Biological or philosophical contradiction

Philosophers, often more sophistic than “philosophers” in the sense of ancient Greece, manage to demonstrate everything. It is enough for them to invoke, according to the schools, the laws of chance or the evil forces that would inhabit the human soul to justify this amazing contradiction which wants man to have the possibility, even an unfortunate tendency to work for his own evil or for that of his environment.

Some harmonic intuitions, however, allow us to hope in a capacity and a will to do good, or at least hope for a human ideal that works by nature for the harmony of the living. It is difficult to know whether these intuitions are either little or little russelist dating back to a functioning originating from psychism, or rather to a need to flee reality and find compensation and assurances in infantile fantasies.

In any case, we should bet the winner: to postulate that man is good by nature encourages us to look for what makes him bad, and this can only stimulate research. Operating defects, whether innate or acquired, can be better understood and combated for the general good. The defects that will be an integral part of human nature will have to be considered constitutional tares, for which we are not responsible. The mere fact that we are involuntarily victims of our own constitution could ultimately motivate us to take the necessary steps to ensure that these defects do not express themselves, or at least limit and prevent their consequences.

However, the fact that a species bears tares that compromises its well-being or the integrity of its biotope is a source of biological contradiction. The laws of evolution, and even more of co-evolution, which govern the future of any ecosystem, allow for optimal perfection of living mechanisms and ecological interactions. The anti-Rousseauists seem to have forgotten, while on the contrary one can admire the insight of the philosopher of the Enlightenment for having approached a principle of harmony intrinsic to nature, long before Darwin formulated the laws of natural selection.

The object of human ecogenetics is not to take sides for or against a perfection of living forms. They are here to use the postulate of an evolution of life towards forms and balances as perfect as possible, not to complet us in original paradise fantasies, but to question us as exhaustively as possible whenever any aspect of living reality comes to contradict it: to what extent are human behaviors responsible for it, through what derogations from natural laws, and what can we do to change the course of things?

We’ll go straight to the goal…