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Written by Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith, 2011


Our conscience is the ‘voice’ of our species’ instinctive moral sense that was acquired before our present ‘good-and-evil’-afflicted, so-called ‘human condition’ emergedBUT that is a truth we couldn’t safely admit until we could EXPLAIN that condition, until we could explain our present seemingly-highly-imperfect, guilty-conscience-producing behaviour!!


MOST WONDERFULLY, however, biology is now finally able to provide this dreamed-of, exonerating, ‘good-and-evil’-reconciling, ‘burden-of-guilt’-lifting, clear-conscience-producing, human-race-transforming EXPLANATION of the human conditionas well as the explanation of how we acquired our original instinctive moral sense in the first place! (It should be mentioned that this explanation of our species’ present deeply psychologically troubled, ‘good-and-evil’-afflicted condition is not the psychosis-avoiding, trivialising, dishonest account of it that the biologist E.O. Wilson has put forward in his theory of Eusociality, but the psychosis-addressing-and-solving, real explanation of it.)



Our conscience is our instinctive moral sense


The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines ‘conscience’ as our ‘moral sense of right and wrong’. Yes, on the subject of our moral conscience the philosopher John Fiske observed that ‘We approve of certain actions and disapprove of certain actions quite instinctively. We shrink from stealing or lying as we shrink from burning our fingers’ (Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, 1874, Vol. IV, Part II, p.126). The philosopher Immanuel Kant was so impressed by our instinctive moral conscience that he had the following words inscribed on his tomb: ‘there are two things which fill me with awe: the starry heavens above us, and the moral law within us’. And Charles Darwin was similarly awed by the existence of our conscience, writing that ‘the moral sense affords the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals’ (The Descent of Man, 1871, p.495). The poet Alexander Pope, however, was not so impressed by our instinctive moral nature, pointing out that ‘our nature [is]…A sharp accuser, but a helpless friend!’ (An Page 55 of
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Essay on Man, Epistle II, 1733). And he was rightour conscience has been ‘a sharp accuser, but a helpless friend’; it has criticised us aplenty when what we really needed was sympathetic, compassionate, reconciling, redeeming and rehabilitating understanding of our ‘good-and-evil’-afflicted human condition. WHY, when the ideals of life are clearly to be cooperative, selfless and loving, are we humans the complete opposite, namely competitive, selfish and aggressive? In fact, why are we so ruthlessly competitive, selfish and brutal that human life has become all but unbearable and we have nearly destroyed our own planet?! In short, HOW DO WE EXPLAIN THE HUMAN CONDITION??


Thus, the two great questions about our consciencewhich can now at last be truthfully answeredare how did we acquire our ‘awe’-inspiring but ‘[un]friend[ly]’, mercilessly-critical conscience; and why don’t we still live in accordance with our moral instinctswhy did the human race ‘fall from grace’, become corrupted, lose its innocence, become immoral, stop obeying our instinctive moral conscience?


Despite trivialising the issue of the human condition with a dishonest explanation of it, the biologist E.O. Wilson was certainly right when he said that ‘The human condition is the most important frontier of the natural sciences’ (Consilience, 1998, p.298). Yes, the outstanding task for science, indeed the holy grail of all human enquiry, has been to solve the issue of the human condition, find the compassionate, reconciling and redeeming explanation of our seemingly-highly-imperfect, ‘good-and-evil’-afflicted human naturebecause without it we humans faced permanent damnation. The famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung was forever saying that ‘wholeness for humans depends on the ability to own their own shadow’ because he recognised that only finding understanding of our dark side could end our underlying insecurity about our fundamental goodness and worth as humans and, in so doing, make us ‘whole’ again.

Understandably, to avoid feeling damned and unworthy while the true explanation for our conscience-offending, competitive, selfish and aggressive behaviour was still to be found, false excuses had to be inventedthe main one being that we have savage animal instincts that make us fight and compete for food, shelter, territory and a mate. Of course, this human-condition-avoiding ‘explanation’ that basically argues that ‘genes are competitive and selfish and that’s why we are’, which, as is about to be described, has been put forward in the biological theories of Sociobiology, Evolutionary Psychology, Multilevel Selection and E.O. Wilson’s Eusociality, can’t be the real explanation for our present divisive behaviour. For a start, it overlooks the fact that our human behaviour involves our unique fully conscious thinking mind. Descriptions like egocentric, arrogant, deluded, artificial, hateful, mean, immoral, guilty, alienated, etc, all imply a consciousness-derived, psychological dimension to our behaviour. The real issuethe psychological problem in our thinking minds that we have suffered fromis the dilemma of our human condition, the issue of our species’ conscience-defying, less-than-ideal, even ‘fallen’ or corrupted, state. We humans suffer from a consciousness-derived, psychological HUMAN CONDITION, not an instinct-controlled animal conditionour condition is unique to us fully conscious humans.

