Joël de Rosnay
February 24, 2006
Biography:
Joël de Rosnay, PhD, is Executive President of Biotics International and Advisor to the President of the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie de la Villette, where he served as Director of Prospective and Evaluation until July 2002. From 1975 to 1984, he was Director of Research Applications at the Pasteur Institute.
Former researcher and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the fields of biology and computer science, he successively served as Scientific Attaché at the French Embassy in the United States and as Scientific Director at the European Society for the Development of Enterprises (a venture capital firm).
He is particularly interested in advanced technologies and the applications of systems theory. Author of: "Le Macroscope" (1975, Prize of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques), "Les Chemins de la Vie" (1983), "Le Cerveau Planétaire" (1986), and several reports, including: "Biotechnologies et Bio-Industrie" (1979), an appendix to the report "Sciences de la Vie et Société" by Professors Gros, Jacob, and Royer, as well as the report that led to the creation of CESTA (Center for Studies on Advanced Systems and Technologies, 1982).
From 1987 to 1995, he was a scientific commentator on Europe1 and author of several science books aimed at a broad public, including "Les Origines de la Vie" (1965), "La Malbouffe" (1979), "La Révolution Biologique" (1982), "Branchez-vous" (Grand Prize for Popular Microcomputer Literature, 1985), "L'Aventure du Vivant" (1988), "L'Avenir en Direct" (1989), "Les Rendez-vous du Futur" (1991), and "L'Homme Symbiotique, Regards sur le Troisième Millénaire," Seuil, 1995.
"La Plus Belle Histoire du Monde," with Yves Coppens, Hubert Reeves, and Dominique Simonnet, Seuil, 1996.
"Une Vie en Plus, la Longévité, Pourquoi Faire?" with Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber, François de Closets, and Dominique Simonnet, Seuil, 2005.
Joël de Rosnay is the recipient of the 1990 Scientific Information Prize from the Académie des Sciences and the 1994 Benjamin Constant Prize for Arts of Communication from the Société d'Encouragement de l'Industrie Nationale.
My comment:
I'll make just one comment, as I don't know the man in the full scope of his many varied and distinguished roles (President, Attaché, Author, Commentator, Director...). He collaborated with Hubert Reeves and Yves Coppens, all three being interviewed by journalist Dominique Simonet. The book, published by Seuil in 1996, is titled "La Plus Belle Histoire du Monde" and is a passionate plea against prevailing conformity. The theme is this: Simonet announces right away that humanity is on the verge of reconstructing the history of the universe "from the quark to man." Each participant thus plays their part. Reeves takes charge of "origins," though at that time the Big Bang model was already being seriously challenged by observations that were known even then. Nevertheless, our three Panglosses insist that "everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds."
De Rosnay then takes over, delivering the dominant scientific view on the origin of life on Earth, even as we are increasingly called to seriously reconsider our understanding. But never mind—every cliché of evolution passes through, and de Rosnay reassures us that it's only a matter of time, and that the few obscure points in the scenario we're trying to reconstruct will soon be clarified.
Coppens is more "wrapped up." He begins with a joke, recalling a phrase from his grandmother:
- You might descend from apes, but not me.
His task is to be the final Pangloss, the one for paleoanthropology. He unfolds his thesis on the emergence of humans in the African Rift, where a sudden change in habitat forced bipedalism. See my thoughts on this in the dossier. Along the way, he carefully avoids defining what "a human" is, as well as sidestepping pitfalls such as "consciousness" and "moral sense," as if these "attributes" were logical outcomes of Darwinian evolutionary processes.
The whole work, despite its immense bookshop success, does not constitute a truly memorable book today, given that all these theses are now under serious scrutiny from every direction. What is surprising is the certainty displayed by each of them—these proclaimed certainties. Since then, Coppens has admitted that his thesis about hominization through the australopithecines, resulting from a habitat shift in an arboreal being, had been invalidated by the discovery of numerous australopithecines in arboreal environments, far to the west of the Rift. Reeves now prefers to adopt the stance of an ecologist, after stating that "despite a few flaws, the standard model, with minor adjustments, still has some good days ahead."
De Rosnay probably never wanted to stay out of the spotlight. Intelligent, he has always perceived early on numerous qualitative technological leaps, which he highlighted in his successful publications. Today, Agoravox aims to be a kind of web-journal built through individual contributions. I took a look. Presented this way, it's a formula that, we might say, is still searching for itself.
If I were to summarize de Rosnay in one quip:
Everything is for the best in the best of possible realities.
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