The Science of Self-Understanding: Exploring Jeremy Griffith's Human Condition Hypothesis

In an age of extraordinary scientific progress and deepening global tensions, one question is more urgent than ever: why does a species capable of such creativity, compassion, and intelligence so often descend into conflict, environmental destruction, and self-sabotage? This paradox—the "human condition"—has long preoccupied philosophers, scientists, and spiritual leaders. Evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson described it as "the most important frontier of the natural sciences."

Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith has devoted his career to conquering that frontier. His theory offers a biological explanation for our psychological unrest: that it was caused by a deep-seated conflict between our inherited instincts and our conscious intellect. It has attracted endorsements from respected figures in psychology, biology, and psychiatry for its power and originality.

The Limits of Conventional Explanations

Griffith argues that humanity has long been desperate to excuse its destructive behavior. In that search, evolutionary theory has offered a series of explanations that attribute our actions to the selfish imperative to pass on our genes. But according to Griffith, these are ultimately reductionist: they overlook the psychological factors driving our behavior.

It began with social Darwinism—the idea that humans are inherently aggressive and selfish, driven by instincts to survive and reproduce. Theories such as kin selection and reciprocal altruism added nuance to this outlook, showing how cooperation could evolve among relatives or through mutual benefit.

While persuasive in cases like family care, these frameworks struggle to explain the spontaneity and range of human empathy. As science writer Bryan Appleyard remarked, "If, for example, I help a blind man cross the street, it is plainly unlikely that I am being prompted to do this because he is a close relation and bears my genes."

In Griffith's telling, multilevel selection emerged next, attempting to fill these gaps by explaining cooperation at the group level. Yet in the eyes of many critics, it is biologically untenable, with figures like the geneticist Jerry Coyne arguing that natural selection quickly favors "cheaters," making long-term group cooperation unstable.

But as the writer Arthur Koestler argued, this reductionism misses something crucial—the psychological dimension of human behavior: "Symptoms of the mental disorder which appears to be endemic in our species... are specifically and uniquely human." Yet science, he lamented, continued to frame behavior in terms of "Pavlov's dogs, Skinner's rats and pigeons," leaving the role of consciousness largely unexamined. It is precisely this role of consciousness in shaping human psychology that Griffith's explanation confronts head-on.

Griffith's Instinct-Intellect Conflict

Griffith argues that about two million years ago, our ancestors became fully conscious (a timeframe supported by the appearance of a large 'association cortex' in the fossil record). Prior to this, instincts, shaped over millennia of natural selection, guided our behavior. The problem was that when our distant forebears began thinking and acting independently, those inflexible instinctive orientations were, in effect, 'intolerant' of the conscious mind's experiments in self-management—the instincts effectively "criticized" these deviations. Without the means to justify itself, the conscious mind grew defensive, producing anger, egocentricity, and alienation—the hallmarks of the human condition.

Griffith illustrates this clash by inviting us to imagine what would happen if a migrating bird was given a fully conscious mind: "The bird is following the instinctive flight path its species had acquired over thousands of generations of natural selection, but it now has a conscious mind that needs to understand how to behave, and the only way it can acquire that understanding is by experimenting in understanding—for example, thinking, 'I'll fly down and explore that island.' But such a deviation from the migratory flight path would naturally result in the instincts resisting the deviation, leaving the intellect no choice but to defensively retaliate against the instincts, try to prove the instincts' unjust criticism wrong, and try to deny or block from its mind the instincts' unjust criticism."

So, Griffith says, "Since humans are the species that became conscious, this explains how we became psychologically upset sufferers of our angry, egocentric and alienated human condition."

What makes this explanation compelling is its simplicity. Once articulated, the idea that our conscious search for understanding would inevitably clash with our instinctive orientations seems almost self-evident. However, while it may be straightforward, its ramifications could not be more profound.

What Griffith's Understanding Enables

Recognising this clash as the root cause of our inner distress, Griffith believes, is profoundly liberating. By offering what he sees as a biologically grounded good reason for humanity's defensive, angry, egocentric, and alienated behavior, this insight lifts what he calls the "burden of guilt" from the human race. And with that burden removed, the defensive behaviors that followed—anger, egocentricity, and alienation—are made redundant.

Griffith emphasises that while we needed these artificial defences of anger, egocentricity, and alienation while we lacked the real defence provided by the 'instinct vs intellect' explanation for our behavior, now that we have that real defence, those artificial defences are no longer necessary—and so they fall away. He argues that this will bring about a profound transformation of human behavior: the ending of our psychologically defensive, angry, egocentric, and alienated, human condition-afflicted way of living.

Reception and Debate

Through the World Transformation Movement, Griffith has shared his theory globally, most notably in his book FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition. Professor Harry Prosen, former President of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, called it "the book that saves the world." Other notable supporters include Professor Scott Churchill, former chair of Psychology at the University of Dallas; Professor Charles Birch, winner of the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion; and David Chivers, former President of the Primate Society of Great Britain. Eminent ecologist Professor Stuart Hurlbert is on record saying, "I am stunned and honored to have lived to see the coming of 'Darwin II.'" Even Stephen Hawking expressed interest in Griffith's thesis.

Sceptics point to its divergence from orthodox evolutionary biology and the difficulty of empirically testing such a sweeping claim. Yet supporters counter that its strength lies in the clarity and parsimony of the instinct-intellect framework. Simple in its essence yet expansive in its reach, it distils the vast spectrum of human behavior into a single, cohesive explanation—a rare quality in science, and one that has historically marked some of its most profound breakthroughs.

A Bold Proposal for Resolution — From Personal Liberation to Global Renewal

As Professor Hurlbert's statement above illustrates, Griffith's work invites comparison to Darwin's theory of natural selection—another idea that, in hindsight, was simple yet transformative in uniting diverse observations under a single principle. While Darwin described the mechanism of evolution, Griffith aims to illuminate the mechanism of our psychological turmoil, and in doing so, open a pathway to a cooperative, compassionate future built on the removal of our deep-seated defensiveness.

Whether the scientific community ultimately embraces his explanation remains uncertain—but with global tensions, environmental crises, and deep social divides pressing in, the urgency to explore such a theory has never been greater. The question is whether we will confront the human condition with the same commitment that has driven every major leap in understanding—and, in doing so, seize the chance to redefine our future as a species.