Extrapolation

Extrapolation is defined in mathematics as predicting the value of a function assuming that it continues to vary as it has previously varied.

If you don’t know an example that the level of a groundwater table drops by one metre each year, you can extrapolate this variation and tell you that it will have dropped by one metre more a year later. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work: if an unusual drought or rain occurs in the meantime, or new drilling runs out faster, or if it is completely exhausted (there, it won’t fall down) etc. Extrapolation is valid only if all things remain equal elsewhere. Otherwise, it can lead to serious mistakes.

The tendency to extrapolate is due to the functioning of our mind and to some form of laziness: it avoids us thinking of factors that may complicate a situation or lead to surprises in its evolution. We constantly project on the reality of linear functions. When we see the price of the stock exchange increase regularly several days in a row, our first reaction is to think that it will rise again the next day. Experience shows that we lose a lot of money by reasoning in this way.

However, it was this same trend that gave the impression that intensive fishing, for example, could continue indefinitely, because it had been fishing for millennia and the ocean was still as fishy. Or that pesticides could not cause significant damage as nothing unpleasant happened in the first years of use. Or that pollution would never win the oceans because nothing had been measured for a long time.

Linearization is intrinsically linked to the notion of growth: without growth, our economy collapses. Yet infinite growth is impossible for all kinds of reasons, including the finiteness of our planet. In other words, an economy that is driven only by growth is doomed to ecological collapse in the longer term. But we continue, politicians in mind, to rely on growth to avoid economic crises without for a moment recognizing that it will not always be possible, and we make no serious effort to change the economic system…

The tendency to extrapolate is the basis of this contradiction. The illusion that the planet would be inexhaustible stems directly from this intellectual simplicity: we extrapolate the current situations by projecting them into the future, especially when it arranges our affairs. There are still reserves of methane, so we can keep running engines. And we forget about global warming. There are still bees, so highly harmful insecticides continue to be placed on the market.

Extrapolation is at the centre of the ecological impasse, in that it has forced us to minimize the dangers until they directly threaten our comfort or our survival. Even today, it is she who opposes ecological awareness and risks making us go beyond the point of no return: since what we have done has worked well so far, let us continue to do as we have always done…

Note that extrapolation is also found in ecological pessimism. Demography is growing by 4% per year on average in the world, so we will be 20 billion in 25 years and the apocalypse is for the 26th year… These extreme positions also harm ecology by generating critical reactions or more or less justified incredulities, which tend, by boomerang effect, to minimize problems.

It is not easy to make a relevant and objective view of a danger situation and its possible development. The weighted assessment of real hazards, without unnecessary packages and without occultations, is nevertheless essential if a general awareness is to occur.

The question posed by human ecogenetics is this: does this tendency to extrapolate, i.e. to replace the complex evolutions of real situations with simplistic linear projections, belong to the natural functioning of human psychism? Would it not be a matter of some mental dysfunctions that remain to be decrypted?

Linear extrapolation is in itself a useful brain function, but some psycho-affective disorders may mislead our use of it, for example when we refuse to see a dark future in front of us, or attempt to darken overly to influence third parties, etc. There is a whole field of research that has never been approached to this day under the aegis of ecology, but which must in no case be underestimated, given that it might have as its stake the future of the planet…