2. ABOUT BIOLOGIST JEREMY GRIFFITH
WTM FAQ 2.4 Is it true, as some people have said, that Jeremy Griffith cannot be considered a biologist because he doesn’t have a PhD, he hasn’t published any research in scientific journals, he is ‘self-published’, his work is inductive not deductive, and he is not an academic who has worked in a scientific institution like a university?
Jeremy Griffith has a Bachelor of Science degree in Zoology, and his entire career has been dedicated to biological research, in particular research into the biology of the human condition, a subject he has written numerous books about, so to describe him as a biologist is legitimate and accurate.
When considering Jeremy’s research, the most important thing to appreciate is that it deals with the issue of the human condition, which has been the most difficult of all subjects for humans to face, and as a result has required an approach independent of the existing details-only-focused, whole-view-of-the-human-condition-avoiding, mechanistic, reductionist scientific framework.
In his book FREEDOM, especially in chapter 2:12, Jeremy makes the following important points about the nature of his necessarily independent, human-condition-confronting-not-avoiding research:
Firstly, he cites Charles Birch, the Templeton-Prize-winning biologist who was Jeremy’s professor of biology when he was at Sydney University, who bravely spoke the truth about the limitations of human-condition-avoiding mechanistic science when he said, ‘[mechanistic] science can’t deal with subjectivity [the issue of our corrupted, ‘fallen’, innocence-destroyed human condition]…what we were all taught in universities is pretty much a dead end’ (from recording of Birch’s 1993 World Transformation Movement Open Day address). Professor Birch also perceived the stultifying, truth-avoiding effects of dishonest, denial-based, mechanistic thinking when he said, ‘Biology has not made any real advance since Darwin’ (in recorded conversation with the author, 20 Mar. 1987), and, some 10 years later, that ‘the traditional framework of thinking in science is not adequate for solving the really hard problems’ (Ockham’s Razor, ABC Radio National, 16 Apr. 1997), with the ‘hard[est] problem’ of all for truth-avoiding thinking to solve being the all-important issue of our species’ corrupted human condition. As Professor Birch concluded, ‘Biology right now awaits its Einstein in the realm of consciousness studies’ (ibid). Note that since our corrupted human condition is consciousness-induced, ‘consciousness’ has become code word for the issue of the human condition.
The Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing was also extremely honest about the extent and effects of the denial of our corrupted human condition when he wrote that ‘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…We are born into a world where alienation awaits us. We are potentially men, but are in an alienated state [p.12 of 156] …the ordinary person is a shrivelled, desiccated fragment of what a person can be. As adults, we have forgotten most of our childhood, not only its contents but its flavour; as men of the world, we hardly know of the existence of the inner world [p.22] …The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man [p.24] …between us and It [our true selves or soul] there is a veil which is more like fifty feet of solid concrete [p.118] …The outer divorced from any illumination from the inner is in a state of darkness. We are in an age of darkness. The state of outer darkness is a state of sin—i.e. alienation or estrangement from the inner light [p.116] …We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another’ [pp.11-12] …We are so out of touch with this realm [where the issue of our corrupted human condition lies] that many people can now argue seriously that it does not exist [p.105]’ (The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, 1967). In addition to pointing out the extent of our alienating denial of our corrupted condition, Laing also emphasised the need for a truthful human-condition-acknowledging account of humans when he wrote that ‘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 [p.11] …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 [p.105]’ (ibid).
Another Templeton Prize winner, physicist Paul Davies also complained of the alienating effects of mechanistic science when he wrote that ‘For 300 years science has been dominated by extremely mechanistic thinking. According to this [whole-view-evading, human-condition-avoiding, mechanisms-only-focused] view of the world all physical systems are regarded as basically machines…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’ (‘Living in a non-material world—the new scientific consciousness’, The Australian, 9 Oct. 1991).
