In a general sense, the concept of predatory well-being introduced in the article Predatory Well-Being: A Global Problem refers to social, political and economic arrangements shaped by the interplay of genes and environments where gains in health, happiness and longevity for some are systematically extracted from others using system-justified harms and equality exclusions (EQEXs) framed as right and good. 

These and other articles on QualityLifeJungle.net attempt to show what the author believes is the direction of future research in behavioral genetics and related disciplines.

For example, research showing the biological embedding of social experience within a person’s lifetime through epigenetic mechanisms such as DNA methylation, with the embedding environment reproduced for the next generation through genetic nurture and institutional design, will be more clearly documented.

Gene-environment predictions of moral, political, and well-being-relevant traits will likely improve as sample sizes grow and cross-ancestry portability improves. The institutional patterns that produce the most damaging gene-environment misalignments will likely become more computationally tractable resulting in greater efficiencies in multi-modal modeling and creating exposome datasets. It is important to note these are predictions that the author believes are supported by the trajectories of current research, but they are not themselves established findings.

Predatory Well-Being is not an attempt to show ‘malice of forethought’ by hierarchy elites. Rather, individuals and groups on top of a social hierarchy try to optimize, through the design and enforcement of their social and institutional preferences, their own gene-environment alignments and well-being. Attempts to optimize their power and control over generations results in rigid institutions that systematically exclude those whose inherited DNA sequences are mismatched and poorly aligned. This looks like genetic determinism.

However, Genetic determinism is false. Genes do not dictate life course outcomes; outcomes emerge from the interplay of genes and environments. But here is what ‘genes are not destiny’ rhetoric obscures: when institutions are designed as if that interplay did not exist, they operate as if it did. Policies treated as ‘neutral’ or ‘one-size-fits-all’ are not neutral. They are environments, and like all environments they reward some gene-environment alignments and penalize others.

The point is not that genes don’t matter. The point is that institutions decide which genetic propensities are rewarded, which are penalized, and whether disadvantages are reversible or permanent. By failing to recognize the interplay, institutions perform genetic determinism by default. A political, economic or governmental system that ignores the nature and social impact of the interplay does not refute determinism. It enacts it.

Predatory Well-Being is the argument that social hierarchy and socioeconomic inequality are biologically and mathematically unsustainable, threatening the future of the biosphere and our genome (e.g., see the article ‘Arithmetic of Global Predation’).

A key point is that differences between people in their inherited DNA sequences create systematic biases in the environments people prefer, accept, and reward. These biases can accumulate across generations and populations and over time shape the institutions those populations build.

Inequality persists because environments are heritable. However, the transmission of inequalities in well-being to future generations does not necessarily require trauma-altered DNA. Instead, inequality can be passed to future generations via genetic nurture through, for instance,  institutions, wealth and systemic harms.

In terms of the biological embedding of epigenetic mechanisms in a subsequent generation via DNA methylation, it is important to note the critical role of genetic nurture and institutional design in this process.

Throughout the articles, there is an attempt to make the following point: Hierarchy itself is not genetically transmitted. The jack-in-the-box pattern introduced in the article Predatory Well-Being: A Global Problem is about genotype–environment alignment and how each generation’s alignments to institutions are systematically reshuffled by genetic recombination.

For example, recombination plus environmental change produces a new distribution of genotype–environment alignments that, when the institutions of the prior generation cannot accommodate, generates the Jack pattern not through allele change but through changing generational alignments (alignment churn) working against institutional rigidity.

While historians Walter Scheidel and Peter Turchin explain materialistic and demographic aspects of dynamic inequality, they do not explain how or why institutions designed and optimized for a particular generation of elites systematically generate pools of dissatisfied counter-elites in future generations.   

It is important to note that gene-environment sorting operates within populations while national populations are not genetically distinct to the degree that variations in between-country well-being can be attributable to genetic stratification.

As a closing point, the articles do not claim or imply that moral views are genetically fixed or that biology dictates ethics.