And of course, the savage-instincts-in-us excuse is also completely inconsistent with the fact that we humans have altruistic, cooperative, selfless and loving, moral instinctswhat we recognise as our ‘conscience’. Clearly then, for the human-condition-avoiding, savage-instincts-in-us excuse to be preserved, a way had to be found around this fact that our original instinctive self or soul’s orientations are to behave in an unconditionally Page 56 of
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selfless, altruistic, moral way, not in a selfish, savage wayand the way that was found was to assert that our unconditionally selfless moral instincts are not actually selfless, but selfish. This was achieved by claiming that our instinctive self or soul’s moral conscience that causes us to behave in an altruistic way is actually a product of reciprocity, from situations frequently found in the animal world where an animal behaves selflessly on the condition it is treated selflessly in return, in which case the behaviour is still intrinsically selfish.

This reciprocity-based account of social behaviour became fully developed with the explanation put forward by the kin-selection-based theory of Sociobiology (and later Evolutionary Psychology) for situations where, for example, worker ants and bees selflessly support their respective colony and queen on the proviso that she reproduces their genes. What happened was that this situationwhere individuals foster relatives or kin because they carry their genes and through supporting them they are ensuring at least some of their own genes are reproducedwas dishonestly used to dismiss humans’ selfless, moral behaviour as just another example of this reciprocal selflessness that is actually selfishness. Yes, any instinctive moral conscience-inspired unconditionally, altruistic behaviour exhibited by us humans, such as charity workers caring for the poor, was said to not be genuinely altruistic behaviour but an indirect form of selfish behaviour!

To demonstrate how this reciprocity explanation has been used to supposedly dismiss our marvellous moral nature as merely a subtle form of selfishness, consider the following from the zoologist Richard Dawkins’ book The Selfish Gene: ‘We [humans] are survival machinesrobot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes…we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes…we are born selfish’ (First pub. 1976, this edn 1989, p.3). E.O. Wilson made a similar claim in his book On Human Nature, when he wrote that our ‘Morality has no other demonstrable ultimate function’ other than to ensure ‘human genetic material…will be kept intact’ (1978, p.167). The science writer Robert Wright summarised this clever, human-condition-avoiding dismissal of our moral instincts as selfish in his boldly titled book The Moral AnimalWhy we are the way we are: The new science of evolutionary psychology, when he wrote that ‘What is in our genes’ interests is what seems “right”morally right, objectively right, whatever sort of rightness is in order’; ‘In short: “moral guidance” is a euphemism’ (1994, pp.325, 216). And in a direct attack on our soul, Wilson even went on to say that [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau claimed [that humanity] was originally a race of noble savages in a peaceful state of nature, who were later corrupted…[but what] Rousseau invented [was] a stunningly inaccurate form of anthropology’ (Consilience, 1998, p.37).

The truth is that, far from being merely ‘a euphemism’, our moral instincts are NOTHING like the selfish reciprocity-derived instincts found in many animal speciesthey are unconditionally selfless, fully altruistic, truly loving, genuinely moral instincts. As Kant and Darwin acknowledged, our ‘awe’-inspiring ‘moral sense affords the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals’. Indeed, all our mythologies recognise this truth that we humans did once live in a cooperative, harmonious, loving, innocent, Garden-of-Eden-like ‘Golden Age’as the author Richard Heinberg acknowledged in his book Memories & Visions of Paradise: ‘Every religion begins with the recognition that human consciousness has been separated from the divine Source, that a former sense of oneness…has been lost…everywhere in religion and myth there is an acknowledgment that we have departed from an original…innocence’ (1990, pp.81, 82). For example, the eighth century BC Greek poet Hesiod referred to the pre-human-condition-afflicted, upset-free, innocent ‘Golden Age’ in our species’ past in his poem Theogony: ‘When gods alike and mortals rose to birth / A golden race Page 57 of
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the immortals formed on earth…Like gods they lived, with calm untroubled mind / Free from the toils and anguish of our kind / Nor e’er decrepit age misshaped their frame…Strangers to ill, their lives in feasts flowed by…Dying they sank in sleep, nor seemed to die / Theirs was each good; the life-sustaining soil / Yielded its copious fruits, unbribed by toil / They with abundant goods ’midst quiet lands / All willing shared the gathering of their hands.’ Yes, our instincts are to be fully cooperative, selfless and lovingwe do have an altruistic, unconditionally selfless moral conscience. As will be explained, our current psychologically upset, competitive, selfish and aggressive behaviour emerged when we humans became conscious.

