Brief biography of Australian
biologist Jeremy Griffith

 

Written by Damon Isherwood and Fiona Cullen-Ward

 

Please note, you can read an elaboration of this
brief biography at the link at the end of this presentation.

 

Also note, if you are looking at a print-out of this document and want to access the links included in it, please go to www.humancondition.com/jeremy-griffith-the-biologist-who-solved-the-human-condition and scroll down to the link you want.

 

 

 

Early life and education

Born in December 1945, Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith was raised on a sheep station in rural New South Wales and educated at Geelong Grammar School in Victoria, one of the most highly regarded schools in the world. An indication of the impression he made even at that early age is the remarkable assessment of Gordon Griffiths, a master at ‘Timbertop’, Geelong Grammar’s renowned year-long outdoor education campus, who described Jeremy as the ‘most outstanding, without a doubt’ student he had taught at the school, ‘a brilliant natural historian…​[with] an independent spirit’. Jeremy gained first class honours in biology in the state matriculation exams and, in 1965, began a science degree at the University of New England in northern New South Wales. While there, Jeremy played representative rugby union football, making the 1966 trials for Australia’s national team, the Wallabies.

 

Biology graduate and search for the Tasmanian Tiger

In 1967, Jeremy Griffith deferred his studies and hitchhiked to Tasmania, determined to save the remarkable dog-like marsupial, the Thylacine, or ‘Tasmanian Tiger’, from extinction, the last known Thylacine having died only 30 years prior to his search. As part of that search he developed what have been credited as the first trail cameras, technology now widely used to monitor threatened wildlife.

Jeremy completed his BSc in zoology at the University of Sydney in 1971 under the tutelage of Templeton Prize winner, Professor Charles Birch (who would later support Jeremy’s work and write the foreword to his 2003 bestseller, A Species In Denial). Jeremy was subsequently offered a scholarship to Stanford University in the USA to continue postgraduate studies in biology, but he chose not to take up the offer, instead continuing his efforts to find and save the Thylacine from extinction that he had begun four years earlier. The search was to last more than six years in total—the most thorough investigation ever into the plight of the Tasmanian Tiger—but sadly Jeremy was to conclude it was extinct. The expedition attracted considerable attention and generated articles in the American Museum of Natural History’s journal, Natural History, and Australian Geographic, and was featured in an episode of the Australian television series A Big Country. Details of the search, including Jeremy’s official report, remain part of a permanent exhibit at the National Museum Australia and are regularly cited in books and articles on the subject, with Jeremy often asked for his knowledge and perspective on the species.

 

Founder of Griffith Tablecraft

In 1972, in the same self-sufficient spirit that had driven his ‘Tiger’ search, Jeremy Griffith established Griffith Tablecraft, a highly successful business manufacturing furniture based on his own simple, embellishment-free, natural designs, pioneering the use of unadulterated bark-to-bark slabs of timber, a lovely idea now popular worldwide for tables and bench tops. His creativity also extends beyond his design work, as Jeremy is also an accomplished artist.

 

Turning to the real issue of the human condition

It was during this time that, at the age of 27, Jeremy Griffith realised that trying to save animals from extinction or designing ideal furniture wasn’t addressing the real issue underlying the extraordinary imperfection in human life: our species’ ‘good and evil’-conflicted behaviour, and that what was really needed in the world was a deeper understanding of ourselves. Jeremy therefore turned his attention as a biologist to explaining the human condition, a study that has remained his life’s focus.

 

Writing, and forming FIX THE WORLD

Jeremy Griffith started writing about the human condition in 1975 and in 1983 established the international not-for-profit FIX THE WORLD, which is dedicated to the study and amelioration of the human condition. He is the author of over 20 books that present his breakthrough ‘Instinct vs Intellect’ biological explanation of the human condition, including his 2003 bestseller A Species In Denial, and in 2016, FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition, his “summa masterpiece”.

 

The significance of Jeremy Griffith’s life devoted to finding the scientific explanation of the human condition

 

The human condition has been the deepest and most important unresolved problem in science

No scientific challenge has been more profound or consequential than understanding the human condition. As Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson declared in his 2012 book, The Social Conquest of Earth, ‘There is no grail more elusive or precious in the life of the mind than…​understanding the human condition.’

It is against the magnitude of that most ‘elusive’ and ‘precious’ challenge that the extraordinary significance of Jeremy Griffith’s life and work has to be understood. Professor Harry Prosen, a former president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, believed Jeremy had achieved precisely the scientific breakthrough Wilson identified, saying: ‘I have no doubt Jeremy Griffith’s biological explanation of the human condition is the holy grail of insight we have sought for the psychological rehabilitation of the human race.’ (You can view many more similarly impressive endorsements of Jeremy’s treatise from leading scientists and thinkers on FIX THE WORLD’s commendations and reviews page.)

