16. The history of biological denial

Before presenting the explanation of how our ancestors managed to develop the completely integrated, unconditionally selfless state that it is being asserted our species once lived in, and which it is claimed our unconditionally selfless moral sense is an instinctive memory of, a summary can now be given of how biologists have coped with the problem of the human condition while they lacked understanding of it.

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PDF Version Since our current upset, corrupted, ‘fallen’, apparently-amoral, extremely non-ideal, competitive, aggressive and selfish, in-truth-desperately-lonely-and-dark present condition is almost the polar opposite of the ideal, fully integrated, cooperative, unconditionally selfless, genuinely altruistic, harmonious, gentle, all-sensitive, loving, caring and happy, idyllic, ‘Godly’, moral, ethical, innocent, ‘Garden of Eden’, ‘Golden Age’ that it is being claimed we once lived in, it obviously hasn’t been psychologically safe to acknowledge in inescapable first-principle, scientific terms such a wonderful instinctive past and moral heritage. To be forced to face such truths without the dignifying explanation for our loss of such an idyllic, innocent, sound state would be suicidally depressing.

This very necessary scientific denial was achieved in a two-fold way. Firstly, having in place the denial of integrative meaning and in its place the assertion that change was random, meaningless and blind meant there was no scientific acceptance of a Godly ideal state to have to compare ourselves to, end of the dilemma of the human condition. If no acknowledgment is made of the existence of integrative meaning then there is no issue about human divisiveness, no dilemma of the human condition to become depressed about. This strategy of using denial to nullify truth is one science has employed in many diverse situations. For instance, it was used early last century to resist the now-accepted geological concept of Continental Drift. Opponents of that concept simply maintained the Earth’s crust was not divided into continental (tectonic) plates, and therefore there was nothing to drift, end of argument. The word ‘ideal’ has already been frequently used when referring to cooperative behaviour but why should being cooperative be considered ideal? With acceptance of integrative meaning we have the answer however if change isn’t directed towards any goal then there’s no fundamental reason for cooperative behaviour to be considered any more ideal than any other behaviour. In fact if selfish survival is all that matters then what is ‘good’ is what helps a species survive. This raises the second part of the scientific denial, namely the assertion that selfishness is the biological characteristic of all of nature and that is why we have been selfish—it is our biological heritage. In the case of our moral sense, biologists simply claimed that it is the same selflessness that occurs in many social species where members selflessly help others only because it indirectly benefits the reproduction of their own genes, which means our moral sense is basically selfish and thus just another expression of the selfishness apparent in all of nature. Combined, a purposeless world and ‘selfishness as the natural way of existence’ eliminates any possibility of our moral sense being a remnant of some genuinely altruistic, unconditionally selfless, integration-consistent, Godly, ideal, ‘Garden of Eden’, ‘Golden Age’ in our past—with any claims to the contrary dismissed as fanciful, romantic nonsense.

The following describes the history of this absolutely extraordinary journey of scientific denial/ lying.

It was explained in preceding sections that the genetic refinement of integration process requires that each reproducing individual remain a separate individual struggling, competing and fighting selfishly for its own reproduction. It was emphasised that even though, as a result of this integrative limitation, there are so many individual organisms competing and fighting for survival in nature, such behaviour is not the main characteristic of existence, rather behaving integratively is; it is just that genetic refinement can’t, as a rule, overcome this need for the reproducing individual to always remain a separate, selectable individual fighting selfishly for its own reproduction. It is an integrative limitation of genetics that there has always to be survival benefits to the reproducing individual for it to develop a particular behaviour.

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PDF Version With the human condition understood and integrative meaning able to be acknowledged this integrative limitation of the selfishness of genetic refinement can at last be acknowledged. However, in the situation that has existed where understanding of the human condition had not yet been found and there was, it follows, a very great need to contrive some excuse for our upset, divisive competitive, aggressive and selfish condition, it was this fact, that genetically the reproducing individual has to carry on as a separate individual fighting selfishly for its own reproduction, that provided the means to falsely justify our species’ upset behaviour. All we had to say was our competitive, aggressive and selfish behaviour ‘is only natural because, after all, we are only animals and animals are always competing with each other, fighting and killing one another. Animals are, as Tennyson said, “red in tooth and claw”—so that’s why we are’.

