V iewing the somber image just depicted with the eyes of a biologist, I find a single culprit: natural selection. I use the word “culprit” metaphorically, of course—no guilt is involved—but the term is not entirely inappropriate. Natural selection, this all-powerful driving force of biological evolution, has privileged in our genes traits that were immediately favorable to the survival and proliferation of our ancestors, under the conditions that prevailed there and then, with no regard for later consequences. This is intrinsic to the process of natural selection, which sees only the immediate present and does not foresee the future. Note that I refer here only to genetically acquired traits. I leave out traits that were acquired by cultural evolution and transmitted by education. These will be considered later.
Human traits retained by natural selection have proved extraordinarily fertile. Without attempting an exhaustive inventory of those traits, which is beyond our scope at present, I find among them a number of individual properties, including intelligence, inventiveness, skillfulness, resourcefulness, and ability to communicate, which we owe to the remarkably performing brains we have acquired in the last few million years, qualities that have generated the fantastic scientific and technological achievements responsible for our success.
But the selected traits have also included selfishness, greed, cunning, aggressiveness, and any other property that ensured immediate personal gain, regardless of later cost to oneself or to others. The worldwide financial crisis that hit like a storm in the fall of 2008 illustrates in particularly dramatic fashion how such traits still persist in today’s world. On the other hand, natural selection has little favored qualities, such as long-term prevision, prudence, a sense of responsibility, and wisdom, which would have proved advantageous only in the long run. Their fruits would have appeared too late for that.
On the collective level, natural selection has privileged traits, such as solidarity, cooperativeness, tolerance, compassion, and altruism, up to personal sacrifice for the common good, which are the foundations of human societies. But selection of those traits has generally been restricted to the members of groups. The negative counterpart of those “good” traits has been defensiveness, distrust, competitiveness, and hostility toward the members of other groups, the seeds of the conflicts and wars that landmark the entire history of humanity up to our day.
It probably all goes back to the time when small bands of prehumans competed for the best resources offered to them by the African forests and savannahs, perhaps even much earlier, as group solidarity is a characteristic of many animal societies. At first, the group was defined by kinship—with the accent on family, clan, or tribe—as it had to be for the traits to become genetically imprinted. Later, the group expanded to encompass shared territories, shared needs, shared interests, shared privileges, shared beliefs, shared values, shared prejudices, shared hatreds, shared anything that could serve to unite “us against them.” Domineering nationalisms and religious fundamentalisms play this uniting role today.
The genetically determined search for immediate profit, whether individual or collective, also explains our irresponsible exploitation of natural resources and lack of concern for the nefarious consequences of our activities, the effects of which are now threatening the future of our species and of much of the living world. Anything that goes beyond the immediate future, whether relating to our retirement, our life expectancy, the fate of our children and grandchildren, or the date of the next elections, to mention only a few familiar deadlines, hardly preoccupies most of us.
All those facts are known and abundantly denounced by the media. What I, as a biologist, have wished to emphasize in this book is that they are the outcome of traits that are inborn, written and sustained in our genes by natural selection. They were useful in the past, at a certain stage of our evolution, but have become destructive. They are a natural burden that we assume at birth. This defect of human nature has not escaped the sagacity of our ancestors.
The wise men of the past knew nothing of DNA or of natural selection. But they knew enough about heredity to write the history of humankind in terms of successive generations going back to the first parents. They also knew enough about human nature to perceive in it a fundamental flaw inherited from the parents and transmitted from generation to generation. They thus imagined, in order to explain this hereditary stain in terms of notions that were familiar to them, the marvelous myth of original sin, situated in the nostalgic site of paradise lost. Not to yield to utter despair, they have invented the idea of salvation, the redeeming act that would save humanity from its downfall. This myth still inspires today the beliefs, hopes, and behaviors of a good part of humankind. That is why calling natural selection the “culprit,” as I have done in the beginning of this chapter, was not entirely inappropriate, except that no culpability, in the proper sense of the word, is involved. There is no Eve to blame, no serpent, no dangerous fruit, only natural selection, necessarily blind, mindless, devoid of foresight and responsibility.
Less romantic than the account of Genesis, the proposed notion has the merit of being founded on reality. Instead of calling on a hypothetical redeemer totally beyond our control, it confers on humanity itself the power and responsibility to erase the original stain or, at least, to counteract its effects. We are indeed, of all living beings on Earth, the only ones that are not slavishly subject to natural selection. Thanks to our superior brains, we have the ability to look into the future and to reason, decide, and act in the light of our predictions and expectations, even against our immediate interest, if need be, and for the benefit of a later good. We enjoy the unique faculty of being able to act against natural selection.
The problem is that, in order to do this, we must actively oppose some of our key genetic traits, surmount our own nature. The last part of this book will be devoted to this challenge.