Each of us has had days that make us realize that life is definitely a constant challenge. Whether it’s a cyclist who almost runs over you while running a fire, a colleague who speeds up to take the elevator before you or a customer at the supermarket who sneakily takes advantage of a moment of distraction on your part to rush towards the automatic checkout you were heading towards. Competition is omnipresent in our daily lives: at school, in work, in sport… And, as if we didn’t have enough adversaries, personal development encourages us to fight against the lazy part of ourselves – themselves, through injunctions to “surpass oneself”, “become the best version of oneself”, “do work on oneself”. The objective: to improve, to perform in one’s relationships with others, to become “plus” individuals.
This dynamic is frequently justified by the analogy with nature, according to which animals themselves are engaged in a permanent struggle for survival. At the origin of this representation? Charles Darwin, of course. In The Origin of Speciespublished in 1859, the British naturalist and paleontologist demonstrates that, for each species, nature establishes a sorting between “premium” characteristics and those which are of no use.
He thus takes the example of the animal that has fascinated biologists for almost two centuries: the giraffe – “But what is the giraffe for? », the French biologist Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire was already wondering in 1827. Darwin has the answer. He argues that only those individuals with the longest necks survived because they could feed on the leaves at the top of the trees more easily than others. Short-necked giraffes would therefore have gradually disappeared, mercilessly swept away by natural selection. Darwin takes the example of other animal species, such as the Galapagos finch, to demonstrate that life as we know it results from incessant optimization work that nature has been carrying out for millions of years.
Artificial selection
The theory of natural selection was soon taken up by theorists of capitalism, such as Adam Smith. Just as animals are condemned to excel or die, there is no question for humans of resting on their laurels. Nature knows what it is doing, and the market is always right. Now, in a refreshing book, Survival of the mediocre (Gallimard, 416 pages, 27 euros), the Franco-Israeli philosopher Daniel Milo demonstrates that this is not the case. Contrary to popular belief, not only does nature not select the best, but in reality we can survive by being average, passable, or even completely useless. A discovery which, we admit, is immediately good for morale, at the same time as it makes you (a little) dizzy. Would we really be exempt from improving our jogging times, from baking a better cake than other parents at our children’s birthdays, from improving at yoga in order to have the right to exist?
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