Fifteen years ago, this member of the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) realized that the opinions and ideological apriorisms of our society on the natural world are far from being realistic. We perceive nature as a mother who provides her children with a stable, peaceful and clean environment, where all living beings on the planet can flourish freely. And all this, according to Arcadi Navarro, are nothing more than falsehoods.
–Some ants stay still on a blade of grass and, if blown away by the wind, they climb back up until a bird swallows them. And there are rats that pounce on their predators and die. Suicidal tendencies?
-Yes, produced by parasites that infect them and then need to pass into the digestive system of other animals to reproduce, so they manipulate the brains of their victims to turn them into easy prey. Nature is cruel, violent and manipulative to incredible limits.
–But wasn’t she a protective, wise and harmonious mother? His statement contradicts most of our basic beliefs about nature.
-It’s sad but true. I too would like to live in a harmonious world with a wise nature. But she doesn’t, which doesn’t make her a bad ogre or a warty witch either. Things are as they are, more complicated than we think. If we want to understand the world to integrate well into it, we have to dismantle our myths and demonstrate how it works. At its core, science is the history of humanity against its prejudices. And the fight continues, because the only tool to progress is the combination of reason and evidence.
–And that is why you, fed up with myths and legends about nature, have decided to writeAgainst Nature, where he reviews some of our most ingrained prejudices.
“It is the fruit of fifteen years of sustained irritation!” There are a number of politically correct platitudes circulating that make it sound horrible to deny nature as a caring and protective mother. Even established scientists from other fields defend this view, which simply does not hold up anywhere. Holding false beliefs makes people ill-prepared to interact with and understand reality. They generate personal and collective impotence. On the other hand, the fact that these ideas are so ingrained in the mainstream culture is a plug for research.
–So, humans live deceived in a sweetened world that we have invented ourselves.
-Religious explanations of the world and myths, in general, have long been approached from a historical and anthropological point of view. But recently, they have started to be seen for what they are, particular biological phenomena of a species, the human being, which can be studied, as is done with other traits, from a neurological and evolutionary point of view. Humans need to explain the world. Our species, after all, has triumphed thanks to the fact that we are machines of understanding, finding correlations and finding out cause-effect relationships. These mechanisms end up getting out of hand and cause us to attribute to nature a certain intentionality, a desire to do harm or do good. We have embraced the idea of nature as a refuge to which we have to return, as opposed to the human practices that we consider most horrible.
–What lies do we tell ourselves about nature?
-For example, that it is recycled and behaves in a sustainable way. Or that the human being is the only animal that kills for pleasure. Absolutely not. In many species of primates, such as gorillas, when a new dominant male enters the group the first thing he does is commit a systematic infanticide that would make Herod pale.
–In his book he accuses nature of being a “wasteful gambler.” Why?
-Although there are biological entities specialized in saving, there is also an incredible waste. It is fascinating to compare how a coyote walks and how a well-fed dog walks with his master. The pet does not have to spare any expense, it jumps, comes and goes. Instead, the coyote walks in a straight line, putting its paws in front of each other precisely to minimize energy consumption. There are also cases of totally unnecessary luxury spending to make sexual claims, as in peacocks. The male has a huge tail that only serves to attract females and can pose a problem when fleeing from a predator. In many respects, nature behaves like a political party on an electoral campaign. In the Amazon, for example, trees compete in height for the sun. They have used enormous amounts of energy to be very tall and yet they all have the same amount of light that they would have if they were shorter. The same happens when parties tell their voters that they will try to make a moderate electoral spending, but the truth is that they invest everything they can to end up having exactly the same level of attention that they would have had with less waste. In this sense, nature is even more wasteful than humans.
?Survival instinct?
-This instinct takes very different forms, from wild competition to the most sacrificial altruism. As in war, in nature you can have enemies and allies. Cooperation occurs as a strategy to succeed that produces rewards, although it has a cost: you have to make sacrifices. We are all the product of collaboration between many cells that have agreed on a common goal – to build a person – and have delegated reproduction, which is the primary need of every living being, to a few privileged cells. Some genes cooperate with others, some cells with others, some species with others and some individuals with others.
–Are there no rebellions?
-Sure! Continually. And specialized structures are created to monitor those who do not cooperate. There are cells that rebel, divide and produce cancer. In bee hives, some workers try to lay eggs on the fringes of the queen. That is why there are patrols that roam the honeycomb, as if they were members of a political police, and detect and eat the eggs of the rebels. The queen also has an oppressive role: she secretes pheromones that prevent the workers’ ovaries from working, although in a colony of 30,000 bees there may be three or four transgressors. In our society there are also individuals who specialize in punishing non-cooperators, such as police officers and judges. And in this sense, genes have a lot to do with it, more than we thought.
–In other words, genetics influence and determine our behavior.
-The evolutionary history of each species appears reflected in its genetic heritage, which determines that certain behaviors are in a certain sense inherited. There are organisms that carry out tasks for whose learning the human being would need courses and courses. For example, beavers lift complex prey almost reflexively. Instead, for us it is more adaptive to transmit culturally many of the things that some animals inherit from their parents. Our biology opens us up to culture and takes us away from determinism. Our success as a species is in plasticity, in the mechanisms that allow us to receive knowledge and transmit it culturally. Genetics gives us the ability to speak, but to develop it we must learn to talk about children. And conflict is the engine that makes us go one step further.
–That is not very politically correct.
-But that’s how it is. Conflict is the main creative force behind the diversity of the living world. Without it there would be no competition to maximize reproduction in each generation and there would not be as much species diversity. Evolution does not occur because of the blind force of mutations in organisms, but because some are beneficial, lead to greater reproduction and that is why they are assimilated. Others, on the other hand, are problematic, generate little adaptation and, therefore, are eliminated. In fact, the great scientific advances have occurred in contexts of warlike conflicts, such as the boom in aviation in World War I or the atomic revolution during World War II. The conflict is constant, permanent and inherent in life, although it remains hidden. It is the force that for 3.5 billion years has shaped life on Earth, the ultimate cause of the colossal diversity and overwhelming beauty of the living world we inhabit.
Very personal: A very curious scientist
Some people go out with friends to have dinner or a drink to have fun; others prefer to go on a hike or play sports; the most homey decide to stay home and watch a movie. For Arcadi Navarro, fun consists of curiosity, in continually wondering about the world around him and trying to understand himself a little more.
“It is absolutely fantastic to spend the day locked in front of the computer, asking yourself questions that sometimes you can answer and sometimes you can’t, which is even more exciting,” says this scientist, his eyes flooded with excitement. “Have you ever camped in a campsite or in the mountains? Surely you have seen that at night the insects go round and round around the lights, they approach until they end up burning. Do you know why? Well, looking for that information is exciting “.