What transpired, however, in this business of having to invent false excuses for our divisive, competitive, selfish and aggressive behaviour was that this denigration of our unconditionally selfless, genuinely altruistic, moral nature as being nothing more than a subtle form of selfishness eventually became just too offensive to tolerate, at which point another explanation for human behaviour that still avoided the issue of the human condition but didn’t deny that we do have genuinely moral instincts had to be foundand it was. In 2012, in his book The Social Conquest of Earth, E.O. Wilson dismissed the kin-selection-based Sociobiology/Evolutionary Psychology theorywhich he had been the leading advocate foras being ‘incorrect’ (p.143) and put forward a new theory that not only contrived a human-condition-avoiding, dishonest explanation for our genuinely moral instinctive self or soul, but took the art of denial to the absolute extreme by also contriving a non-human-condition-confronting explanation of the human condition itself!

Known as Multilevel Selection or the Theory of Eusociality (ibid. p.183) (eusociality simply meaning genuine sociality), this theory maintains that humans have instincts derived from natural selection operating at the individual level, where members of a species selfishly compete for food, shelter, territory and a mate, and instincts derived from natural selection supposedly operating at the group level, where groups of altruistic, cooperative members supposedly outcompete groups of selfish, non-cooperative memberswith the selfish individual level instincts supposedly being the bad/sinful aspects of our nature, and the supposed selfless group-selected instincts being the good/virtuous moral aspect of our nature. According to Wilson, ‘Individual selection is responsible for much of what we call sin, while group selection is responsible for the greater part of virtue. Together they have created the conflict between the poorer and the better angels of our nature’ (ibid. p.241). In summary, Wilson now asserts that ‘The dilemma of good and evil [which is the issue of the human condition] was created by multilevel selection’ (ibid).

While it is certainly true that we do have genuinely moral instincts, under scrutiny Wilson’s group selection mechanism for how we acquired them completely falls apart.

While it makes sense that, as Wilson stated, ‘altruists beat groups of selfish individuals’ (ibid. p.243), the biological stumbling block is whether genes, which have to selfishly ensure they reproduce, can develop self-sacrificing altruistic traits in the first place. The genetic reality is that whenever an unconditionally selfless, altruistic trait appears those that are selfish will naturally take advantage of it: ‘Sure, you can help me reproduce my genes but I’m not about to help you reproduce yours!’ Any selflessness that might arise through group selection will be constantly exploited by individual selfishness from within the group. As the biologist Jerry Coyne pointed out, ‘altruism would be unlikely to override the tendency of each group to quickly lose its altruism through natural selection favoring cheaters’ (‘Can Darwinism improve Binghamton?’, The New York Times, 9 Sep. 2011).

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they seem implausible, for they involve groups warring, then peacefully merging, then separating back out into new groupswith the altruists somehow banding together into their own groups.

But despite the propensity for unconditionally selfless traits to be exploited and thus eliminated, Wilson has put forward an argument that warring between groups of early humans where extreme cooperation would have been an advantage was a strong enough force to overcome this problem of selfish exploitation and thus allow for the selection of altruism and the emergence of our genuinely moral instincts. Yes, according to Wilson, our ability to war successfully somehow produced our ability to love unconditionally!

However, as has been emphasised, standing in stark contrast to Wilson’s proclamation of ‘universal and eternal’ warfare (The Social Conquest of Earth, p.65) are not only the cultural memories enshrined in our myths and religions, and in the words of some of our most profound thinkers, that attest to humans having a peaceful heritage, but also the evidence gleaned from studies in anthropology and primatology, such as those of bonobos (Pan paniscus), which are not only humans’ closest relatives, but also an extraordinarily gentle, cooperative and peaceful species. But when discussing bonobos, Wilson merely cites an instance of bonobos hunting in a group, using that ‘evidence’ to draw erroneous comparisons with the more aggressive common chimpanzees; ‘That’s one more problem out of the way’, he seems to be saying.

