Jeremy Griffith is an Australian biologist and author. He first came to public attention for his attempts to find the Tasmanian tiger. He later became noted for his writings on the human condition and theories about human progress. He founded the World Transformation Movement to advance his ideas in 1983.
Early life
Griffith was educated at Tudor House School in New South Wales and the Geelong Grammar School in Victoria. He first became known for his search for surviving Tasmanian tigers or thylacines, the last known specimen of which died in captivity in 1936. The search conducted from 1967 to 1973, 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 Bob Brown, which concluded without finding any evidence of the animal's continuing existence.
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 became a bestseller in Australia and New Zealand. His writing is known for allowing readers to access the thoughts of many famous philosophers, thinkers and religious sources. His biological works on the origins of human nature assert that "humans act angrily because of a battle between instinct and intellect". An article by Griffith published in The Irish Times summarised the thesis presented in Freedom as "Adam & Eve without the guilt: explaining our battle between instinct and intellect"; and Kirkus Reviews wrote that "Griffith offers a treatise about the true nature of humanity and about overcoming anxieties about the world". The Templeton Prize winner and biologist Charles Birch, the New Zealand zoologist John Morton, the former president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association Harry Prosen, and the Australian Everest mountaineer Tim Macartney-Snape have been 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 reliance on the writings of the African novelist Sir Laurens Van Der Post, and also the work of anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. Griffith has argued throughout his writings that the driving force in human evolution was increased nurturing of offspring, a process he calls 'love indoctrination'. He 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, particularly the loss of the aggressive canine morphology evident in other extant primate taxa. The theory postulates an intensification of maternal care, and associated increased pro-social 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 sub-adult socialisation may have been important in the early stages of human evolution. According to a 2020 article 'The fury of the left, explained' in The Spectator Australia by Griffith, ‘honest biological thinking’ can explain why the ideology of the political Left represents a threat to human progress: ‘the Left has given in to the temptation of relief-hunting and abandoned that all-important search ’. When interviewed by Alan Jones and Graham Richardson on their Richo & Jones Sky News Australia television program, Griffith said “my article in The Spectator last week was all about how we can bring rationale, understanding to the danger of the Left, reason versus dogma.”
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 1990, known as the Foundation for Humanity’s Adulthood. In 2009, the name changed to World Transformation Movement. In 1995, Griffith, Macartney-Snape and the Foundation for Humanity’s Adulthood were the subject of an Australian Broadcasting CorporationFour 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 Foundation, which was described as a cult. The publications became the subject of defamation actions in the NSW Supreme Court. 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 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 him was untrue.
Other writings
Griffith’s biological analysis of the dangers of eucalypts in light of the 2019–20 Australian bushfire season, published in The Spectator Australia under the heading ‘The science of bushfires’, was described by Alan Jones as “an outstanding piece…what’s never been said before” during Griffith’s appearance on Jones’ 2GB radio program and by Graham Richardson as “brilliantly written, really good prose” on the Richo & Jones Sky News Australia television program, in which Jones called Griffith “a star”. Griffith’s analysis also generated interest in Australia and the UK.
