The Survival Instinct in Management and Organizational Practice: A Genealogy of Unfalsifiability

This working paper examines the survival instinct as it operates in management and organizational practice -- tracing its genealogy through philosophy, economics, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience, and evaluating the evidence from evolutionary biology, anthropology, and cognitive neuroscience that complicates a survival-instinct-centered account of human behavior. The paper argues that the framework, as currently deployed, is structured in ways that make falsification difficult: individuation of the problem locates malfunction inside the individual rather than in structural conditions, and a persistent literal/figurative ambiguity allows the framework to claim scientific authority while retreating to metaphor when challenged empirically. The practical implications for organizational practice, leadership development, and research design are examined. The paper is the first output of Human Evolution Lab (HEvLab) and clears the ground for a companion framework, Protective Design, which proposes a more empirically adequate alternative grounded in continuity-preservation rather than survival competition.