What is Progenetics?

Progenetics is a general, scientific, and philosophical approach based on a fundamental question stemming from molecular biology and the mechanisms of heredity: are the constraints imposed on us by culture compatible with the genetic data specific to human beings?

This question arises in all areas of human activity. We have a number of vital needs that require fulfillment and do not necessarily find the conditions favorable to their expression or realization in our form of civilization. Many of these needs are psychological: the need to be respected, loved, understood, protected, informed, etc. Others are physiological: the need for clean air, healthy food, unpolluted water, sleep, physical activity, rest, etc.

An individual who is systematically deprived of sleep will, after a few days, develop serious psychological problems; they will eventually fall asleep in any situation, even if it puts them in mortal danger (while driving a car). Someone deprived of all water becomes dehydrated and exhibits serious symptoms (dry mucous membranes, altered consciousness, apathy, hallucinations). Someone deprived of affection or love for too long becomes depressed or aggressive, even suicidal.

These three examples show that certain needs are intrinsic to the characteristics of the human organism. Accustoming oneself to deprivation is possible up to a certain point (drinking less, shortening sleep time, coping with loneliness), but beyond a certain threshold, similar problems appear in all individuals: discomfort, feelings of frustration, aggressive reactions, even irreversible disorders, highlighting the universal and irrepressible nature of fundamental needs.

The same reasoning applies to all vital needs, so the progenetic approach concerns all aspects of culture that can restrain, condition, or excessively influence our behavior. It thus lies at the heart of the famous nature-nurture dilemma, while also adding a genetic dimension, in accordance with advances in molecular biology and evolutionary theories. It is worth noting that, paradoxically, it is also compatible with creationism.

The findings of molecular biology suggest that organic and psychological needs are largely programmed genetically, insofar as the same dysfunctions are observed in all humans subjected to the same deprivations, regardless of their culture. This does not preclude a certain degree of adaptability, whether through habituation, evolution over generations, or epigenetics (through gene regulation or perhaps other undiscovered mechanisms). However, every adaptive system has its limits, beyond which damage or trauma is inevitable.

For example, the body can go without food for a certain period, but beyond a few months, it deteriorates irreversibly. We know the story of the farmer who wanted to train his donkey to eat nothing: “I gave him half the previous week’s ration, it worked very well, but after a few more days he wouldn’t eat anything! Unfortunately, he died just then…”

The same reasoning applies to each of our vital needs. Prolonged deprivation or excessive demands result in dysfunctions that can lead to irreversible damage when certain thresholds are exceeded. We can then apply the reverse reasoning – and this is where the progenetic approach comes in: whenever symptoms of a disorder appear, we must ask ourselves whether the constraints that civilization or lifestyle habits impose on the body exceed its adaptability threshold.

It is obviously impossible to attribute every form of suffering to cultural constraints; some forms of suffering arise from natural living conditions and cannot be blamed on human error. The problem lies in determining where the line is drawn between suffering of natural origin, which is truly unavoidable, and that which stems from cultural factors that can be challenged. The task then becomes one of investigating the origins, causes, benefits, drawbacks, dependencies, and possible alternatives, rather than simply accepting the status quo and allowing suffering to continue.

Progenetics, for example, applies to ecology; it is, in fact, its very backbone. Pollution by a chemical substance stems directly from the fact that the microorganisms in the environment are not genetically adapted to it: They lack the enzymatic or other mechanisms that would allow the pollutant to be broken down, and it accumulates in the environment, with all the consequences linked to its toxicity when certain thresholds are exceeded.

The same applies to noise pollution: our ears and our brain circuits for hearing, as well as those for attention, are genetically adapted to the noise levels found in nature. When these levels are exceeded, as is the case in many urban environments, particularly near airports, various signs of stress, difficulty concentrating, headaches, and even hearing damage signal the excess. A certain degree of habituation is possible, but above certain quantitative or temporal thresholds, inherent to human genetics, physiological or psychological disorders are inevitable.

The problems of aquaculture could have been largely predictable through a progenetic approach: the fish concentrated in fish farms do not receive their natural food. Besides the issue of concentration, there is the question of the nature of the waste they produce: cereal pellets and surplus fish, mixed and heat-treated, create an imbalance that would not exist under natural living conditions and introduce molecules to which these animals are not genetically adapted. The excrement is then laden with nitrogen compounds that pollute the marine environment, causing aerobic algae to proliferate, which depletes the waters of oxygen, weakening wild fish populations and leading to their abandonment. A progenetic approach would lead to better respect for natural ecological cycles, particularly by operating more extensively and promoting the multiplication of the fish’s natural prey, without introducing inappropriate polluting substances at any stage of the food chain.

Ecological reasoning, although relatively simple, was formulated only very recently. Progenetics would have allowed for its development earlier and prevented much damage. The simple fact that organisms are subject to certain limits determined by their genome could have made researchers aware of the dangers of releasing new molecules from the chemical and food industries into the environment. Instead, for many years, scientists condoned all the reckless actions carried out under the guise of science. Even today, many mechanisms related to environmental degradation remain unclear, for example, the relationship between pollution and viral or bacterial diseases. These diseases could appear as adaptation mechanisms to molecules not accounted for by the genetic programming of the species concerned, and their devastating effects are all the more severe when pollution is omnipresent (for example, the viruses recently observed in whales, avian flu, etc.).

