many people wrongly believe life seeks it's own general survival, which it why it tends to seek reproduction and avoiding death of the individual.

But from an evolutionary point of view this can be easily understood as what's been apt to survive. Obviously if a lifeform doesn't seek it's survival or reproduction, the species would die off rather quickly, and we wouldn't be seeing it today. Aside from some individual mutation which caused it to reappear.

[madnak]

You're almost certainly correct. Even in terms of the drive to procreate, it's never an on/off switch (although it functionally resembles one in many species).

[CityFan]

I agree that there is no fundamental imperative [oops, I think that term might be taken for something else...] but a mesh of biological responses which, because of natural selection, combine to make a survivalist/porecreationist organism.

That is the logical implication of evolutionary theory. I doubt you will find an intelligent scientist who doesn't agree with you.