« Contrary to a received anthropocentric idea, however, it is not the number of genes that makes the complexity or intelligence of an organism, rice and some amoeba have more than man! »

« The permanent change of everything, including in humans, is very well explained by the Greeks. The idea is reflected in the question posed by the Sphinx in Oedipus: "What is the animal that walks in the morning on all fours, lunch on two legs and in the evening on three legs?" The answer is "Man," which evolves from a four-legged baby to that of a standing adult and then an old man leaning on his cane. Everything changes all the time. »

« The concept of early s e l e c tion of bright minds is very much rooted in culture in France, which is not the case in the United States. When I ask an American at the top of his career about his training, he will tell me about what he has done in the last ten years, while a Frenchman will still highlight the diploma he obtained at the age of twenty-five, it's ridiculous! If the most brilliant thing he has done in his career is his studies, it is not very rewarding. It is a very French habit to boast of having done Normale sup', Mines, Polytechnique or having passed the competition of the medical boarding school, as if it still meant something twenty years later. This way of thinking is also fixist, since it conveys the idea that having obtained a degree at twenty-five years, the person will remain for his life an ennarque, a normalian or a polytechnician. In fact, the French believe it! A sixty-year-old polytechnician must be an intelligent and important person. This system of early s e l e c tion has a very d e l e t erious consequence: in France, if you have not obtained the right diploma, it will be difficult for you to make up for lost time. On the other hand, in the United States it is common to go back to university at the age of forty or fifty. »