To understand the scale of this achievement, it is necessary to understand what the human condition truly is, why it has been so extremely difficult for humans—including scientists—to confront the subject, let alone solve it, and therefore how remarkable Jeremy is to have done so.

 

A summary of Jeremy Griffith’s explanation of the human condition

The elaboration that is linked to below explains all this in detail, but, very briefly, Jeremy Griffith explains that when humans’ fully conscious mind emerged some 2 million years ago (as evidenced by fossil skulls from our evolutionary past indicating expansion of the brain’s association cortex around this time) it started managing our life from a basis of understanding the world. However, our already established naturally selected instinctive orientations to the world inevitably resisted those exploratory experiments in self-management. In effect, our inflexible, ‘dictatorial’, non-understanding instincts criticised our conscious mind for deviating from their established orientations, and unable to explain why our intellect had challenged our instincts, our conscious mind could not resolve the conflict, all it could do was resist the criticism: attack our instincts’ unjust criticism, try to prove it undeserved, and try to block it from its thoughts—we became defensively angry, egocentric and alienated.

 

The terrible guilt at the heart of the human condition

What made this situation so much worse was the particular nature of our species’ instinctive orientations to the world—they were not the brutal and savage ‘must reproduce your genes’ instincts that other animals have, but cooperative selfless and loving moral instincts, the ‘voice’ of which is our conscience. As Charles Darwin himself recognised, ‘The moral sense…​affords the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals’. Jeremy Griffith actually explains (and again you can read more about this in the elaboration that is linked to below) that our distant ape ancestors developed our extraordinary cooperative, selfless and loving moral instincts through the extended nurturing of infants—which is how the bonobo species of ape are creating their extraordinarily cooperative, selfless and loving behaviour. In fact, following correspondence over the years between Jeremy and renowned primatologist Frans de Waal, in 2010 de Waal observed that ‘There is an increasing consensus among biologists that empathy arrived with the evolution of maternal care in mammals.’

The reason our cooperative, selfless and loving moral instincts made the criticism by our instincts of our conscious mind’s experiments in understanding so much worse is because when we became defensively angry, egocentric and alienated, those behaviours were extremely offensive to our particular cooperative, selfless and loving moral instinctive self or ‘soul’. We, our conscious mind, seemingly for no good reason, had turned utopia into dystopia, destroyed paradise itself!

So the unbearable condemnation from our cooperative, selfless and loving instinctive self or soul meant that our conscious mind had to defensively block it out from our thoughts. In doing so, we became sufferers of ‘psychosis’, which literally means ‘soul-illness’, derived from psyche meaning ‘soul’ and osis meaning ‘abnormal state’.

It is the extreme guilt and shame of having corrupted, destroyed, the original cooperative, selfless and loving world of our instinctive self or soul that is what the human condition is at its deepest level.

It is interesting to note that Jeremy’s obvious-in-hindsight ‘instinct vs intellect’ explanation for our soul-corrupted human condition bears out biologist Allan Savory’s observation that ‘whenever there has been a major insoluble problem for mankind, the answer, when finally found, has always been very simple’.

 

Humans, including scientists, have been so terrified of the issue of the human condition that we have lived in denial of it

So it makes sense that while we couldn’t explain our soul-corrupted condition, confronting the guilt and shame of it was so unbearably depressing—in fact, suicidally depressing—that virtually every human had no choice but to live in determined denial of the issue of our horrifically innocence-destroyed, soul-corrupted condition. As is explained in the elaboration linked to below, the great philosopher Plato wrote that we humans are so afraid of the issue of the ‘human condition’ that we metaphorically hide ‘a long way underground’ in ‘a cave’ so no ‘painful’ light from the ‘sun’ can expose our corrupted condition. So when the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, ‘O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall, frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed’, he wasn’t exaggerating the depth of depression almost everyone faced if they allowed their mind to think about the human condition while it was still to be ‘fathomed’/​understood/​answered.

It follows that since science is practiced by humans who are terrified of the issue of our soul-corrupted human condition, science had to develop a detail-only focus, mechanistic, reductionist approach, designed to avoid confronting the unbearable overarching issue of the human condition.

 

Reductionist, mechanistic science could not solve the human condition

One manifestation of mechanistic, reductionist science’s human-condition-avoiding framework is the familiar explanation mentioned above that our competitive, selfish and aggressive behaviour simply reflects savage, must-reproduce-our-genes instincts like those found in other animals—such as saying ‘Our fighting and wars are due to a genetic imperative in us to dominate and be a winner in the reproductive battle of life’.

