SYDNEY, March 20, 2012 /PRNewswire-Asia/ -- Zoologist Richard Dawkins wrote in his book The Selfish Gene that 'we are born selfish', while ancient philosopher Plato wrote 'our souls exist before birth' and that 'our soul resembles the divine'.
Who is right? Which are we: selfish with savage animal instincts or selfless with a moral, loving soul? And if we have a soul what is it and how did we acquire it? These seemingly unanswerable questions around the base issue of whether we humans are fundamentally good or bad have plagued humanity for millennia.
Thankfully the agony of our human condition, of not knowing why on the one hand we have the ability to put the lives of others before our own while on the other hand we have a parallel ability to hurt, oppress even kill our fellow humans, is now over.
In a brilliant new article simply titled 'Soul', Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith explains that despite appearing destructive, science can now reveal that we humans actually have a moral soul that is derived from a loving, cooperative and selfless heritage.
Griffith, who has dedicated his life's work to analysing the biological reasons for our divisive state, clarifies why traditional scientists, like Dawkins have, until now, had no choice but to maintain that humans are selfish with savage animal instincts.
"Unable to explain our contradictory human nature, scientists have understandably had to justify our competitive, selfish, aggressive behaviour with false excuses and avoid the issue of our soul, even though it is one of our most used terms and the fundamental issue in psychology," says Griffith.
"So denying the existence of our moral soul was a necessary evil, if you like."
"But thanks to all the knowledge accumulated by science, we can now understand that the underlying biological reason for our competitive, selfish, aggressive behaviour is the battle that developed between our cooperative instincts and our intellect that has been raging since our conscious thinking brain emerged some two million years ago, and the psychological turmoil that battle produced."
Griffith explains that it was our distant primate ancestors' ability to unconditionally love and nurture their offspring that saw unconditionally selfless traits develop and establish in us our moral soul.
"Our 'soul' is our species' instinctive memory of a time when our distant ancestors lived in a cooperative, selfless, loving, innocent state, but that is a truth we couldn't afford to admit until we found the clarifying, biological explanation for why we humans became competitive, selfish and aggressive; in fact, so ruthlessly competitive, brutal and even murderous that human life has become all but unbearable and we have nearly destroyed our own planet!
"By being able to finally understand ourselves, the transformation of the human race can begin and we can return to living as our soul knows we once did, in a peaceful, loving, selfless, harmonious state."
With understanding of our human condition now found, Griffith says human pain and suffering can end and all the big questions about what makes us human can safely be explained, including how, when genes are selfish, did we develop an altruistic, moral soul.
As Professor Harry Prosen, a former president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, says of Griffith's breakthrough work: "I have no doubt this biological explanation of the human condition is the holy grail of insight we have sought for the psychological rehabilitation of the human race."
'Soul' is one of several short articles developed by Griffith to help demonstrate to readers the universal application of his synthesis to subjects wide and varied. The articles, on topics including 'What is Science?', 'What is Love?', 'Is there a God?' and 'Consciousness', appear in Griffith's latest publication, The Book of Real Answers to Everything! (The book is freely available online at www.worldtransformation.com/real-answers.)
Griffith's work, which has been published in, among other titles, the Australian bestseller A Species in Denial, (2003) and Freedom (2009), has received recognition from peers and independent thinkers worldwide.