The Hungarian-English polymath Arthur Koestler was also frustrated by mechanistic, reductionist science’s avoidance of our species’ conscious-mind-induced, extremely alienated, human-condition-afflicted psychosis, writing that ‘symptoms of the mental disorder which appears to be endemic in our species…are specifically and uniquely human, and not found in any other species. Thus it seems only logical that our search for explanations [of human behaviour] should also concentrate primarily on those attributes of homo sapiens which are exclusively human and not shared by the rest of the animal kingdom. But however obvious this conclusion may seem, it runs counter to the prevailing reductionist trend. “Reductionism” is the philosophical belief that all human activities can be “reduced” to – i.e., explained by – the [no-psychosis-involved] behavioural responses of lower animals – Pavlov’s dogs, Skinner’s rats and pigeons, Lorenz’s greylag geese, Morris’s hairless apes…That is why the scientific establishment has so pitifully failed to define the predicament of man’ (Janus: A Summing Up, 1978, p.19 of 354). Like Davies, Koestler complained too of ‘the sterile deserts of reductionist philosophy’ (ibid. p.20), making the fundamental point that ‘a correct diagnosis of the condition of man [had to be] based on a new approach to the sciences of life’ (p.20), concluding, like Birch, that ‘the citadel they [mechanistic scientists] are defending lies in ruins’ (p.192).
No wonder then that one of history’s greatest mechanistic scientists, Sir Isaac Newton, famously lamented that ‘I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people’. Yes, when the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that ‘The discovery of truth is prevented most effectively…by prejudice, which…stands in the path of truth and is then like a contrary wind driving a ship away from land’ (Essays and Aphorisms, tr. R.J. Hollingdale, 1970, p.120 of 237), he was recognising the inability of human-condition-avoiding, mechanistic, reductionist thinking to find understanding of our ‘madness’.
So when Professor Birch said that ‘the traditional framework of thinking in science is not adequate for solving the really hard problems’, in particular the hardest problem of all of the human condition, and that ‘Biology has not made any real advance since Darwin’, and that ‘Biology right now awaits its Einstein in the realm of consciousness studies’, it becomes very clear how independent of traditional mechanistic science, and how precious Jeremy’s human-condition-confronting study of the human condition is! No wonder the esteemed American ecologist and Professor Emeritus of Biology at San Diego State University, Stuart Hurlbert, published a comment on the World Transformation Movement’s website in 2022 about Jeremy’s work in which he said, ‘I am stunned and honored to have lived to see the coming of “Darwin II”.’
Indeed, the extremely eminent psychiatrist and former president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association Professor Harry Prosen acknowledged how precious Jeremy’s truthful and thus effective, human-condition-confronting studies of the human condition are when he said: ‘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’; and, ‘Jeremy Griffith’s book FREEDOM is the book that saves the world’!
Many other extraordinarily impressive commendations for Jeremy’s treatise from eminent scientists and thinkers can be read in the Commendations section of the WTM’s home page.
And with regard to the suggestion that a ‘biologist’ must be published in ‘peer-reviewed’ scientific journals, it follows from what is explained above that the established, entrenched, traditional mechanistic scientific paradigm resists the human-condition-confronting, truthful explanation of the human condition, and the main way it does so is by ignoring it. In the prevailing mechanistic paradigm, status and credibility are achieved through being published in a ‘peer-reviewed’ journal, which is one in which the articles it contains have been examined by people with credentials in the article’s field of study before it is published. Obviously, with mainstream science determined to deny the human condition, and with almost all humans unable to confront the human condition, Jeremy’s treatise has neither been ‘peer-reviewed’ or published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. However, many of the great breakthroughs in science have had to come from outside the prevailing paradigm; from so-called ‘outsiders’, and so mainstream science’s refusal to publish work in its peer-reviewed journals does not indicate that work is not science of the very highest quality. 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 this 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’ (Interview by Andrew Jack, ‘An acute talent for innovation’, Financial Times, 2 February 2009). In paragraph 6 of his Introduction to Jeremy’s book FREEDOM, Professor Prosen makes this same point about paradigm shifts—which are the epitome of ‘scientific creativity’—having to come from ‘outside’ the ‘orthodoxy’, also emphasising that nowhere is this requirement to work outside the existing paradigm more necessary than when the subject is the human condition:
“In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970), science historian Thomas Kuhn noted that ‘revolutions are often initiated by an outsider—someone not locked into the current model, which hampers vision almost as much as blinders would’ (from Shirley Strum’s Almost Human, 1987, p.164 of 297). And when it comes to addressing the problem of the human condition this need to think independently of the existing details-only-focused, whole-view-of-the-human-condition-avoiding, mechanistic framework could not be more critical. For someone to be able to explain, and, through that explanation, bring reconciling, ameliorating understanding to our troubled human-condition-afflicted lives, they obviously had to be thinking from a position outside that conventional mechanistic paradigm. The situation certainly brings to mind Einstein’s famous comment that ‘We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them’! I might say that I think we have always known that profound insight into human nature wasn’t going to emerge from the ivory towers of intellectualdom, rather it was going to come from the deepest of deep left field, somewhere where some extraordinary untainted clarity of thought might still exist, such as from the backwoods of Australia where these answers are actually from.”
