Part 4:13 Summary of why biology had not made any real advance since Darwin

This analysis of dishonest, denial-complying, human-condition-avoiding mechanistic, reductionist biology began at Part 4:9 under the heading, the ‘Fourth Category of Thinker: The great majority of the human race who avoided the whole issue of a psychosis in our human situation by simply blaming our selfish and aggressive behaviour on supposed brutish and savage animal instincts within us that our intellect supposedly has to control’. There it was stated that ‘What we are going to see now is how almost everyone…in the world, including virtually all scientists, totally avoided the whole issue of the real dilemma and psychosis of our human condition by simply blaming our selfish and aggressive behaviour on supposed brutish and savage animal instincts within us that our intellect has to control.’ It was explained that ‘Most people, in fact virtually all adults, have avoided anything to do with the issue of the psychological dilemma and resulting psychosis and neurosis of our human condition. Even beginning to vaguely contemplate the nature of our human situation has been too psychologically dangerous for upset humans—as described in Part 4:4C, even asking the obvious initial question of ‘What makes humans unique?’ has been a ‘no-go zone’. Clearly what is so unique about us humans is that we are conscious, but thinking about that was a slippery slope as it quickly raised the depressing question: ‘Well, if we are fully conscious, reasoning, intelligent, extremely clever animals, what is so intelligent, clever and smart about being so aggressive and selfish that we have nearly destroyed our own planet?’ Similarly, to start thinking truthfully about the other element that must play a significant role in our situation, namely that of our instinctive heritage, was even more treacherous as it very quickly led to the unbearably confronting memory, that all humans carry, of an upset-free, cooperatively orientated, innocent time in our species’ instinctive past, a time before the fabled ‘fall’ that all our mythologies recognise took place when we became fully conscious.

What we have now seen is how true that prediction was, for apart from some recent desperation-motivated exceptions that were just described in Part 4:12J, the journey that biology has undergone since Darwin has been one of completely avoiding any encounter with the truth that we humans once lived in an innocent, upset-free, completely unconditionally selflessly orientated instinctive state, and that we then we became conscious, after which we became sufferers of a psychologically upset human condition. Basically, Social Darwinism, Sociobiology, Evolutionary Psychology, the by-products of natural selection account, the Multilevel theory and the Theory of Eusociality all avoided acknowledging that the human condition is, in fact, a psychologically derived condition, a psychosis. If we are honest even for a moment, the descriptions that we give of our human behaviour, such as egocentric, arrogant, evil, shameful, guilty, contemptuous, alienated, psychotic, depressed, deluded, artificial, fake, pretentious, superficial, escapist, defensive, dishonest, hateful, mean, etc, etc, all imply a psychological dimension to our human behaviour. Not one of these theories leads to the fulfilment of Carl Jung’s requirement that ‘wholeness for humans depends on the ability to own their own shadow’. Ours is a psychologically derived condition, we have a ‘shadow’ to understand and ameliorate. It really is absurd to try to relate our species’ mind-controlled, psychologically-troubled human condition to other animals’ gene-controlled animal condition.

As already pointed out in Part 4:12G when talking about the by-products of natural selection explanation for our moral soul, the overall problem for biologists from both the left-wing and the right-wing is that they have been operating in a mechanistic, reductionist paradigm that determinedly resisted any encounter with the psychological agony of the human condition, which meant they couldn’t hope to truthfully explain such fundamental questions as the human condition, how we acquired our unconditionally selfless moral instincts or how we humans became fully conscious. If you’re avoiding the whole issue of a psychosis in our human situation you are in no position to explain it—as R.D. Laing pointed out, ‘Our alienation goes to the roots. The realization of this is the essential springboard for any serious reflection on any aspect of present inter-human life.’

Again, the great questions in biology, indeed the three holy grails of biology, have been to truthfully explain the human condition, which is done in Part 3:2; to truthfully explain the origins of humans’ unconditionally selfless moral instinctive self or soul, which is what the love-indoctrination explanation given in Part 8:4 does; and to truthfully explain how we developed full consciousness when other species haven’t been able to, which is explained in Part 8:4B. The immense frustration of mechanistic, reductionist biology has been its inability to solve any of these fundamentally important biological questions, which is why biology became stalled, piled up and festering at this gateway that it couldn’t seem to get through no matter how determinedly it tried. And the reality is it could never get through because, in the case of our moral instincts for example, the ability to solve the riddle of how a fundamentally selfish process could have produced unconditionally selfless instincts depends on not living in denial of Integrative Meaning, or of the fundamental psychosis/​alienation of our human situation, or, most particularly, of the importance of nurturing both in the maturation of our species and in our own lives.

