Science has transformed our understanding of the natural world, from the origins of
species to the workings of the human genome. Yet one subject remains extraordinarily
difficult to explain: ourselves.
Why can humans be so loving and cooperative, yet also angry, egocentric and
destructive? Why does a species capable of remarkable empathy and self-sacrifice also
produce cruelty, conflict and war?
Together, such contradictions form part of the enduring problem commonly described as the human condition.
Evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson regarded the problem as fundamental: in The Social Conquest of Earth, he wrote, “there is no grail more elusive or precious in the life of the mind than the key to understanding the human condition.”
The significance of the subject is also reflected institutionally. In 2009, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences convened an Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium specifically titled “The Human Condition.” The resulting National Academies volume brought together leading evolutionary biologists and philosophers of science to examine human evolution from the molecular level through to culture and the characteristics that make us uniquely human.
Yet there is no single scientific explanation of the paradox that is the human condition.
Researchers have approached the origins of human behaviour from markedly different
directions.
One influential approach is human ‘self-domestication’. Evolutionary anthropologist
Brian Hare has proposed that selection for reduced reactive aggression and increased
social tolerance played an important role in human evolution, helping to produce our
unusual capacities for cooperation and social cognition. Hare has also argued that this
heightened friendliness has a darker side: strong bonds with our own group can
contribute to hostility and even dehumanisation of perceived threatening outsiders.
Biologist Jeremy Griffith has proposed a different evolutionary explanation, centred on
the emergence of consciousness. He argues that a fundamental conflict developed
between humanity’s pre-existing genetically acquired instincts and our newly emerging
conscious intellect. Griffith places the emergence of consciousness, and this resulting
conflict, at roughly two million years ago, linking it to the major development of the
brain’s association cortex during human evolution.
As our distant hominin ancestors became sufficiently conscious to experiment in
managing their lives, Griffith proposes, they inevitably began departing from instinctive orientations established through natural selection. The instincts’ inevitable resistance to those departures amounted, in effect, to criticism of an emerging intellect that could not yet explain why its experiments in self-management were necessary. He argues that the resulting insecurity produced defensive anger, egocentricity and alienation, which he therefore interprets primarily as psychological responses rather than simply expressions of selfish or aggressive instincts.
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has observed that while the universality of physical laws makes the cosmos “a marvelously simple place”, by comparison “human
nature—the psychologist’s domain—is infinitely more daunting.” It is precisely this
daunting complexity that Griffith’s hypothesis purports to make sense of, accounting for the full spectrum of human behaviour, including its seemingly impenetrably complex and contradictory aspects. Its proponents argue that the more fully Griffith’s explanation is understood, the more persuasive it becomes, a view reflected in the growing number of favourable assessments his work has received from scientists and academics who have studied it.
The hypothesis carries a further implication. If these behaviours arose defensively from
an unresolved psychological conflict, Griffith argues that understanding why the
conscious intellect had to depart from instinct would remove the underlying insecurity
that made the defensive angry, egocentric and alienated behaviours necessary. On his
account, anger, egocentricity and alienation are not immutable features of human
nature, but psychological responses that can become redundant once their underlying
cause is understood.
Griffith also founded Fix The World, an international charity whose purpose includes
advancing education, discussion and research into the human condition.
Other theories emphasise different evolutionary mechanisms. Gene-culture
co-evolution, for example, proposes that culture did not simply emerge from biological evolution but became an evolutionary force itself, creating new environments that
helped shape human genes and psychology.
Biologist E.O. Wilson approached the problem through multilevel selection, arguing that humanity’s unusual sociality arose through evolutionary processes involving selection at both individual and group levels. The resulting tension between individual and group interests was central to his account of the conflicting impulses of human nature.
Self-domestication, the instinct-intellect clash, gene-culture coevolution and multilevel
selection offer fundamentally different evolutionary explanations of the human condition.What unites them is the attempt to explain how evolution produced the extraordinary and often contradictory characteristics of human nature.
That endeavour spans evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology, genetics and
neuroscience. It encompasses questions about cooperation and aggression,
consciousness and culture, morality and conflict.
These are different dimensions of the larger puzzle Wilson identified as the great
frontier of natural science—and that the National Academy of Sciences explicitly placed under the heading “the human condition.”
Science has made extraordinary progress in explaining where humans came from. Fully explaining why we are the way we are remains one of its great challenges.