With the development of science this original misrepresentation of what is going on in nature, namely the integration of matter, was given an equally erroneous biological basis. It was referred to as Social Darwinism, the corruption of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection as being concerned with ‘the survival of the fittest’. As emphasised, the real concern or objective of genetic refinement, or ‘natural selection’ as Darwin originally termed the concept in his 1859 book The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, was the integration or development of order of matter. It was Darwin’s associates, Herbert Spencer and Alfred Russel Wallace, who persuaded him to replace the term ‘natural selection’ (as used in the first editions of this great book) with the term ‘survival of the fittest’. They argued the term ‘natural selection’ could be interpreted as implying the involvement of a personal selector. Darwin’s friend and great defender, Thomas Huxley, called it an ‘unlucky substitution’ (Charles Darwin, Sir Gavin de Beer, 1963, p.178 of 290) and from the perspective of science needing to avoid as much denial/ dishonesty as possible, ‘unlucky’ it certainly was. While a personal, interventionist, ‘creationist’, ‘designing’ God was not involved, God in the form of an integrative purpose to existence was. While Darwin’s idea of natural selection did not recognise the involvement of integrative purpose in change, the concept of natural selection did not preclude it. Natural selection simply recognised that some varieties of a species reproduced more than others. Whether or not those that reproduced more could be viewed as ‘winners’, as being ‘fitter’ or more worthwhile or ‘better’ than others, was not decided. With integrative meaning acknowledged, it can be seen that ‘losing’ in the sense of not reproducing can be consistent with integration. Understanding that unconditional selflessness or love is the theme of existence, the glue that holds wholes together, we can see that unconditionally selfless behaviour, where an individual gives their life for the maintenance of the larger whole and as a result does not reproduce, can be very meaningful, a ‘fitter’, ‘better’ way of behaving. Social Darwinism’s ‘survival of the fittest’ concept however implied that those who reproduced more than others were ‘fitter’, that the object of existence was to survive, that the only reason a behaviour will develop is if it has survival value—in effect that selfishness is the fundamental characteristic of life, the natural way of existence.

While this was a radical misrepresentation of Darwin’s original presentation of his concept of natural selection, for upset competitive, aggressive and selfish humans it was a valuable misrepresentation of the natural world because if selfishness is all that’s going on in the natural world then that is the reason we are selfish, and have needed to be selfish. In this false but useful representation of living in a selfish world, cooperative, selfless, loving moral values become entirely human inventions. They become values that if we want to aspire to because, independent of biological reality, we have, for religion-inspired or culture-inspired or other supposedly non-biological reasons, decided they are values that are to be attained then we are going to have to achieve them by repressing our supposed Page 64 of
PDF Version natural, biological, selfishness-driven original instinctive state. Instead of any suggestion that our original instinctive state was to living in an utterly integrated, unconditionally selfless, harmonious, gentle, idyllic, ‘Garden of Eden’, ‘Golden Age’, it was asserted that we were once selfish, competitive and aggressive ‘wild’, ‘fierce’, ‘primitive’, ‘savage’, ‘barbarian’ ‘brutes’ and ‘beasts’ supposedly like the rest of nature and that the task of being a human was to learn to contain this dreadful biological heritage. This scientific denial and evasion of the truths of integrative meaning, of our fabulous integrated past and of the true nature of our unconditional-selflessness-orientated moral sense was diabolically dishonest but at the same time necessary—because, as emphasised, having to face those truths would make our task of having to live with our unexplained corrupted reality suicidally depressing.

