Victor M. Toledo
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Every professional union is organized to connect and share their strengths and weaknesses. In Mexico, the National Academy of Medicine and the College of Civil Engineers are famous for their very long careers and their enormous number of members. Biologists have not been left behind. Today they are organized in the Mexican Federation of Colleges of Biologists (FEMCOBI), which brings together organizations from 18 entities in the Mexican Republic. In Mexico there are 180 thousand active biologists with bachelor’s, master’s, doctoral and postdoctoral degrees in 88 institutions who work in two large fields: those who work basically in laboratories (in genetics, microbiology, molecular biology, biomedicine, etc.) and those who work basically in the field (taxonomists, biogeographers, ecologists). In recent days, FEMCOBI organized its seventh national colloquium in Zihuatanejo, Guerrero, to which I was invited to offer the inaugural conference and which was attended by about 200 participants. The central thesis of my conference was that unlike all other existing professions, the biologist is moved by a special impulse derived from his own activity, which has profound cultural, ethical, aesthetic and, finally, political implications.
Biologist training provides us not only with a vision of the living universe, it also gives us an evolutionary and historical perspective with the appearance of the first organisms about 3,500 million years ago, with the particularity that every living being It comes from a common ancestor, and over time there has been a process that entails the greatest complexity. In the vital fabric we have gone from simple organisms to increasingly complex organisms. And even more in the evolutionary tree
All species are related, they are all part of a kinship, and their closeness and distance force us to classify them. The biologist is, consequently, essentially a taxonomist. A taxonomist who ends up classifying himself. He Homo sapiens It therefore has an origin and kinship relations: it is a species, genus, family, suborder and order, it is a primate that appeared just 300 thousand years ago, the only surviving species of the 10 of its genus. The biologist humbly accepts his position in the evolutionary stream. A simple comparison with ants is more than enough. Ants originated 150 million years ago, and then diversified 100 million years ago, at the end of the age of reptiles. Today all the ants in the world weigh as much as all human beings, according to Edward O. Wilson (1929-2021), considered the Darwin of the 21st century and creator of sociobiology. Furthermore, the confluence of two extraordinary minds, that of the biologist Lynn Margulis (1938-2011) and that of the geochemist James Lovelock (1919-2022) designed the theory of Gaia and came to the conclusion that the planet itself is a system alive.
In short, the world of life is still here and biologists are the first to defend it because of their knowledge, just as indigenous peoples do through their sacred vision of the natural world. There is, however, a fully political dimension, linked to the human brain, which is nothing less than the most efficient system known to science. Weighing only 1,300 grams and an energy consumption of about 400 calories, the brain stores more than 100 billion nerve cells (neurons) capable of developing one million synapses (connections between neurons) per second with a total potential density. interneuronal connective density of 10 to the power of 14, the highest known connective density in the universe! With tremendous design in our heads, the recent history full of aggression and destruction, which culminated in the two world wars and some 100 million deaths, is inexplicable.
Politics is a direct result of ideology and ideologies whatever they are (left, center or right) have only led to the greatest human tragedies, such as wars, cultural exterminations, massacres, purges, holy inquisitions, burning of witches, etc. Ideologies nullify critical thinking and cloud and anesthetize the minds of human beings, suppressing all the potential of the brain. Can human beings live outside of ideologies? You can and you should. We owe Morris Berman, an American historian, an explanation on the subject. An idea is something you possess, ideology is something that possesses you
( The re-enchantment of the world1987). Human beings adopt an ideology because of their absence of somatic anchoring
for its lack of roots with life itself, for its inability to face silence and emptiness. Today biologists are bearers of a flame of hope, which may be the key to getting out of the tremendous crisis of civilization in which we are trapped: their love for life.
