Lieju said:
You'd need to look on how the xenomorphs act with each other.
Well, they certainly have problem solving skills, but they are not empathetic towards one another. In Alien 4, they gang up on one of their own and viciously slaughter it to use its acid blood to escape their cages. That's smart in a gruesome "for the greater good"-kind of way, but not really indicative of particularly social behaviour.
I think the comparison to soldier ants somebody made in this thread is kind of neat in that they clearly don't care about individual aliens' survival; they will throw lesser specimens in the line of fire and kill their own if they perceive it to be of overall benefit. They are calculating but without mercy towards every living thing, including themselves. The only possible exception might be the queens and their eggs, which would make sense as they are the only kinds of individuals necessary for survival of the species. Protecting them at the cost of losing loads of soldier and worker specimens makes sense.
Anyway, to add to this, there are a lot of indicators that xenomorphs are biologically designed weapons and that the ship they were first found in was actually a sort of bomber, a bomber carrying weapons of mass destruction, basically. The Space Jockey (the fossilized pilot they find there) being infested and killed was presumably an accident, like a bomb going off before it is at its destination. This is further supported by Prometheus, although I don't really think of that movie as canon too much. But it adds to it, I guess. Still, it's implied in the very first Alien movie already.
If you were to design a biological weapon like that, there is little reason to give it empathy. It does require some basic sense of self-preservation to avoid losing a lot of its effectiveness though (lest it pointlessly jump into holes and kill itself or something or enemy forces could figure out a single strategy that would always work against them; they need to be able to adapt to be useful), which would explain aliens' reaction to fire and other obvious threats. At the same time, they do view a lot of their forms as expendable, which is why they rushed quite a number of xenomorphs into the auto-turrets in Aliens (2) before ceasing the pointless assault (they couldn't know the guns were almost out of ammo, so the assault would actually have succeeded if they had kept it up a little longer): You wouldn't want to let their survival instinct overrule their main function, which is to be an expendable soldier, a weapon.
By the way, the OP puts a lot of emphasis on "survivor". Personally, I never interpreted that as a "poor, misunderstood, alone survivor, the last of its kind there" or something like that, but more as a description of how it is designed: Capable of withstanding most environmental threats, requiring little food or sleep, being rather single-minded in its hunt etc.. It's a survivor, i. e. a creature well designed for survival... in a combat zone, basically.
