For centuries, the human condition was largely the territory of philosophers, novelists and theologians. Scientists tended to focus elsewhere: on the natural world, disease, matter, the stars and, eventually, the machinery of the brain.
Something is changing.
Across neuroscience, evolutionary biology, genetics, psychology, anthropology, cultural evolution and artificial intelligence, researchers are increasingly asking a deceptively difficult question: what makes us human, and why do we behave as we do?
There is no single answer. What is becoming clear, however, is that understanding human beings requires connecting fields that have traditionally been studied separately.
A striking example came in 2025, when Frontiers in Neuroscience published a research collection titled “What Makes Us Human: From Genes to Machine.” Led by researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, it brought together research spanning human evolution and genetics, neurons, brain networks, language, creativity, consciousness, culture and artificial intelligence. The editors described the scientific effort to understand human uniqueness as having gained “new urgency and depth.”
That breadth is significant. Rather than treating human uniqueness as a question belonging to one scientific discipline, researchers are increasingly recognising that these areas are interconnected.
From Genes to Culture
At Duke University, geneticists are investigating sections of DNA that have changed unusually rapidly in the human lineage, asking whether these regions help explain the distinctive development of the human brain. Other researchers are examining the evolution of the neocortex and cellular differences between human and other primate brains.
But biology tells only part of the story.
Humans also inherit enormous amounts of information culturally. We learn languages, values, customs, moral rules and ideas from others, then pass them to future generations.
Michael Muthukrishna, Professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics, has made the relationship between culture, evolution and human behaviour a central focus of his work. His research explores how culture has shaped human psychology and social change, while his book A Theory of Everyone brings together insights from the sciences, humanities and cultural evolution.
This perspective makes the traditional nature-versus-nurture debate increasingly inadequate. Human behaviour is shaped by biology, but biology operates within a cultural environment that humans continually create and change.
Looking Inside the Human Mind
Neuroscience provides another piece of the puzzle.
Researchers can now study the brain at levels that would have been unimaginable only decades ago, from individual neurons to the networks involved in memory, emotion, decision-making and consciousness.
Yet greater knowledge has also highlighted what remains unexplained.
Consciousness is perhaps the clearest example. Scientists can observe neural activity and identify relationships between brain activity and particular experiences, but explaining why biological processes produce subjective experience remains one of science’s most difficult challenges.
Artificial intelligence adds another dimension. As machines become increasingly capable of language, reasoning and creative tasks, researchers are being pushed to reconsider what intelligence actually means—and whether intelligence, consciousness, creativity or culture truly distinguish humans.
In an unexpected way, understanding machines may be helping scientists reconsider what it means to understand ourselves.
Canada Is Part of the Conversation
This investigation is not confined to Europe or the United States.
At the University of British Columbia, psychologist Steven Heine has studied how culture shapes the way people understand themselves and their surroundings, including how they construct meaning and identity. His work in existential psychology examines how people make sense of their lives when confronted with experiences that challenge their assumptions.
It represents another route into the same fundamental question.
A geneticist might ask what changed in the human genome. A neuroscientist might ask what changed in the brain. A psychologist such as Heine can examine how those biological capacities become part of the stories people tell themselves about who they are and what their lives mean.
Increasingly, these questions overlap.
The Problem of Fragmentation
Science has accumulated extraordinary knowledge about individual aspects of human behaviour, yet there is considerably less agreement about how those findings fit together into a coherent understanding of the human being.
We know more and more about the pieces while the larger picture remains elusive.
The phrase “human condition” is useful because it encompasses that larger picture. It refers not simply to what the brain does or how societies function, but to the contradictions that appear throughout human existence: empathy and aggression, cooperation and conflict, rational thought and irrational behaviour, selflessness and self-interest.
These contradictions have been investigated from countless scientific and philosophical perspectives. The deeper question is whether they might ultimately have something in common.
An Older Question Comes Back Into View
It is in this context that the work of Jeremy Griffith, biologist and founder of the non-profit Fix The World (previously the World Transformation Movement), enters the discussion.
Griffith has spent decades pursuing a biological explanation for the human condition. Rather than focusing on one specific behaviour, he seeks to explain the broader psychological contradiction that has occupied thinkers for centuries: why a species capable of extraordinary love, cooperation and moral concern is also capable of aggression, selfishness, insecurity and destructive conflict.
His theory centres on the emergence of the conscious human intellect and its relationship with our older instinctive nature. Griffith argues that the intellect’s drive to question, experiment and understand came into conflict with instinctive behavioural guidance. In his view, this conflict produced psychological insecurity, defensiveness, guilt and aggression that have subsequently shaped human behaviour.
Whether one accepts Griffith’s theory or not, the questions it addresses sit within a much larger scientific conversation. Researchers across multiple disciplines are increasingly asking how biology, the brain, culture, consciousness and psychology fit together.
The human condition may therefore be becoming more than an old philosophical question. It could become one of science’s most ambitious interdisciplinary challenges: understanding not simply what humans are made of, but why we became the complicated, contradictory beings we are.