While this ‘selfishness-is-natural’ excuse was useful in relieving the insecurity of our human condition, there was always in the background an awareness that there were situations in nature that seemed to contradict this idea that selfishness is universal. As explained in the previous section, while most of nature is ‘red in tooth and claw’—the members of most species compete and fight with each other for food, space, shelter and a mate—not all situations in nature are characterised by selfish competition and aggression. When King Solomon said ‘Go to the ant…consider its ways and be wise’ (Proverbs 6:6), he was referring to the industry of ants but any observation of ants will reveal that that industry is based on extraordinarily selfless dedication by each ant to the greater good of the colony. There are situations in nature, such as in social ant and bee colonies, where there is remarkable selfless cooperation and while the lessons of such cooperation-led industry can make us ‘wise’ it can also confront and expose us terribly with the dilemma of our upset, divisive competitive, aggressive and selfish human condition. The truth is the selfless behaviour of ants and bees in their remarkably selfless, cooperative and harmonious colonies has long been a confronting and exposing sore point for humans.

It was Edward O. Wilson who, after a life-long study of ants, finally got the confronting ant and bee monkey off our back. In his famous 1975 book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, Wilson explained that while individual ants—and this also applies to social bees—appear to be behaving unconditionally selflessly they are, as was explained in the previous section, each behaving selfishly, because, by selflessly looking after their colony and its queen who carries the genes for their existence, they are indirectly selfishly ensuring the reproduction of their own genes. Being non-sexual clones they depend on the queen to reproduce them. In so-called ‘kin selection’, individuals of some species have also developed the ability to behave selflessly towards other related members because by fostering their kin they are in effect fostering the reproduction of their own genes that their relatives share. The point Wilson was making is that while reciprocity involves selflessness, it is actually a subtle form of selfishness—it is overall selfish behaviour. The obvious reason Sociobiology became such a famous text is that the selfish reciprocity explanation put forward in it could be used to dismiss any selfless behaviour in nature—including selfless behaviour in humans—as nothing more than a variety of the selfishness that was said to be characteristic of all of nature. In fact in Sociobiology Wilson claimed his work to be ‘the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior…including man’ (p.4). The human-condition-relieving, selfishness-is-all-that-is-occurring-in-nature account had supposedly been reconfirmed. Our ‘awe’-inspiring, as Kant described it, marvellously unconditionally selfless, truly altruistic, integrative meaning/ love/ God-representing moral grandeur was being dismissed as nothing more than a subtle-form-of-selfishness. While such an account was immensely guilt-relieving for upset humans it amounted to an all-out assault on the truth about the very nature of our instinctive self or soul. Only a year Page 65 of
PDF Version after Sociobiology was published Oxford University-based zoologist Richard Dawkins joined the assault. In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, Dawkins stated that, ‘We [humans] are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes [p.v of 352] …we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes [p.2] …we are born selfish [p.3]’ (1976 edn). Emboldened, Wilson published another book in 1978, provocatively titled On Human Nature, which focussed more directly upon science’s supposed ability to explain (actually to dismiss) our moral sense as nothing but a subtle form of selfishness, saying ‘Morality has no other demonstrable ultimate function’ other than to ensure ‘human genetic material…will be kept intact’ (p.167).

It wasn’t long before this particular study of social behaviour was given a title: ‘Evolutionary Psychology’. While this term recognises the fact that genes can and do select for cognitive brain structure like they select for any other body structure, there was also an inference that reciprocity’s ability to explain all acts of selflessness, including humans’, meant that biology could now explain humans’ psychological state, our human condition no less. Basically, if integrative meaning doesn’t exist and change is random then there is no ‘moral’, ‘ethical’, ‘right’-versus-‘wrong’ ideal state. Moreover if selfless behaviour is not to do with creating some noble, al-true-istic, Godly, integrative state but rather nothing more than selfish survival behaviour at work, like supposedly all behaviour in nature, then there is no dilemma of the human condition to have to face. In 1994 science writer Robert Wright published a book introducing this new field of study, with another provocative title, The Moral Animal—Why we are the way we are: The new science of evolutionary psychology. Using reciprocity’s supposed ability to explain our morality, Wright wrote that, ‘What is in our genes’ interests is what seems “right”—morally right, objectively right, whatever sort of rightness is in order’ (p.325 of 467) and ‘In short: “moral guidance” is a euphemism’ (p.216).