In paragraph 32 of his Introduction, Professor Prosen further explains how solving the subject of the human condition required someone working independent to the mainstream of mechanistic science, or what Koestler described as ‘the scientific establishment’:
“Jeremy once sent me a feature article that was syndicated in the weekend magazine of two of Australia’s leading newspapers about the extraordinarily enlightened Australian biologist Charles Birch, who was the head of the biology faculty at Sydney University when Jeremy was a student there, which I will quote because it describes the treatment that has been given to any scientist who dared to recognize the teleological, holistic [human-condition-confronting-not-avoiding] purpose or meaning of existence. [Jeremy explains why teleology has been an anathema for mechanistic scientists in chapter 4 of FREEDOM.] Titled ‘Science Friction’, the article referred to an emerging group of scientists who are bringing about a ‘scientific revolution’ and ‘monumental paradigm shift’ in science because they have ‘dared to take a holistic approach’ and are thus being seen by the scientific orthodoxy as committing ‘scientific heresy’. The article said that these scientists, such as the ‘physicist Paul Davies and biologist Charles Birch’, who are ‘not afraid of terms such as “purpose” and “meaning”’, are trying ‘to cross the great divide between science and religion’, adding that ‘Quite a number of biologists got upset [about this new development] because they don’t want to open the gates to teleology—the idea that there is goal-directed change is an anathema to biologists who believe that change is random’. The article summarized that ‘The emerging clash of scientific thought has forced many of the new scientists on to the fringe. Some of the pioneers no longer have university positions, many publish their theories in popular books rather than journals, others have their work sponsored by independent organisations…universities are not catering for the new paradigm’ (Deidre Macken, The Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne’s The Age, 16 Nov. 1991; see <www.wtmsources.com/152>). While Jeremy gained a BSc degree at a conventional university, he didn’t continue his studies there to gain a PhD and he has ‘publish[ed his]…theories in popular books rather than journals’—but as this article points out, the very good reason for pursuing that autonomous path is that ‘Universities are not catering for the new paradigm’. In fact, as I mentioned, Jeremy had to create an ‘independent organisation’ to study the human condition from a truthful, non-mechanistic, teleology-recognizing base—and, as I mentioned, his prescience in ‘pioneer[ing]’ this now recognized all-important frontier for science reveals what an extraordinarily capable and eminent scientist Jeremy is; a professor of science in the truest sense. Thomas Kuhn was certainly right when, as I mentioned earlier, he said that ‘revolutions are often initiated by an outsider—someone not locked into the current model, which hampers vision almost as much as blinders would’. Kuhn also recognized that ‘When a field is pre-paradigmatic [introduces a new paradigm, as Jeremy’s work does]…progress is made with books, not with journal papers’ (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1970; from ‘Phillip Greenspun’s Weblog’; see <www.wtmsources.com/154>). And I might point out that just as Jeremy has had to do to create a revolution in science, Charles Darwin was ‘a lone genius, working from his country home without any official academic position’ (Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind, 2000, p.33 of 538).”
With regard to Jeremy’s books being ‘self-published’, it follows from what Professor Prosen has explained about Jeremy having to create an ‘independent organisation’ to study the human condition from a truthful, non-mechanistic, teleology-recognising base, that it was also necessary for Jeremy and others who wanted to promote truthful, non-mechanistic, teleology-recognising studies of the human condition to establish an independent publishing house to publish such holistic, human-condition-confronting work. So WTM Publishing & Communications is a very specialist publisher dedicated to publishing work emerging from this incredible new paradigm.
