Genetics of Original Sin

The Impact of Natural Selection on the Future of Humanity

By Christian de Duve

2009

First Published

4.25

Average Rating

252

Number of Pages

7H41M

Audio Length

Increasingly absorbed in recent years by advances in our understanding of the origin of life, evolutionary history, and the advent of humankind, eminent biologist Christian de Duve of late has also pondered deeply the future of life on this planet. He speaks to readers with or without a scientific background, offering new perspectives on the threat posed by humanity’s immense biological success and on the resources human beings have for altering their current destructive path. Focusing on the process of natural selection, de Duve explores the inordinate and now dangerous rise of humankind. His explanation for this self-defeating success lies in the process of natural selection, which favors traits that are immediately useful, regardless of later consequences. Thus, the human genome determines such properties as tribal and group cohesion and collaboration and often fierce and irrational competition with and hostility toward other groups’ attributes that were once useful but now often ruinously dysfunctional. Christian de Duve suggests that these traits, imprinted into human nature by natural selection, may have been recognized by the writers of Genesis, thus inspiring the myth of original sin. Is there redemption for genetic original sin? In a brilliant and original conclusion, the author argues that, unique in the living world, humankind is endowed with the ability to deliberately oppose natural selection. Human beings have the capacity to devise measures that, while contrary to local or personal interests, can bring forth a safer world.

Avg Rating

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Author

Christian de Duve

Author · 5 books

Christian de Duve (1917-2013) was a Belgian scientist and author. He discovered the cellular components called lysosomes and peroxisomes and researched insulin and glucagon. He was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1974 with Albert Claude and George E. Palade "for their discoveries concerning the structural and functional organization of the cell". Born outside of Belgium, de Duve and his family returned to Belgium when the First World War ended, having fled the country for this reason. He started studying medicine in 1934 at the Catholic University of Leuven and graduated in 1941. Being a gifted student, he started working in the laboratory of professor J.P. Bouckaert who was trying to uncover the mechanism of action of insulin. Believing the answer could be found in biochemistry, de Duve started studying chemistry and graduated in 1946. He was awarded a doctorate in 1945 for his doctoral thesis "Glucose, Insuline et Diabète". He became a professor at the Catholic University of Leuven in 1951 and later at the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL). He started working at the Rockefeller Institute (now Rockefeller University) in 1962 dividing his time between Belgium and the United States. He also worked at the Medical Nobel Institute in Sweden and the University of Washington, USA. He founded the International Institute of Cellular and Molecular Pathology (now known as the de Duve Institute) in Brussels in 1974. He became emeritus professor in Belgium in 1985 and in New York in 1988. He wrote several books on the origin of life and biology.