In summary, our moral instincts are not derived from warring with other groups of humans, as Wilson and his Eusociality theory of group selection would have us believe. No, we have an unconditionally selfless, fully altruistic, all-loving, universally-benevolent-not-competitive-with-other-groups, genuinely moral conscience. The ‘savage instincts in us’ excuse for our selfish behaviour is entirely inconsistent with the fact that we have completely moral, not partially moral and partially savage, instincts as Wilson claimed.

Overall then, while selfless instincts have been incorporated into the mix to counter Evolutionary Psychology’s offensive denigration of our moral instincts as being nothing more than a manifestation of selfish instincts, the same strategy of blaming our competitive, selfish and aggressive behaviour on supposed selfish, brutal instincts in us humans has been maintained. The real, psychological reason for our competitive, aggressive and selfish behaviour is still being denied. As emphasised earlier, we humans suffer from a consciousness-derived, psychological HUMAN CONDITION, not an instinct-controlled ANIMAL CONDITIONour condition is unique to us fully conscious humans.

(A more comprehensive description of the human-condition-avoiding, dishonest biological theories on human behaviour of Sociobiology, Evolutionary Psychology, Multilevel Selection and Eusociality can be found in the What is Science? article in this, The Book of Real Answers to Everything!, with the complete presentation appearing in the freely-available, online book Freedom: Expanded Book 1.)


So, what is the truthful, real, psychosis-addressing-and-solving biological explanation for our present seemingly-highly-imperfect human condition? And, beyond that, what is the truthful biological explanation for the origin of our human species’ ‘awe’-inspiring, ‘distinct’-from-other-animals, unconditionally selfless, fully altruistic, truly loving, genuinely moral instinctive conscience?


Firstly, to present the truthful, human-condition-addressing rather than human-condition-avoiding explanation of how our species’ competitive, selfish and aggressive human condition emerged.

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And BEST OF ALL, because this explanation of the human condition is redeeming, conscience-relieving and thus rehabilitating, all our upset angry, egocentric and alienated behaviour now subsides, bringing about the complete TRANSFORMATION OF THE HUMAN RACEand importantly, understanding of the human condition doesn’t condone ‘bad’ behaviour, it heals and by so doing ends it. From being competitive, selfish and aggressive, humans return to being cooperative, selfless and loving. Our round of departure has ended. The poet T.S. Eliot wonderfully articulated our species’ journey from an original innocent, yet ignorant, conscience-obedient state, to a psychologically upset, conscience-defying state, and back to an uncorrupted, but this time enlightened, conscience-consistent state when he wrote, ‘We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time’ (Little Gidding, 1942).

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With understanding of the human condition we can now safely explain the truthful biological origins of our unconditionally selfless, fully altruistic, genuinely moral instinctive conscience.


The question for biology is how could we humans have developed an unconditionally selfless, fully altruistic, truly loving, genuinely moral instinctive conscience? How can such instinctive behaviour possibly develop when the fundamental biological assumption is that unconditionally selfless instinctive traits cannot develop genetically because self-sacrificing traits tend to self-eliminate and for a trait to develop and become established in a species it needs to reproduce and carry on? The most selflessness that can seemingly be developed genetically is reciprocity, where, as mentioned, an animal behaves selflessly on the condition it will be treated selflessly in return, thus ensuring its continuation from generation to generation, which means the trait is, as pointed out, intrinsically selfish.

So, how did humans develop unconditionally selfless instincts? While self-eliminating genetic traits apparently cannot develop in animals, there was one way such unconditional selflessness could develop, and that was through nurturinga mother’s maternal instinct to care for her offspring. Genetic traits for nurturing are intrinsically selfish (which, as stated, genetic traits normally have to be) because through a mother’s nurturing and fostering of offspring who carry her genes her genetic traits for nurturing are selfishly ensuring their reproduction into the next generation. However, while nurturing is a genetically selfish trait, from an observer’s point of view the nurturing appears to be unconditionally selfless behaviour. The mother is giving her offspring food, warmth, shelter, support and protection for apparently nothing in return. This point is most significant because it means from the infant’s perspective its mother is treating it with real love, unconditional selflessness. The infant’s brain is therefore being trained or indoctrinated or inscribed with unconditional selflessness and so, with enough training in unconditional selflessness, that infant will grow into an adult who behaves unconditionally selflessly. Apply this training across all the members of that infant’s group and the result is an unconditionally selflessly behaved, cooperative, fully integrated society. And then, with this training in unconditional selflessness occurring over many generations, the unconditionally selfless behaviour will become instinctivea moral conscience will be established. Genes will inevitably follow and reinforce any development processin this they are not selective. The difficulty is in getting the development of unconditional selflessness to occur in the first place, for once it is regularly occurring it will naturally become instinctive over time.

