Artifacts

According to the Little Robert: artifact =phenomena of human origin, artificial (in the study of natural facts). The word refers to all that man can do to change the natural environment (forestation, agriculture, dams, lighting, fire, culinary art, etc.), to change the behaviour of animals (domestication, traps, hunting, etc.) or their own behaviour (forbidden, obligations, education, conditioning, etc.).

In principle, every artifact aims to improve living conditions. However, as it departs from nature, it can place living species and man himself in situations not foreseen in genetic determinisms. It therefore requires some adaptation of individuals to the new conditions. However, adaptability is limited, so that certain artifacts can have effet-pervers, i.e. harmful consequences that appear in the longer term.

This is the case with the various advances that have led to the consumption society, the dependencies and conditioning that it induces in the population and the resulting ecological disaster. One question to be asked is why man, when introducing the use of an artifact, only takes into account its beneficial effects and systematically neglects its effet-pervers, even when they are already apparent.

It seems that, in the face of its capacity for invention, man lacks what one might call an “ecological impulse”: his attention is captured by the immediate advantages of an invention, and there is no instinct to worry about its secondary consequences. Two explanations are possible: either man’s brain, having only recently accessed conceptual intelligence, has not yet reached a finished form; the current ecological crisis would be a consequence of this incompleteness and could mark a new phase of evolution through awareness or selection; or, second possibility, certain malfunctions prevent us from implementing this ecological impulse at the same time as our creative impulses; This paralysis, which causes us to neglect the potential nuisances of our inventions, would be due to certain factors that remain to be determined.

Human ecogenetics tries to see clearly in this imbroglio and, if necessary, to seek the root causes of the mental dysfunctions responsible for our anti-ecological behaviors.