This particular one wasn't going anywhere useful.

That's presumably why the comment said "when [collective they] finally get lucky", not "when [individual they] inevitably get lucky".

A certain percentage of your species having genes encouraging risky/stupid behavior is likely somewhat useful.

It's convenient that colonies of penguins only live where there is food. One wonders how they got there, perhaps god set them there to live for eternity.

I get what you're saying and all, but when you look back across the hundreds of millions of years of evolution, the whole reason humans exist is the extreme and sometimes arbitrary individual choices and "that never happens" situations that are exceptions to niche saturation. You could take the glass half empty, cold and pragmatic view and focus on the fact that millions, or maybe even tens of millions of antisocial/adventurous/moronic penguins have to get wanderlust and die frozen and alone before you might even get a single successful breeding pair, but who wants to look at life like that?

Most badass penguins don't make it. Being the badass penguin isn't a sensible life goal. The altar of time demands the blood sacrifice of nearly all the badass penguins before progress and change is allowed. Occasionally, though, they win, and new species are born. The exceptions end up forking the timeline, and provide a backdrop of meaning to the sacrifice of all those who came (or went?) before.

The thing I love most is the fact that you can project anything on to the penguin, from extreme heroism, to villainy, to meaninglessness, or even profound cosmic purpose. I'd love to know what the evolutionary psychology / behavior is that actually causes it, though.

> They usually just wander off to die alone in the cold.

Usually! But not always.

Every once in a while, one probably makes it to another colony many miles away, and helps prevent inbreeding as a result.

Or runs into a similar weirdo somewhere in between.

This leaving the group to die can also be observed in other species (cats and dogs do this too).

So this penguin knew its time was up and didn’t want to mess up the colony with its dead body.

We interpret the behaviour through our lenses and experiences.

Human explorers aren't necessarily terribly rational. A bunch of ordinary human pride is involved.

The base on the actual South Pole, far on the interior of the continent, isn't McMurdo where much of that documentary was filmed, it is Amundsen-Scott, and it's named for two teams of explorers who first reached that pole in the same summer, Amundsen (whose team reached it first and returned alive) and Scott (whose team was second and all died)

Scott's plan was crap. To a considerable extent that view is hindsight, but even at the time Scott must have known Amundsen's plan was better. Certainly by the time they reached the Pole and found that they'd been beaten to it, he will have been sure. By that time he was in extreme danger, slowly starving and with a long trek back to any permanent shelter - it would have taken excellent luck (which he didn't get) to make it home alive, and in any case he'd been beaten to the pole.