Genetics of Original Sin (19 page)

In their expansion, humans have invaded every part of our planet, from below sea level to the highest mountaintops, from tropical forests to frozen steppes and ice fields, from lush savannahs and prairies to the driest deserts, from the Earth's surface to the depths of oceans, the air above us, and even the Moon and distant space. Unlike other living species, they have not achieved their successes by developing appropriate physical adaptations; they have done it with their intelligence.

They have used the powers of their brains to subjugate the world, domesticating much of the biosphere to obtain their food and fuel, as well as the raw materials they have used to manufacture their clothes, shelters, ships, weapons, hunting gear, fishing implements, and countless other devices. They have turned mud into bricks, clay into pots, sand into glass, rocks into cement, mortar, and concrete. They have quarried stones for building houses, temples, and roads. They have extracted minerals from the Earth to produce copper, iron, tin, aluminum, and other metals, which they have used as such or converted into a powerful set of new materials, including bronze and, especially, steel, which has transformed the world. With these products, they have built cities, harbors, highways, bridges, factories, and machines. They have invented engines to work for them, and exploited natural energy sources, including the fossilized remains of ancient biospheres, to fuel those machines. They have discovered electricity as a transportable form of energy, generated at one end from heat, falling water, sunlight, wind or, even, the atom, and converted at the other end into heat, lighting, cooling, mechanical work, and other useful actions. They have woven a dense transportation and communication network around the planet. They have, by the wonders of chemistry, transformed simple materials into all kinds of artificial substances, including plastics and drugs. They have made telephones, radios, television sets, computers, robots, and all the other electronic devices that support our technological age. With the help of some of these tools, they have explored the depths of the universe, the nature of matter, the secrets of life, and the mysteries of the mind. They have succeeded in mastering nature to the point of engineering life almost at will and of unleashing the huge amounts of energy stored in atoms. They have created music, art, litera
ture, philosophy, and religion, which are, with science, the pillars of human civilization.

There is no story like it. After more than three and a half billion years of slowly evolving life, almost imperceptibly giving rise to microbes, plants, fungi, and animals of increasing complexity, a single species among the many millions born from this development has suddenly exploded into overwhelming world dominance within no more than a few millennia, most of it within the last few centuries, roughly the equivalent of the last minute if life had started one year ago.

Amazingly, these collective achievements have been accomplished despite perpetual strife or, sometimes, because of it. Human history, from the time records have become available and, probably, before that, has been an endless succession of battles, wars, crusades, conquests, invasions, massacres, colonizations, and enslavements of various kinds. Most of the monuments that adorn our marketplaces and village squares are representations of triumphant emperors, kings, generals, admirals, liberators, and other warriors. Or, usually more modestly displayed, they are tributes to the millions who have lost their lives for the sake of victory—or defeat—as celebrated by the poet Horace, who, two thousand years ago, encouraged the young Romans with the obscenely famous verse: “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (It is sweet and decorous to die for one's country).

Even in peace, competition has remained, directly or by proxy, the most widely, passionately, and, sometimes, violently practiced form of entertainment, with arenas, stadi
ums, and sports fields replacing bloody battlefields as outlets for our thirst for combat. Business and commerce also are strongly competitive, with few holds barred. So is politics. Even academe has its battles for tenure, prizes, and peer recognition; art and music have their contests. All these manifestations, whether bellicose or peaceful, are rooted in the depths of our being. The warring instinct is embedded in human nature.

In a different register, human history has been a savage, collective exploitation and wanton destruction of natural resources, living and nonliving, for the sake of immediate benefit with little or no regard for long-term consequences. The living world has become impoverished, species are being lost every day, energy and other resources are nearing exhaustion, the environment is deteriorating, pollution is everywhere, climate is changing, natural balances are threatened. Especially, human beings are being crushed by their own number. Overcrowded cities are spawning increasingly lawless suburbs. Waste is accumulating in and around them, straining the capacity to deal with it. Vast areas are witness to the struggles of destitute populations trying to survive under unlivable conditions. In spite of the advances of medicine, deathly epidemics are more menacing than ever before. Conflicts, exacerbated by economic disparities, nationalisms, and fundamentalisms, are raging in various parts of the world. The specter of a nuclear holocaust has become thinkable.

For all these reasons, the exponential pace of human expansion may be about to flatten into a logistic curve, with the limit being set by the finite dimension and resources of planet Earth. This enforced flattening, if it occurs naturally, is bound to be achieved at the cost of enormous human suffering through famine, deprivation, disease, environmental assaults, and internal strife.

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.

T
he wisdom of the ages enjoins us to draw lessons from the past in preparing the future. This is what I have attempted to do in this book, going back to the most distant past to draw the lessons that could help humanity respond to the deathly menaces that weigh on its future. Such is the object of this last part. Here, I consider seven options, which are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

O
ur first option is to do nothing and let nature take its course. In that case, there can be little doubt about the outcome.

The signs are unmistakable. Humans have unwillingly and, even, unwittingly, by unbridled pursuit of immediate benefits, endangered their own survival to such an extent that, for all we know, the point of no return may already have passed. Under the mercilessly indifferent law of natural selection, this blind, suicidal course can only continue until it is brought to a halt by its own consequences. Natural selection has no foresight.