Our "Original Sin" Will Destroy Us

Now that the fittest have survived, their genes will destroy us. So says Nobel winning biologist Christian de Duve who believes that an innate unerring will to survive is the ultimate foundation of human extinction — we are myopic victims of our own success.

The cost of our success is the exhaustion of natural resources, leading to energy crises, climate change, pollution and the destruction of our habitat. If you exhaust natural resources there will be nothing left for your children. If we continue in the same direction, humankind is headed for some frightful ordeals, if not extinction.

As it turns out, evolution can be just as short-sighted as our political machine.

Because it has no foresight. Natural selection has resulted in traits such as group selfishness being coded in our genes. These were useful to our ancestors under the conditions in which they lived, but have become noxious to us today. What would help us preserve our natural resources are genetic traits that let us sacrifice the present for the sake of the future. You need wisdom to sacrifice something that is immediately useful or advantageous for the sake of something that will be important in the future. Natural selection doesn’t do that; it looks only at what is happening today. It doesn’t care about your grandchildren or grandchildren’s grandchildren.

It’s this lack of long term philosophy that Duve posits to be our “original sin.”

I believe that the writers of Genesis had detected the inherent selfishness in human nature that I propose is in our genes, and invented the myth of original sin to account for it. It’s an image. I am not acting as an exegete – I don’t interpret scripture.

Duve does offer some thoughtful suggestions as to how we can at least slow the destiny of our demise — such as birth control and further empowering women (as they’re inherently less aggressive in their approach). Even so, he remains only “cautiously” optimistic of our future.

Christian de Duve is professor emeritus at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, and at Rockefeller University, New York. During his distinguished career he has received numerous honors and prizes, including the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and fifteen honorary degrees. He lives in Belgium.

His latest book, Genetics of Original Sin, is published by Yale University Press

via NewScientist