Articles throughout the website develop the concept of Predatory Well-Being. 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 may look 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.