The Vital Error: Where Evolutionary Biology and Genealogy Meet

In On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche sets up an opposition between the 'naivete of English biologists' in their research on the evolution of life and a methodology that records the singularity and the contingency of natural events without introducing any finality: genealogy. Nietzsche shares with these scientists the need to trace the explanation of living beings back to a naturalistic framework liberated from theology, but he questions their linear and progressive conception of the evolution of life. This article explores these two competing biological accounts of life. The first is informed by the adaptationist paradigm, namely the theoretical framework of contemporary 'English biologists'; the second is elaborated by combining the theories of the palaeontologist Stephen J. Gould with the work of Nietzsche, Foucault and Esposito on life and genealogy. If the former account introduces a positive normative ground-rendering biology a synonym for destiny-the latter runs the risk of being secretly inhabited by a negative normative ground, which prescribes an infinite demand for liberation and transformation.