In 1998, only a few years after Wright’s book was published, Wilson published another book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, in which he took the art of denial to its absolute extremity, suggesting Evolutionary Psychology’s alleged ability to explain the moral aspects of humans meant biology and philosophy, the sciences and the humanities, indeed science and religion, basically reality and ideality (ideality now dismissed as just a ‘euphemism’), the dilemma of the human condition no less, could at last be solved (actually not ‘solved’ but eliminated as biologically unfounded). He spoke of ‘the attempted linkage of the sciences and humanities…of consilience, literally a “jumping together” of knowledge…to create a common groundwork of explanation’ (p.6 of 374), and went so far as to claim, ‘The strongest appeal of consilience is…the value of understanding the human condition with a higher degree of certainty’ (p.7). An extract from Consilience, published in the prestigious journal The Atlantic Monthly (Apr. 1998), in an article boldly titled ‘The Biological Basis of Morality’, featured this introduction: ‘Philosophers and theologians have almost always conceived of moral instincts as being transcendent or God-given. Is it possible, though, that ethical reasoning derives not from outside but from our very nature as evolving material creatures?’ Just how bold Wilson was in his claim to have made sense of the philosophical, spiritual and religious aspect of human life using reciprocity is illustrated by one of the headings used in the extract, ‘The Origins of Religion’. Religions have been the custodians—albeit using abstract, metaphysical terms—of integrative meaning represented by the concept of ‘God’, of the existence of our ‘Garden of Eden’ innocent integrated past and its representation in us of our moral ‘soul’, and of our corrupted ‘fallen’, human-condition-afflicted, ‘sinful’ present state. These truths certainly can be explained biologically without invoking a ‘transcendent’, interventionalist, ‘creationist’, ‘intelligently-designing’ God, as has been done in this book; as can the deeper issue of ‘the human condition’, the dilemma of the existence of good and evil in the Page 66 of
PDF Version human make-up, as has also been biologically explained in this book, however to use biological lies to ‘explain’ them and by so doing ‘produce’ the reconciliation or ‘consilience’ of science and religion is an act of diabolical dishonesty, almost the ultimate denial and assault on truth. Of course, in terms of needing to avoid the scientific demystification of God and of what our soul actually is and of the true nature of our moral sense, the essential achievement of Wilson’s work was that he seemingly provided a way to deny these truths. Indeed Wilson made his overall point unequivocally when he said in Consilience: ‘[Jean-Jacques] Rousseau claimed, [that humanity] was originally a race of noble savages in a peaceful state of nature, who were later corrupted…[but what] Rousseau invented [was] a stunningly inaccurate form of anthropology’ (p.37). It has been said that the most forceful and thus effective lie is the lie that puts forward the complete opposite of the truth. This statement by Wilson is just such an all-out, no-holds-barred, unrestrained, outrageous reverse-of-the-truth lie.

Understandably a backlash developed against this extreme selfishness-justifying, right-wing dismissal and denigration of our moral instincts. Randolph Nesse, Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at the University of Michigan, for instance said: ‘The discovery that tendencies to altruism are shaped by benefits to genes is one of the most disturbing in the history of science. When I first grasped it, I slept badly for many nights, trying to find some alternative that did not so roughly challenge my sense of good and evil. Understanding this discovery can undermine commitment to morality—it seems silly to restrain oneself if moral behavior is just another strategy for advancing the interests of one’s genes’ (The Origins of Virtue, Matt Ridley, 1996, p.126 of 295).