It is clear that the independent—not actually ‘self’—publishing of such works is not being done because the standard of such works are low, or because of author vanity, as books that are actually self-published are often accused of being, but because the resistance to such human-condition-confronting work necessitated the creation of an independent publisher for such revolutionary thinking.
Even in the conforming mechanistic realm, self-publishing was sometimes necessary and did not necessarily mean the work was inferior or a vanity project. Many very famous writers had to self-publish such as Friedrich Nietzsche, A. N. Whitehead (with Bertrand Russell), William Blake, Edgar Allen Poe, James Joyce, Henry Thoreau, Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, D.H. Lawrence, George Bernard Shaw and Alexandre Dumas. Indeed, in 2010, when winning the then biggest defamation action in Australia’s history against two of the country’s largest media outlets that sought to impugn the standard of Jeremy’s treatise (see Persecution of the WTM for Exposing the Human Condition), the three judges in the Court of Appeal, led by Justice David Hodgson, who was one of the most highly regarded legal minds in Australia (and had himself written books about the nature of consciousness), unanimously found that while there were many unconventional aspects to Jeremy’s work, such as he ‘had no affiliation or association with a university or scientific establishment, had no recognition from a university or scientific establishment other than an undergraduate degree, had apparently not published in peer review publications, and had self-published the work under consideration, are not elements of the standard of the work itself, but are nevertheless factors counting heavily against the work receiving consideration and support from the scientific community. The circumstance that the work was a grand narrative explanation from a holistic approach, involving teleological elements, would also count against the work receiving consideration and support from the scientific community, without necessarily impacting on the standard of the work.’
With regard to Jeremy’s research for his treatise on the human condition, it is not deductive in nature, whereby a researcher reads existing theories of whatever phenomenon they are studying, and then conducts experiments to test hypotheses that emerge from those theories. No, as Professor Prosen points out in paragraph 31 of his Introduction to FREEDOM:
“not only has Jeremy’s work been treated as heretical by mechanistic science because he dares to look at the real ‘psychological’ nature of the human condition, it has also been resisted because of the two reasons referred to in the ruling by the…three judges of the New South Wales Court of Appeal. Firstly, rather than being a more mechanistic and less thinking dependent, deduction-derived theory, Jeremy, like Darwin did with his theory of natural selection, puts forward a wide-ranging, induction-derived synthesis, a ‘grand narrative explanation’ for, in this case, human behavior—an approach, incidentally, that led to both Darwin’s and Jeremy’s work being very wrongly criticized by some for not presenting ‘new data’ and a ‘testable hypothesis’, and even as ‘not being science at all’! Secondly, Jeremy’s enormously knowledge-advancing (and ‘science’ literally means ‘knowledge’, derived as it is from the Latin word scientia, which means ‘knowledge’) thinking is based on ‘a holistic approach involving teleological elements’. As Jeremy beautifully explains in chapter 4, the reason that the fundamental truth of the teleological, holistic purpose or meaning of existence of developing the order or integration of matter into ever larger and more stable wholes (atoms into compounds, into virus-like organisms, into single-celled organisms, into multicelled organisms, etc) has been denied by human-condition-avoiding mechanistic science is because it implies humans should behave in an ordered, integrative, cooperative, selfless, loving way.”
Similarly, Professor Scott Churchill, a former Chair of Psychology at the University of Dallas, described Jeremy’s approach in a review of Jeremy’s book FREEDOM: ‘Griffith’s ideas have been criticized for not presenting the field of science with “new data” and “testable hypotheses.” But such a complaint is disingenuous since evolutionary processes are not subjectable to the same kind of “hypothesis testing” that one finds in the other sciences. An hypothesis is a “smaller, more compact thesis” that is “deduced” from a larger idea or thesis in such a way that one can test that larger idea piece by piece. Whereas, the kind of synthesis offered in Griffith’s book is presented both conceptually and metaphorically with an aim to tie together existing data, while correcting and expanding upon the more limited existing interpretations of those data…Such a perspective comes to us not as a simple opinion of one man, but rather as an inductive conclusion drawn from sifting through volumes of data representing what scientists have discovered’ (Review of FREEDOM submitted to New York Magazine, 26 Sep. 2014). (You can read more about the difference between inductive and deductive science in chapter 2:4 and chapter 6:12 of FREEDOM). So the suggestion that the only valid biological ‘research’ is deductive, is clearly wrong; 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 Design of Experiments, 1935).