For a species to develop nurturingto develop this method for overcoming the gene-based learning system’s seeming inability to develop unconditional selflessnessit required the capacity to allow its offspring to remain in the infancy stage long enough for the infant’s brain to become trained or indoctrinated with unconditional selflessness or love. In most species, infancy has to be kept as brief as possible because of the infant’s extreme vulnerability to predators. Zebras, for example, have to be capable of independent flight almost as soon as they are born, which gives them little opportunity to be trained in selflessness. In the case of primates, however, being already semi-upright as a result Page 62 of
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of their tree-living, swinging-from-branch-to-branch, arboreal heritage, their arms were semi-freed from walking and thus available to hold a helpless infant, which means they were especially facilitated for prolonging their offspring’s infancy and thus developing unconditionally selfless behaviour. The exceptionally maternal, matriarchal, cooperatively behaved, peaceful bonobo chimpanzee species provide a living example of a species in the midst of developing this training-in-love process. It was our distant ape ancestors who perfected the process, and that is how we acquired our unconditionally selfless, fully altruistic, instinctive self or ‘soul’, the ‘voice’ of which is our moral ‘conscience’. In light of this, we can now also understand why and when we began to walk upright: the longer infancy is delayed, the more and longer infants had to be held, and thus the greater the selection for arms-freed, upright walkingwhich means bipedalism must have developed early in this nurturing of love process, and in fact the early appearance of bipedalism in the fossil record of our ancestors is now being found.

The question still to be answered is why was it that humans acquired a fully conscious mind while other species didn’t? The answer is explained in chapter 7 of FREEDOM, but very briefly, while mothers’ training of their infants in unconditional selflessness enabled an unconditionally selflessly behaved, fully cooperative society to develop, this training in unconditional selflessness had an accidental by-product: it produced brains trained to think selflessly and thus truthfully and thus effectively and thus become ‘conscious’ of the relationship of events that occur through time. Other species who can’t develop unconditional selflessness can’t think truthfully and thus effectively because unconditional selflessness, which they are unable to recognise, is the truthful theme or meaning of existence. The point is, you can’t hope to think truthfully and thus effectively if you’re lying. Selfishness-practicing species have an emerging mind that is dishonestly orientated, a mind that is alienated from the truth, which means it can never make sense of experience and thus never become conscious.

Thus, through nurturing we acquired our born-with, ‘collective unconscious’, as Carl Jung described our shared-by-everyone instinctive self or soul. Yes, our soul did become ‘unconscious’, a subterranean part of our conscious mind, because we had to repress and deny it for its unjust condemnation of usbut no more; as Professor Prosen said, our species’ psychological rehabilitation’ can now begin!

Understandably, however, until we could truthfully explain the good reason humans became embattled with the human condition and thus unable to adequately nurture their children it has been psychologically unbearable to admit that it wasn’t tool use or language development or mastery of fire, etc, etc, but nurturing that gave us our moral conscience and made us humanas has been said ‘people would rather admit to being an axe murderer than being a bad father or mother’ (Sun-Herald, 7 July 2002). It is only now that we can explain why we developed such upset angry, egocentric and psychotic and neurotic alienated lives, which unavoidably made nurturing our children with real, sound love all but impossible, that we can safely admit the critical part nurturing played both in the emergence of our species and in our own lives. In truth, the nature vs nurture debate has really been about defensively trying to argue against the importance of nurturing in the lives of our children. Yes, it is only now that we can truthfully explain the human condition that we can afford to tell the real story behind our ‘awe’-inspiring conscienceand admit that Rousseau was right when he said, ‘nothing is more gentle than man in his primitive state’ (The Social Contract and Discourses, 1755; tr. G.D.H. Cole, 1913, Book IV, The Origin of Inequality, p.198).



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As just demonstrated, with understanding of the human condition
found ALL the great issues finally become explainable.
See also: Human conditionWhat is science?What is love?SoulGood vs Evil
How can we save the world?ConsciousnessHuman nature
Why do people lie?Why do we fall in love?



The Book of Real Answers to Everything! by Jeremy Griffith,
featuring a Foreword by Professor Harry Prosen, at




Watch videos on the biological explanation of the human condition and the
dreamed-of TRANSFORMATION of the human race that it brings about




Read FREEDOM, the definitive book on the world-transforming
explanation of the human condition, specifically chapter 3 on the
origins of the human condition, and chapter 5 on the origins of
our conscience, at