Jeremy Griffith

Early life

Griffith was educated at Tudor House School in New South Wales and the Geelong Grammar School in Victoria. Griffith described his schooling at Geelong Grammar, under the headmastership of the renowned Australian educator James Darling, as one of the important formative influences in his life.

He first became known to the general public for his comprehensive search for surviving Tasmanian tigers or thylacines, the last known specimen of which died in captivity in 1936. The search was conducted from 1967 to 1973. His search is considered the most intensive ever carried out, and included exhaustive surveys along Tasmania's west coast; installation of automatic camera stations; prompt investigations of claimed sightings; and in 1972, the creation of the Thylacine Expeditionary Research Team with Dr Bob Brown, which concluded without finding any evidence of the thylacine's continuing existence.

Writings on the human condition

A biology graduate of the University of Sydney, Griffith began writing on the human condition in 1975, publishing the first of his six books on the subject in 1988. A Species In Denial (2003) became a bestseller in Australia and New Zealand. In June 2016 Freedom: The End Of The Human Condition was launched at the Royal Geographical Society in London, where Sir Bob Geldof gave the keynote address. The presentations at the launch are published in the booklet Transform Your Life And Save The World. Each of Griffith’s published works is grounded in his grand narrative explanation of human nature. His work is multi-disciplinary, drawing from the physical sciences, biology, anthropology, and primatology together with philosophy, psychology, and psychiatry. He cites thinkers drawn from varied backgrounds and eras, from Socrates, Plato, and Christ, through to more contemporary philosophers and scientists, such as Charles Darwin, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Eugene Marais, Louis Leakey, Laurens van der Post, and R.D. Laing.

His biological works on the origins of human nature assert that "humans act angrily because of a battle between instinct and intellect".The Irish Times summarised the thesis presented in Freedom as "Adam & Eve without the guilt: explaining our battle between instinct and intellect"; Kirkus Reviews wrote that "Griffith offers a treatise about the true nature of humanity and about overcoming anxieties about the world"; and Griffith himself has asserted that through his "clarifying insight all our psychologically defensive angry, alienated and egocentric behaviour…is made redundant".

The Templeton Prize winner and biologist Charles Birch, the New Zealand zoologist Professor John Edward Morton, the former president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association Professor Harry Prosen, and the Australian Everest mountaineer Tim Macartney-Snape have been among the long-standing proponents of Griffith’s ideas. Morton publicly defended Griffith when he and his ideas were attacked in the mid-1990s. Griffith’s ideas have been criticised based on perceived problems with the empirical veracity of his anthropological writings, an objection that highlights his indebtedness to the writings of the African novelist Sir Laurens Van Der Post, and also the work of anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas.

Griffith has persistently argued throughout his writings that the driving force in human evolution was increased nurturing of offspring, a process he calls 'love indoctrination'. Griffith adopts a neo-Lamarckian view in which mothers model pro-social behaviour to offspring, with consequent behavioural changes resulting in 'soft' Lamarckian inheritance. Such behaviours will differentially proliferate if they are performed in the context of a social niche in which co-operative behaviour is favoured. Consequent to this genetic selection will stabilise changes that were initiated at the level of social behaviour. It is this process that he argues gave rise to the human moral sense. Evidence for this view is the reduced sexual dimorphism in the early stages of human evolution, and particularly the loss of the aggressive canine morphology evident across extant primate taxa. Griffith's theory postulates an intensification of maternal care, and associated increased prosocial behaviour of offspring, as being the distinguishing feature of the human lineage. His theory echoes that of Adrienne Zihlman, who postulated changes in patterns of subadult socialisation may have been important in the early stages of human evolution. This view has been corroborated by recent fossil discoveries such as Ardipithecus ramidus where evidence for changes in mating and social systems, and possibly patterns of child socialisation, have been inferred from reduced canine and craniofacial morphology.

The World Transformation Movement

The World Transformation Movement was founded by Griffith in 1983, as the Centre for Humanity’s Adulthood, an organisation dedicated to developing and promoting understanding of the human condition. It was incorporated in 1990 with Griffith and his colleague mountaineer Tim Macartney-Snape among its founding directors and became a registered charity in New South Wales in 1991 known as the Foundation for Humanity’s Adulthood. In 2009, the organisation became the World Transformation Movement.

In 1995, Griffith, Macartney-Snape and the Foundation for Humanity’s Adulthood (as the World Transformation Movement was then known) were the subject of an Australian Broadcasting Corporation Four Corners program and a Sydney Morning Herald newspaper article, in which it was alleged that Macartney-Snape used speaking appearances at schools to promote the World Transformation Movement, which was described as a cult. The publications became the subject of long running defamation actions in the NSW Supreme Court and were found to be defamatory. In 2007, the ABC was ordered to pay Macartney-Snape almost $500,000 in damages, and with costs the payout was expected to exceed $1 million. The proceedings against the Herald were resolved when it published an apology to the Foundation for Humanity’s Adulthood (World Transformation Movement) in 2009. Although Griffith was not awarded damages in relation to the Four Corners broadcast, on appeal in 2010 the NSW Court of Appeal found what was said of Griffith was untrue.