As a result of this backlash, selflessness-emphasising left-wing versions of the reciprocity explanation for our moral sense emerged. In his 1999 book Death, Hope and Sex, biologist James Chisholm for example argued that ‘human…moral sentiments…evolve [from]…reproductive strategies [ways of increasing your chances of reproducing your genes]…[that] value equality [since it can be shown that] inequality is a major source of risk and uncertainty’ (p.xi, p.xii of 296). Again, in a similar fashion to Wilson but this time from a left-wing cooperation-and-compassion-emphasising viewpoint, Chisholm brazenly proclaimed the greater significance he saw in his theory when he said, ‘the view of human nature as a manifestation of our reproductive strategies…says it is rational to be compassionate, and that can help us ameliorate our all-too-human condition’ (p.xi).

Basically Wilson, Dawkins and Wright chose to emphasise the benefit to the individual from acts of reciprocity—‘sure you can give to others but only do it in order to receive a reward for yourself’—while the emphasis by Chisholm and his associates in the left-wing camp was on reciprocity’s benefit to the group—‘you give to others so that society is maintained however because of the nature of the reciprocity tool that you have to employ there unavoidably has to also be a benefit for yourself’. One was individualistic and the other socialistic in emphasis.

The problem was both these ways of interpreting and explaining our moral sense were completely deficient, simply because reciprocity could never explain the altruism of humans’ unique moral sense. Again, altruism means unconditional selflessness and reciprocal acts of selflessness are not unconditional. The truth is reciprocity failed to even begin to explain the unconditionally selfless, truly altruistic, genuinely loving and compassionate, all-sensitive, ‘awe’-inspiring, wonderful moral sense in humans. If we were behaving selflessly because it was going to selfishly aid our own chances of reproducing, as Chisholm for example suggested, our whole being would have known that and we could not and would not have been able to build the profound appreciation of unconditional selflessness or love that is our moral sense and conscience. We all know, if we are honest about it, that our conscience expects our treatment of all humans, indeed our treatment of all living things and even of the Earth itself, to be caring, kind and loving. In Page 67 of
PDF Version fact such Machiavellian behaviour as Chisholm described so offends our conscience that that response in us alone is evidence enough of just how strong and authentic our moral sense is. In the 2001 TV documentary series Testing God, in the part titled ‘Darwin and the Divine’ which focused upon these prevailing biological ‘explanations’ of humans’ moral sense, Reverend Martha Overall from the South Bronx in the USA was seeking to make this point about the immense deficiency of such accounts when she said they are ‘very superficial…the real truth lies in the goodness in the hearts of people, especially the hearts of…children [and those]…who will go out and save somebody who is homeless and drunk and addicted…that kind of relationship to another human being on the basis of nothing more than their humanity and their basic goodness, one to another, is far more truthful than a bunch of numbers’. A ‘bunch of numbers’, scientific evaluation, is fine but it had to relate to the issue and equate with the overall evidence to be true and reciprocity doesn’t begin to explain our ‘awe’-inspiring moral sense or relate one little bit to our soul’s memory and awareness of a ‘Garden of Eden’, ‘Golden Age’ in our past and potential for the future.

While the left-wing selflessness-emphasising ‘explanation’ for our moral sense made its supporters feel good for appearing to support ideality and for appearing to not be going along with the selfishness-emphasising right-wing interpretation of our moral sense, its selflessness-emphasising version was actually more dishonest and deceitful than the selfishness-emphasising account. While selflessness and compassion were being supported by the likes of Chisholm, the truth of an utterly cooperative, al-true-istic, soul-and-morality-creating ideal past for humans and the issue it raised of our present corrupted human condition were not at all being acknowledged or engaged by the reciprocity explanation for our moral sense. In fact these truths were still being ardently evaded. What was actually occurring was even more dishonest than Wilson’s, Dawkins’ and Wright’s undisguised denial of the truth of our unconditionally selfless soul, because to disguise lying as truth is so much more sinister. Indeed the deceitful left-wing, pseudo idealistic art of only mimicking the truth becomes an outrage when it is suggested, as Chisholm did, that such deceit can help ‘ameliorate’ our ‘human condition’ when the human condition is precisely the problem of lying which was being greatly added to, not ameliorated. This left-wing art of only mimicking the truth and the very great danger of doing so will be explained at length in the latter half of this book. There it will be revealed that pseudo idealism was the most sophisticated form of lying to ever have been developed; it took the art of lying to the maximum, which means it took humanity the furthest possible distance away from the truth and thus any chance of achieving its freedom from the human condition.