Progenetic reasoning applies particularly to the food sector. Food must provide the body with certain substances necessary for its functioning. If one of these is not available in sufficient quantity, or if it is consumed excessively, various disorders can arise, ranging from simple nutritional imbalances to illness and death. Furthermore, some foods contain undesirable substances that the body is unable to break down or eliminate, and which can prove pathogenic in the short or long term.

Since we are far from knowing everything about nutrition and health, and since human pathology remains a serious problem despite advances in medicine, the question concerns all of our eating habits: does traditional diet correspond to the genetic makeup of the human body? It is clear that humans have not always eaten as they do today. Many dietary habits and techniques have become established over the centuries, and each innovation must be subjected to genetic scrutiny.

The problem is usually sidestepped by invoking genetic adaptation, but it’s important to understand that genetics has its limits: it doesn’t guarantee that satisfactory adaptation is possible to any given food (otherwise, there would be no poisons in nature), and it only transforms at the species level after a large number of generations. Therefore, we must ask ourselves, for each food, whether it corresponds to the genetic makeup of the human body, and conversely, for each disease, to what extent it might result from our dietary habits.

For example, we have the same digestive enzymes as chimpanzees, even though the two lineages diverged approximately three million years ago. The difference between their respective DNA is less than 1%. However, human diets have undergone numerous transformations in a relatively short period: first with the introduction of cooking, agriculture, and animal husbandry in the Neolithic era, ten or twenty thousand years ago; then with the development of culinary arts from the Roman period onward; and even more dramatically in recent centuries with colonial products and the food industry.

There is no guarantee that the characteristics of our assimilation system have adapted to these dietary changes, neither somatically nor genetically. Our ancestors certainly did not make the connection between a particular new food and the health problems it could cause in the long term. For example, they may have linked the consumption of a poisonous plant to immediate health problems, but they had great difficulty connecting the habit of braising their meat to an increased cancer rate occurring decades later. It wasn’t until the 20th century and the major epidemiological studies launched by the WHO that the catastrophe was revealed and the trend of barbecuing and other sources of carcinogenic molecules was curbed.

The progenetic approach, by definition targeting potential civilizational and cultural errors, automatically draws attention to all possible factors of disease, even when they seem harmless because they are deeply rooted in tradition. For example, the use of animal milk and its derivatives is considered ancestral; the baby bottle and the art of cheesemaking are, a priori, above suspicion. Yet they constitute major innovations specific to our civilization: no animal in nature consumes the milk of another species. There is no basis for claiming that cow’s milk, natural and beneficial for calves, is harmless once introduced into a human digestive tract. The Japanese did not consume it until their introduction by the Americans, and since then they have had just as many cancers as their conquerors.

The question then arises as to whether the enzymes programmed by human DNA are capable of properly breaking down the various complex molecules contained in cow’s milk. The scientific consensus would tend to answer in the affirmative, and yet Canadian research demonstrated in [year missing] that certain bovine proteins are not completely broken down and that their residues trigger immune system reactions that destroy the pancreatic cells responsible for secreting insulin, thus leading to insulin-dependent diabetes with all its side effects. The discovery was relegated to oblivion because it challenges established ways of thinking and production systems that seem more important than the existence of millions of diabetic children. The awareness raised by the progenetic approach should, on the contrary, have prompted researchers to delve deeper into the issue and draw conclusions regarding food hygiene and agricultural production.

A similar question arises concerning cereal consumption. Primates consume very little grain, and in a wild form that lacks the characteristics of the selected and hybridized grains of our crops. Are the enormous quantities of grains we consume consistent with the genetic programming of our assimilation? Grains contain gluten (a protein residue found in flour), which has a stimulating effect on the nervous system. What are the consequences of this on our individual and social behaviors? For example, on aggression or sexuality? What are the repercussions of these behaviors on family and social equilibrium, for example, on demographics?

In a completely different field: progenetics allows us to approach the problem of morality and taboos specific to each society from a new perspective. For example, don’t the sexual prohibitions imposed by Judeo-Christian societies counteract genetically programmed instinctual drives? The very existence of endemic neurosis justifies questioning these notions, which has been attempted many times, but a further step is possible if we consider that genetically programmed behaviors have a teleological meaning. The question then becomes not whether or not to abolish prohibitions, but rather to define the purpose of the behavioral tendencies in question.

These few examples hint at the field of investigation opened up by progenetics: it applies to all sectors of culture, takes often intuitive reasoning and structures it on a solid foundation, leads to questioning values ​​that we might consider beyond reproach, and challenges cultural stereotypes by subjecting them to intercultural or interspecific comparisons. It seeks cause-and-effect relationships, previously unnoticed, between ancestral (or modern) errors and suffering or frustrations considered inherent to human nature. It constitutes a kind of tool for clearing away the dust and sediment of millennia of tradition, awakening the objectivity of researchers, and leading to more ecological and fundamental solutions to the problems of civilization.

Genetic heritage evolves very slowly. This period seems long to us, but in the context of biological timescales, it represents only one-hundredth of the evolutionary time of the human genome after its separation from primates, and only a few millionths of the evolutionary time of life itself. Given that all organisms have always fed on the foods they found in nature, without altering either their flavors or their biochemical structures, it is worth asking to what extent the modern human organism is capable of functioning without disruption in a culinary and agricultural context that never existed during the time when the human genome was developing, and to what extent genetic or epigenetic adaptation has been possible.