The
New Scientist February 28,
2011
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20928015.400-biology
-nobelist-natural-selection-will-destroy-us.html
Biology
Nobelist: Natural selection will
destroy us
By Clint
Witchalls
We have
evolved traits that will lead to
humanity's extinction, says
Christian
de Duve - so we must learn to
overcome them
We are the
most successful species on the
planet, but you think we
will
ultimately pay the price for this
success. Why?
The cost of
our success is the exhaustion of
natural resources,
leading to
energy crises, climate change,
pollution and the
destruction
of our habitat. If you exhaust
natural resources there
will be
nothing left for your children.
If we continue in the same
direction,
humankind is headed for some
frightful ordeals, if not
extinction.
You think
that natural selection has worked
against us. How?
Because it
has no foresight. Natural
selection has resulted in traits
such as
group selfishness being coded in
our genes. These were useful
to our
ancestors under the conditions in
which they lived, but have
become
noxious to us today. What would
help us preserve our natural
resources
are genetic traits that let us
sacrifice the present for
the sake of
the future. You need wisdom to
sacrifice something that
is
immediately useful or
advantageous for the sake of
something that
will be
important in the future. Natural
selection doesn't do that;
it looks
only at what is happening today.
It doesn't care about your
grandchildren
or grandchildren's
grandchildren.
You call
this short-sightedness "original
sin". Why did you pick this
terminology?
I believe
that the writers of Genesis had
detected the inherent
selfishness
in human nature that I propose is
in our genes, and
invented
the myth of original sin to
account for it. It's an image. I
am not
acting as an exegete - I don't
interpret scripture.
How can
humanity overcome this "original
sin"?
We must act
against natural selection and
actively oppose some of our
key genetic
traits.
One
solution you propose is
population control, but isn't
this
ethically
dubious?
It is a
simple matter of figures. If you
want this planet to continue
being
habitable for everyone that lives
here, you have to limit the
number of
inhabitants. Hunters do it by
killing off the old or sick
animals in
a herd, but I don't think that's
a very ethical way of
limiting
the population. So what remains?
Birth control. We have
access to
practical, ethical and
scientifically established
methods
of birth
control. So I think that is the
most ethical way to reduce
our
population.
You also
advocate giving more power to
women. Why?
Speaking as
a biologist, I think women are
less aggressive than men,
and they
play a larger role in the early
education of the young and
helping
them overcome their genetic
heirloom.
Are you
optimistic about humankind's
future?
I'm
cautiously optimistic - very
cautiously. I try to be
optimistic
because I
prefer to give a message of hope
to young people, to say:
you can do
something about it. But in the
present, there is not much
evidence
that this is
happening.
Profile
Christian
de Duve is professor emeritus at
the Catholic University of
Louvain
(UCL), Belgium and Rockefeller
University, New York. In 1974
he co-won a
Nobel prize for his work on
cellular structure. His
latest
book, Genetics of original sin,
is published by Yale
University
Press