The problem the left-wing emphasis on selfless idealism created for the right wing camp was how could selfishness be upheld. Unsurprisingly, E.O. Wilson again came to the rescue. The May 2006 edition of National Geographic featured an interview with Wilson in which he talked about a book he and zoologist Bert Hölldobler are writing, titled The Superorganism. It was explained in the previous section that negative entropy was able to integrate single-celled organisms into multicellular organisms—as well as some smaller multicellular organisms such as bees and ants into the next larger whole of integrated multicellular organisms—by elaborating the reproducing individual. It was explained that the limitation of the genetic mechanism or tool for integrating matter was that the reproducing individual always had to remain independent fighting for its own reproduction and that one way to integrate more matter without violating this necessary integrity of the reproducing individual was to elaborate or enlarge it. It was further explained that this integrative mechanism couldn’t be employed to integrate organisms that were large in relation to their environment, such as humans, because it resulted in too great a loss of Page 68 of
PDF Version variability. In the National Geographic article Wilson acknowledged that for multicellular organisms ‘The Superorganism…colony is the next level of biological organization’ and then, truthfully enough, in explaining how they developed, first referred to Darwin’s idea of ‘group selection’ where ‘what counts is the group, and that [for example] worker ants are just part of the colony, just an extension of the queen. Her heredity is what matters. If she is producing separate organisms that serve her purpose, then all together, these colonies can prevail over solitary individuals’; he then elaborated saying, ‘The colony, by group selection, has developed traits that could not be possible otherwise—communication, the caste system, cooperative behavior. It’s a unit of activity and of evolution. One colony against another is what’s being selected. This happens to be close to Darwin’s idea but in modern genetic terms. It has to do with defense against enemies. Naturalists have discovered more and more groups that have altruistic workers and soldiers—ants, termites, certain beetles, shrimp, and even a mammal, the naked mole rat’. After giving this explanation of how ant colonies developed and behaved Wilson then however added that we humans are ‘the one highly social vertebrate with altruism and high levels of division of labor, though not sterility, unless you want to throw in the priestly caste—which you might. We’re the one species that has reached this level, and we dominate…And ants are constantly at war. Well, so are we!…It may turn out that highly evolved societies with this level of altruism tend strongly to divide into groups that then fight against each other. We humans are constantly at war and have been since prehistory’. So, according to Wilson, we now accept that we humans are biologically capable of being cooperative and even altruistic but only in the cause of behaving extremely selfishly and competitively as groups. The truth is that, firstly, being large animals we weren’t able to employ the device of elaborating the reproducing individual, so from that point alone we couldn’t have become integrated the way ants have. Secondly, the ‘altruistic’ behaviour in these ‘superorganisms’ is not the real, unconditionally selfless altruism that, as will shortly be explained, characterises our moral sense. And thirdly, our current competitive, aggressive and selfish behaviour is psychologically not biologically derived; it is a consciously-based, insecure, upsetting, frustrating, depressing struggle we humans have with the world, in fact with our instinctive self. Our divisive behaviour is the result of a psychologically upset state, which we all intuitively know is the case if we are prepared to be honest. Our condition is a result of a psychological dilemma and insecurity. It is a psychosis. Ants aren’t struggling with a psychosis; they aren’t psychologically upset creatures like humans. Their situation is nothing at all like ours.

