to a true or false need

How to distinguish a false from a real need?

For some, everything would be determined by culture: our habits and education would generate our needs of civilized men, apart from some purely biological needs.

Human ecogenetics does not exclude the major role of culture in setting up everything we feel like needs. It draws attention to the fact that culture may or may not correspond to the innate potentials inherent in human nature, and that the needs induced by this culture may also be in line with or unrelated to our real nature.

Example: a person who gets used to using a certain drug, such as a child born in a smoking family, will get used to the smells of tobacco very early, and even to the effect of nicotine present in the smoky atmospheres. He will be more likely to become dependants on tobacco, all the more so as he will have begun younger. Yet it is clearly a false need: he would have lived just as well without smoking, would not risk the same lung cancers or cardiovascular diseases, and would not have polluted his surroundings by putting him at the same risk. Still a few decades ago, cigarette smoking was a mark of superiority (it is still with many young people, unfortunately), and it was associated with artists, philosophers, film actors…

Only the scientific approach has revealed its long-term harmfulness, and ultimately prompted policies to take action to reduce this cause of mortality. Previously, smokers felt smoking as a right, like freedom, and gave it unreservedly. Many of our habits could respond to the same pattern: we take them for needs specific to our nature, or for inalienable rights. Or, quite simply, we do not ask ourselves questions about them, even though they have harmful consequences for our body and the environment.

Human ecogenetics proposes to use an objective scientific approach in order to discern in our different needs, habits, conditionings and beliefs, which is either true or false. This distinction is necessary if one wants to raise the problem of respect for the environment and our own health on a solid basis, free from stereotypes specific to our culture and contrary to nature…