Sir Francis Bacon, the father of the scientific method, was one of the first to recognise how hopelessly compromised deductive science can be by the limitations of the practitioner, declaring that ‘The subtilty of Nature far surpasses the subtilty of [our current human-condition-afflicted] sense and intellect; so that men’s fair meditations, speculations and reasonings are a kind of insanity, only there is no one standing by to notice it…The Logic which is in vogue [deductive reasoning] is rather potent for the confirming and fixing [of] errors [rather] than for the investigation of Truth: so that it is more harmful than useful…And so our only hope is in a true Induction’ (Novum Organum; or A True Guide to the Interpretation of Nature, 1620; Book 1, Aphorisms 10-14). Essentially, ‘true’ ‘induction-derived’ knowledge requires fearless, free, imaginative thinking—as Koestler has pointed out: ‘Max Planck, the father of quantum theory, wrote in his autobiography that the pioneer scientist must have “a vivid intuitive imagination for new ideas not generated by deduction, but by artistically creative imagination”’ (The Act of Creation, 1964, p.147 of 751). And with regard to the human-condition-confronting fearlessness of such a free ‘imagination’, the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev said that ‘Knowledge requires great daring. It means victory over ancient, primeval terror. Fear makes the search for truth and the knowledge of it impossible. Knowledge implies fearlessness…Particularly bitter is moral knowledge, the knowledge of good and evil…Moral knowledge is the most bitter and the most fearless of all for in it sin and evil are revealed to us along with the meaning and value of life’ (The Destiny of Man, 1931; tr. N. Duddington, 1960, pp.14-15 of 310). So declaring ‘induction-derived’ ‘new ideas’ and ‘knowledge’ as ‘not being science at all’ is simply mechanistic science saying it doesn’t want to participate in ‘the search for truth’ and ‘knowledge’; basically, it doesn’t want to practise science—because, again, ‘“science” literally means “knowledge”’!
Clearly, human-condition-confronting inductive research into the human condition is ‘biological research’; in fact, because it is not hampered by denial, or kept from truth by ‘prejudice’ as Arthur Schopenhauer wrote, it is the most effective and penetrating research of all.
Conclusion
So rather than saying “Jeremy Griffith cannot be considered a biologist”, Jeremy should be considered the ultimate biologist because, as Professor Prosen stated, his treatise could hardly be more impressive biology, especially since it solves the holy grail of science of the issue of the human condition! This further review from Professor Churchill acknowledges just some of the brilliance of Jeremy’s thinking: ‘I have recommended his [Griffith’s] more recent work to my students precisely for his razor-sharp clarifications of positions of contemporary authors like Edward O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and Robert Wright. Griffith manages to summarize book-length expositions of these oftentimes obtuse and varying perspectives on human evolution with clarity and brilliance’ (Expert Report, 2007). It is actually dishonest mechanistic scientists who can no longer be considered true scientists, with their ‘oftentimes obtuse and varying perspectives on human evolution’ now replaced by Jeremy’s human-condition-confronting-not-avoiding, ‘razor-sharp clarifications’ of the ‘varying perspectives on human evolution’! Again, as Professor Prosen wrote, Jeremy is a ‘professor of science in the truest sense’; and as the highly esteemed ecologist Professor Stuart Hurlbert stated in 2022 about Jeremy’s stature as a biologist, ‘I am stunned & honored to have lived to see the coming of “Darwin II”.’
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For further reading about the extraordinary nature of Jeremy Griffith’s human-condition-confronting-not-avoiding, non-mechanistic, absolutely authentic and hugely important scientific research we recommend reading FAQ 1.10. Also, to learn more about Jeremy Griffith, his background and his breakthrough explanation of the human condition, please visit his biography page on the WTM’s website.