Blaming the human condition on genetic opportunism is ridiculously transparently false, but then again we had to find some excuse for our condition while we couldn’t explain it. The great danger however of taking the art of denial to such extremes as Wilson and Chisholm have is that it threatened to hide humanity forever from any truth and thus any chance of ever finding the all-important liberating understanding of our human condition—and, as has been emphasised, being an issue about behaviour the human condition was ultimately the responsibility of biologists to understand and by so doing ameliorate. Wilson did acknowledge this when in Consilience he said that, ‘The human condition is the most important frontier of the natural sciences’ (p.298 of 374), but how outrageously deceitful was it for him to say this when he is clearly the absolute lord of lying, the master of keeping humanity away from any truth and thus any chance of finding insight into the human condition. The understanding of the human condition that has been presented in this book had to be found by resisting at every turn the almost overwhelming tidal wave of biological denial and dishonesty now flooding the world, and it was only because of a rare few who maintained any biological integrity, such as Laurens van der Post, Arthur Koestler and Eugéne Marais, that all the denial was able Page 69 of
PDF Version to be stood up to and the dignifying understanding of our condition put together. As an example of how much resistance I have met in my personal journey to address the issue of the human condition, in December 1983 I went to London and personally submitted an 8,000 word summary of what was to become my first book, Free: The End of The Human Condition, to John Maddox, the then editor of Nature magazine, considered at the time the leading science journal in the world, and also to Colin Tudge, the then Features Editor of New Scientist magazine. Both declined to publish the article, with Maddox saying to me twice that the concept of integrative meaning arising from negative entropy ‘is wrong’ (transcript of 15 Dec. 1983 meeting with Maddox). Maddox, now Sir John Maddox, wouldn’t allow the argument to progress to ‘base one’, to ‘get off the ground’. Initially Nature magazine wouldn’t even accept my submission (their reference G-12057 JM/MS can be read at www.worldtransformation.com/nature). It was only after I wrote an offended letter of protest saying I had come ‘half way around the world to see you’ and I felt like ‘a piece of mud that had been scrapped off on your doorstep’ that Maddox agreed to see me. In hindsight I am so immensely proud that with virtually no structural support around or behind me I took the truth from out in the back country in Australia across the world right into the heart of the den of denial which has a massive infrastructure of support spanning the globe and stood my ground there against the head dragon of denial.

In a more recent example of how great the tidal wave of biological denial is, 110 copies of The Human Condition Documentary Proposal, containing all of the fully accountable biological synthesis that is being presented in this book, were sent by the all-precious group of supporters this information has now to all the relevant editors, writers and departments at National Geographic and the National Geographic Society before the interview with Wilson referred to above took place and was published and yet pretty well no interest in it at all was expressed by those people at National Geographic.

What has been encouraging is that the Documentary Proposal has, along with numerous angry, dismissive responses, received over 100 endorsements from many of the world’s leading scientists and thinkers, including physicist Stephen Hawking and Noble laureate Charles H. Townes. The truth is on its way. As Teilhard de Chardin said, ‘the Truth has to appear only once…for it to be impossible for anything ever to prevent it from spreading universally and setting everything ablaze’ (Let Me Explain, 1966; trs René Hague & others, 1970, p.159 of 189). Soon all the gremlins of dishonesty, as necessary as they have been, will crawl away into their holes forever and all the suffering from the effects of our human condition in the world will be brought to an end.

Incidentally, in the National Geographic interview Wilson says he has ‘another book in progress…called The Creation, and its subtitle is A Meeting of Science and Religion [in which] I take a very strong stance against the mingling of religion and science’. As has already been explained, the way science coped with the great truths contained in religion of integrative meaning represented by the concept of ‘God’, of the existence of our ‘Garden of Eden’ innocent integrated past and its representation in us of our moral ‘soul’, and of our corrupted ‘fallen’, human-condition-afflicted, ‘sinful’ present state, was to simply maintain that religion is totally unrelated to science. The truth of the matter is, as both Nobel and Templeton Prize-winning physicist Charles H. Townes has said, ‘For they [religion and science] both represent man’s efforts to understand his universe and must ultimately be dealing with the same substance. As we understand more in each realm, the two must grow together…converge they must’ (The Convergence of Science and Religion, Zygon, Vol.1 No.3, 1966).

(Note, Part 2 of the Documentary Proposal also presents analysis of the history of biological denial.)