In summary, the interpretations of human behaviour put forward by the proponents of Social Darwinism, Sociobiology, Evolutionary Psychology, the by-products of natural selection account, the Multilevel theory and the Theory of Eusociality were not advances in sound biological thinking where human behaviour was concerned, rather, they were increasingly sophisticated ways for upset humans to avoid the issue of our human condition. As my professor of biology at Sydney University, Charles Birch, so truthfully said, ‘Biology has not made any real advance since Darwin’ (In recorded conversation with this author, 20 Mar. 1987). Indeed, Birch went further in speaking the truth when he said, ‘Science can’t deal with subjectivity…what we were all taught in universities is pretty much a dead end’ (From recording of Birch’s 1993 FHA/WTM Open Day address). He later said that ‘the traditional framework of thinking in science is not adequate for solving the really hard problems’ (ABC Radio National, Ockham’s Razor, 16 Apr. 1997), and we know that the ‘hard[est] problem’ of all for humans to confront and solve was the ‘subjective’ issue of our psychologically upset human condition.

As R.D. Laing wrote about both the importance and difficulty of investigating our consciousness-derived-and-induced human condition: ‘The requirement of the present, the failure of the past, is the same: to provide a thoroughly self-conscious and self-critical human account of man…Our alienation goes to the roots. The realization of this is the essential springboard for any serious reflection on any aspect of present inter-human life [pp.11-12 of 156] …We respect the voyager, the explorer, the climber, the space man. It makes far more sense to me as a valid project—indeed, as a desperately urgently required project for our time—to explore the inner space and time of consciousness [the issue of the human condition]. Perhaps this is one of the few things that still make sense in our historical context. We are so out of touch with this realm [so in denial of the issue of the human condition] that many people can now argue seriously that it does not exist. It is very small wonder that it is perilous indeed to explore such a lost realm [p.105]’ (The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, 1967). (It should be mentioned in passing here that with E.O. Wilson’s trivialisation of the subject of the human condition ‘many people’ will ‘now argue’ that the subject of the human condition does exist, but they won’t be thinking ‘seriously’ about what the human condition actually is—which means the subject has, in truth, become ever more of ‘a lost realm’!)

So Darwin advanced biology as far as it could go if you weren’t prepared to lie and if you weren’t prepared to truthfully confront the issue of the human condition—and that is where biology, and science as a whole, has been stalled, because almost every biologist since Darwin failed to take up the path that led to the truthful explanation of the human condition that is being presented here in Freedom Expanded: Book 1, and which Darwin’s understanding of natural selection made possible. They failed to admit that we humans have unconditionally selfless moral instincts that are at odds with our conscious mind, and from there realise that these two learning systems, the gene-based and the nerve-based, differ in the way they process information, and from there realise the nature of the difference, which is that the gene-based learning system can give species orientations, but orientations are not the understandings that the nerve-based learning system requires, hence the battle between the two learning systems that produced the psychologically upset state of the human condition. But with understanding of the human condition now found, by taking that human-condition-confronting, denial-free path through to its conclusion, the consilience of all information (which E.O. Wilson at one stage deceitfully claimed to be achieving) can finally occur. In the future, instead of children being taught unrelated subjects like spelling, mathematics, history, chemistry, biology, physics, religion, etc, all subjects will be associated under the broader subject of what it means to be human. Instead of having to live in a cave of denial all of humanity can finally come out into the sunshine of the truth about ourselves and be forever TRANSFORMED to a state that is free of the upset state of the human condition.

So what I said when summarising the dishonest Multilevel Selection account of human behaviour at the end of Part 4:12H-vi applies to all the post-Darwin accounts of human nature: from Social Darwinism to Sociobiology to Evolutionary Psychology to the by-products of natural selection account to the Multilevel theory to the Theory of Eusociality. While these theories certainly made us feel as though we had some excuse for our corrupted, fallen, alienated, split, bipolar, manic depressive, psychotic condition, in truth, all that they were was contorted, bewildered—alienated—interpretations of human behaviour. Yes, just the sort of rubbish people conjure up when they have lost all access to what it is that we have to explain about ourselves, namely our ‘fall[en]’ from a Garden of Eden’ state of original innocence, corrupted, immensely alienated, psychotic and neurotic lives. In Part 4:12A I warned that what was going to be presented would be a nightmare of dishonest thinking, and that is what it has been.

The fact is, both the left and the right weren’t interested in going anywhere near the real issue of the human condition, only in pretending to—and this pretence has led to literally a mountain of supposedly scholarly papers and books; billions and billions of words about theories supposedly supported by mathematical models, formula, graphs and charts, which, unfortunately, amounted only to a great pile of bullshit/​lies/​denial/​dishonesty/​alienation—but, again, it is simply a reflection of what has happened across all areas of human life; the human race has entered the end play state of terminal alienation. Thank goodness the true understanding of our human condition has arrived to save us from this unthinkably torturous form of death of the human race.