The Place of Humans in Biology Compared to Animals: Just Another Animal, or the Cause of the Worst Biodiversity Crisis?

Session 2: Living with Animals
Moderator: Thomas Lecuit (Collège de France)

Abstract

Every new discovery in biology invites us to rethink our view of the living world and the place humans occupy within it. Following in the footsteps of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, numerous observations have gradually reinforced the idea that humans are just one animal among many, having emerged, like all species, from a long evolutionary history. On the scale of the tangled tree of life, our species represents only a small branch. But this view clashes with another observation, stemming from contemporary ecology: human activities are today profoundly transforming ecosystems and are at the root of a major biodiversity crisis affecting many animal and plant species. Humans are therefore both one animal among many and a species capable of altering, on an unprecedented scale, the conditions of existence for all living things. How can we reconcile these two perspectives? What does biology teach us about this apparent paradox? Can our place within the animal world help us better understand our unique responsibility toward the living world and our planet?

Virginie Courtier-Orgogozo

Virginie Courtier is a biologist, a research director at the CNRS, and an associate professor at École Polytechnique. With her research team at the Institut Jacques Monod in Paris, she studies the evolution of Drosophila fly species to better understand our origins and the future of living organisms. She is also interested in various issues at the intersection of biology and society, such as the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, the risks associated with biotechnology, and animal experimentation. She received the CNRS Bronze Medal in 2014 and was elected a member of EMBO in 2022. She has been a member of the Scientific Council of the Parliamentary Office for the Evaluation of Scientific and Technological Choices (OPECST) since 2020 and a member of the CNRS Ethics Committee (COMETS) since 2021. She served as a professor at the Collège de France in 2023.