But, as is made clear in the elaboration below, that explanation is simply a way of avoiding having to account for the obvious immensely insecure, soul-distressed, psychological nature of our behaviour. We don’t suffer from a genetic-opportunism-driven ‘animal condition’, but a conscious-mind-based, psychologically troubled ‘human condition’.

This failure to confront the human condition illustrates the fundamental limitation of science’s mechanistic, reductionist approach. No wonder the Templeton Prize-winning physicist Professor Paul Davies expressed frustration with mechanistic thinking, saying, ‘I have little doubt that much of the alienation and demoralisation that people feel in our so-called scientific age stems from the bleak sterility of mechanistic thought.’

So, as is explained more fully in the elaboration at the link below, humanity has been profoundly shaped by its fear and denial of the human condition, and science has been no exception. Its mechanistic, reductionist framework was designed to resist confronting the overarching issue of our deeply psychologically troubled, soul-corrupted human condition.

 

Why Jeremy Griffith works outside the conventional scientific framework

 

To solve the human condition Jeremy Griffith had to work outside the ‘peer review’ system

In an immensely soul-corrupted, human-condition-stricken world, Jeremy Griffith was extraordinarily fortunate in his upbringing to be exceptionally nurtured with unconditional love, and it is his resulting phenomenal soundness and security of self that enabled him to confront and ultimately solve the human condition. But because this incredibly rare ability of Jeremy’s to confront and think truthfully and effectively about the human condition was at odds with conventional science’s effective prohibition of this psychologically off-limits subject, Jeremy has had to operate independently of it, establishing FIX THE WORLD in 1983 to support his research—a charity that in 2026 has over 80 centres around the world and a vast website where all the information is available for free at www.HumanCondition.com.

This need for an independent approach also explains why Jeremy’s work has developed outside the traditional peer-reviewed scientific structure. Peer review necessarily evaluates new work through researchers working within established disciplines and prevailing frameworks. In the case of the human condition, that presents a particular problem: if the prevailing scientific framework is mechanistic, reductionist and structured around avoiding confrontation with the human condition, then a thesis that directly confronts and seeks to explain that condition was never likely to gain acceptance from within that framework.

This is consistent with a broader limitation of scientific orthodoxy, identified by the science historian Thomas Kuhn, who observed that, ‘revolutions in science are often initiated by an outsider—someone not locked into the current model, which hampers vision almost as much as blinders would’. Sir James Black, who won a Nobel Prize for the discovery of two of the most successful drugs ever developed by the pharmaceutical industry, was pointing out the limitation of the peer review system when he said, ‘The anonymous peer review process is the enemy of scientific creativity…Peer reviewers go for orthodoxy’.

 

Solving the human condition required inductive rather than deductive science

Further, since conventional mechanistic, reductionist science has been dedicated to avoiding the issue of the human condition, the overarching problem of the human condition could not be solved by simply deducing further conclusions from within those existing, denial-based frameworks. It required an inductive approach—one that draws together established observations and knowledge into a new, complete-picture synthesis capable of explaining human behaviour as a whole. As Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher, the father of modern experimental design, wrote, ‘Inductive inference is the only process known to us by which essentially new knowledge comes into the world.’

 

“The most courageous thinker I have ever met”

Given the enormity of the problem Jeremy Griffith set out to solve—the all-important issue of the human condition that humanity, and its vehicle for investigating reality, science, has lived in determined denial of; and the need to think outside that framework of denial to arrive at a genuinely new, whole-picture, human-condition-confronting, fully accountable and thus true explanation of it, as Jeremy has done—it is little wonder that after studying Jeremy’s work and knowing him personally for nearly 20 years, Professor Prosen described him as ‘the most impressive person and courageous thinker I have ever met’.

 

Fixing the world

Most wonderfully, by providing the real defence for why our intellect had to defy our instincts, our artificial defensive behaviours of anger, egocentricity and alienation are made redundant, which means we are finally in a position to fix the world. Yes, with our soul-corrupted human condition now finally explained, a whole new world emerges free of all the agony and horror of the angry, egocentric and alienated human-condition-stricken life. We finally have the means to relieve the underlying psychosis behind all human suffering, bar natural causes. Wars, violence, inequality, poverty, the mental health crisis, polarised politics, etc, can all now end. As Professor Prosen said, the understanding we now have of the human condition ‘is the holy grail of insight we have needed for the psychological rehabilitation of the human race’. Everyone can now leave Plato’s horrifically debilitating metaphorical dark ‘cave’ and rejoice in the warm healing sunshine of the redeeming understanding of ourselves.

 

 

Read a full step-by-step elaboration of this brief biography in the book Jeremy Griffith: The biologist who solved the human condition so we can fix the world (www.humancondition.com/jeremy-griffith-the-biologist-who-solved-the-human-condition/#elaboration).