Why Science Still Struggles to Explain the Human Condition

Science has transformed our understanding of the physical world, life and evolution. Yet one of its hardest problems remains remarkably close to home: how do we explain ourselves? 

Why are humans capable of love, cooperation, creativity and moral concern, yet also aggression, selfishness, anxiety and alienation? Why can rational beings behave irrationally? And why do destructive patterns persist even when people understand the damage they cause? 

These questions lie at the heart of the human condition. 

Modern science approaches them from many directions. Neuroscience investigates how brains produce thought, emotion and behaviour. Psychology examines motivation, personality and relationships. Evolutionary biology asks how characteristic human behaviours arose. Anthropology investigates the development of culture and cooperation. 

Different disciplines, but parts of the same enormous endeavour: understanding what produces human behaviour and why our species became so internally conflicted. 

Science’s “grand challenge” of understanding ourselves 

The scale of the problem is reflected in the language scientists themselves use. 

A National Academies workshop on twenty-first-century neuroscience identified as a “Grand Challenge” the question of how the human brain works and produces mental activity—how physical processes give rise to thought, emotion and behaviour. 

Psychology has confronted a similar problem. Writing in Frontiers in Psychology, researchers have described psychology as a “hub” discipline whose challenge is to understand humans across levels ranging from neurons and emotions to social behaviour and culture. The stated ambition was nothing less than understanding humanity in its full complexity. 

More recently, cognitive scientists have again identified integration as a central challenge: bringing together neural mechanisms, cognition, behaviour and social context into explanations that work across different levels. 

In effect, these fields are tackling the human condition piece by piece. 

Why emotion and reason cannot be separated 

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has made one important contribution by challenging the traditional picture of reason as something separate from emotion. 

His work on patients with damage to brain regions involved in emotion showed that the ability to reason effectively in everyday life depends heavily on emotional processes. Human decision-making, in other words, cannot be understood simply by studying abstract rational thought. 

That insight addresses one part of the human condition: why intelligent people can nevertheless make decisions driven by fear, attachment, status or other emotional forces. 

Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux has explored another part of the problem through his research on fear and defensive behaviour. His work has helped clarify the neural systems that detect threat and produce defensive responses. 

Together, such research shows why explaining human behaviour requires more than identifying what people consciously think. Behaviour emerges from interactions between consciousness, emotion, memory, physiology and evolutionary history. 

But a larger question remains: why did humans become so psychologically defensive in the first place? 

Consciousness created a new problem 

The emergence of consciousness itself is another major piece of the human-condition puzzle. 

Cognitive neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga has spent decades studying the organisation of the human brain and the mechanisms underlying conscious experience. His split-brain research, in particular, helped reveal how strongly the conscious mind seeks to construct coherent explanations for behaviour and experience. 

That raises a profound evolutionary question. 

Once humans became sufficiently conscious to reflect upon themselves, make choices and experiment with their own behaviour, did consciousness itself create new psychological pressures? 

Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith, founder of the international charity Fix The World, has developed an explanation of the Human Condition centred precisely on that transition. 

Griffith distinguishes between instinct and conscious intellect. 

Instincts, in his account, are genetically acquired orientations shaped by natural selection. A conscious intellect works differently: it can experiment, learn through cause and effect and eventually manage behaviour through understanding. 

Griffith argues that once our ancestors became sufficiently conscious, their intellect needed to experiment with managing life for itself. But those experiments inevitably sometimes defied existing instinctive orientations. 

The conscious mind could not initially explain why that defiance was necessary. 

According to Griffith, the instincts’ opposition was therefore experienced as condemnation of the conscious mind’s search for understanding. Humans became increasingly insecure about their worth and sought to defend and validate themselves, producing anger, egocentricity and alienation. 

His explanation therefore attempts to identify not just the mechanisms behind particular behaviours, but the original psychological source of humanity’s conflicted condition. 

Why explanation could matter 

The most distinctive aspect of Griffith’s account is what follows from it. 

If anger, egocentricity and alienation arose because humans could not explain why the conscious mind had to defy instinct, then Griffith argues those behaviours are not immutable features of human nature. 

Once we can understand why consciousness had to experiment—and therefore why its apparent defiance of our instinctive orientations was necessary—the underlying insecurity and need for psychological self-defence can subside. 

In this view, explaining the human condition is itself part of resolving it. 

That proposition sits within a much broader scientific effort. 

Damasio has illuminated the inseparability of reason and emotion. LeDoux has investigated the biology of defensive behaviour. Gazzaniga has explored the mechanisms of consciousness and the brain’s drive to make sense of experience. Griffith attempts to bring consciousness, instinct, psychological conflict and destructive behaviour together in one overarching explanation. 

Across neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science and evolutionary biology, the approaches differ, but the larger objective is recognisable: to understand the human condition by explaining why human beings think, feel and behave as they do. 

For all the progress science has made in understanding the world around us, explaining ourselves remains one of its greatest unfinished challenges.