Welcome to the Jungle!
Will we make it through the 21st century?
The human motivations and capacities underlying every art, science and innovation, whether aimed at satisfying a need or seeking something good, emerge from the complex interplay of genetic propensities and environmental conditions (e.g. social, political, economic, natural and biophysical).1
Like fingers across a piano’s keyboard creating a melody, this interplay produces life course trajectories with many variations and outcomes. In a similar way, individual experiences and traits emerge from the unique interplay of genetic propensities and environmental factors. On a broader scale, countries and cultures develop distinct but intertwined themes, harmonies and melodies created by universally shared human genetic capacities adapting to vastly different historical, geographic and social environments.
Now…here we are in the 21st century…our gene-environment themes, harmonies and melodies are still off-key, dissonant and clashing.
Who are we and what have we done?
See our foundational article: The Gene-Environment Roots of Hierarchy & Socioeconomic Inequality.
The gene-environment framework of many cultures and countries across the world is littered with the self-perpetuating inequalities of social hierarchy and socioeconomic stratification reproduced through multiple pathways that include the within-lifetime biological embedding of social experience.2
The articles currently on this website drill down deep into the gene-environment basis of this pattern, laying the foundation for a series of new articles arguing that increasingly complex global conflicts are accelerating this biologically embedded pattern into a crisis that threatens the well-being of future generations and the planet’s life-support systems.
Below is a short list of major social, economic, environmental and geopolitical problems that will be discussed in future articles.
In each of these flashpoints, a gene-environment paradox, system-justified harms, genetic determinism by default,3 advancing AI technologies and the internet, we argue, play a critical role in accelerating changes in social, political and economic structures across the world.
–the unbridled concentration of income, wealth and technological power on a global basis
–cultural, racial and ethnocentric hostilities fueled by socioeconomic inequality
–the global impact of increasingly complex climate change inequities on low-income populations
–global conflicts over habitable and agricultural land
–global food production and distribution inequities
–global health, education and longevity disparities
–the internet’s role in weaponizing data, fueling disinformation warfare and amplifying ethnic, racial, religious and cultural tribalism
–social conflicts over AI’s role in governance, education and resource distribution
–Biotech Elites capturing political systems and economic resources
–political instabilities resulting in the global rise of authoritarian regimes
–political and economic conflicts between nuclear nations
Something must be done…
A New Global Vision beyond social hierarchy that begins with understanding and resolving the gene-environment complexities of Well-Being Across Our Individual and Cultural Differences.
Last edited October 2026
References
1. von Stumm, S., & d’Apice, K. (2022). From genome-wide to environment-wide: Capturing the environome. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 17(1), 30-40.
Sauce, B., & Matzel, L. D. (2018). The paradox of intelligence: Heritability and malleability coexist in hidden gene-environment interplay. Psychological Bulletin, 144(1), 26–47.
Turkheimer, E. (2000). Three laws of behavioral genetics and what they mean. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 9(5), 160-164.
Plomin, R., Gidziela, A., Malanchini, M., & von Stumm, S. (2022). Gene–environment interaction using polygenic scores: Do polygenic scores for psychopathology moderate predictions from environmental risk to behavior problems? Development and Psychopathology, 34(5), 1816–1826. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579422000931
“GxE is important because it recognizes that one size does not fit all and offers the possibility of personalized tailoring of children’s environments based on their genetic propensities. Moreover, weak environmental effects in the population could have strong effects on children with particular genetic proclivities. GxE is the genetic extension of phenotypic research on differential reactivity to the environment.”
“GxE is distinct conceptually from gene-environment correlation, which denotes experiences that are correlated with genetic propensities, that is, genetic exposure to environmental effects and genetic mediation of associations between environmental factors and psychopathology.”
Polderman, T. J. C., Benyamin, B., de Leeuw, C. A., Sullivan, P. F., van Bochoven, A., Visscher, P. M., & Posthuma, D. (2015). Meta-analysis of the heritability of human traits based on fifty years of twin studies. Nature Genetics, 47(7), 702–709.
Henrich, J. (2016). The secret of our success: How culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smarter. Princeton University Press.
Laland, K. N., Odling-Smee, J., & Myles, S. (2010). How culture shaped the human genome: Bringing genetics and the human sciences together. Nature Reviews Genetics, 11(2), 137–148.
Schultz, W. (2015). Neuronal reward and decision signals: From theories to data. Physiological Reviews, 95(3), 853–951.
Kandler, C., Riemann, R., Angleitner, A., Spinath, F. M., Borkenau, P., & Penke, L. (2016). The nature of creativity: The roles of genetic factors, personality traits, cognitive abilities, and environmental sources. Journal of personality and social psychology, 111(2), 230–249. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000087.
Kandel, E. R., Schwartz, J. H., Jessell, T. M., Siegelbaum, S. A., & Hudspeth, A. J. (Eds.). (2013). Principles of neural science (5th ed.). McGraw-Hill.
“Neurons are computational devices.”
2. Thayer, Z. M., & Kuzawa, C. W. (2011). Biological memories of past environments: Epigenetic pathways to health disparities. Epigenetics, 6(7), 798–803.
Erola, J., Lehti, H., Baier, T., & Karhula, A. (2022). Socioeconomic background and gene–environment interplay in social stratification across the early life course. European Sociological Review, 38(1), 1-17.
Wedow, R., Zacher, M., Huibregtse, B. M., Harris, K. M., Domingue, B. W., & Boardman, J. D. (2018). Education, smoking, and cohort change: Forwarding a multidimensional theory of the environmental moderation of genetic effects. American Sociological Review, 83(4), 802–832.
Kong, A., Thorleifsson, G., Frigge, M. L., Vilhjalmsson, B. J., Young, A. I., Thorgeirsson, T. E., … Stefansson, K. (2018). The nature of nurture: Effects of parental genotypes. Science, 359(6374), 424–428.
Scorza, P., Duarte, C. S., Hipwell, A. E., Posner, J., Ortin, A., Canino, G., & Monk, C. (2019). Research review: Intergenerational transmission of disadvantage: Epigenetics and parents’ childhoods as the first exposure. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 60(2), 119–132.
Willems, Y. E., Rezaki, A. D., Aikins, M., Bahl, A., Wu, Q., Belsky, D. W., & Raffington, L. (2026). Social determinants of health and epigenetic clocks: A systematic review and meta-analysis of 140 studies. Nature Human Behaviour. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-02477-6
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3. The gene-environment paradox, system-justified harms and genetic determinism by default are theoretical constructs introduced in The Gene-Environment Roots of Hierarchy & Socioeconomic Inequality.
Sidanius, J., & Pratto, F. (1999). Social dominance: An intergroup theory of social hierarchy and oppression. Cambridge University Press.
Jost, J. T., Banaji, M. R., & Nosek, B. A. (2004). A decade of system justification theory: Accumulated evidence of conscious and unconscious bolstering of the status quo. Political Psychology, 25(6), 881–919.
van de Werfhorst, H. G. (2026). The sociogenomics of social stratification and general theories of inequality. The British Journal of Sociology, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.70138