There is a fundamental theme that runs throughout these articles:

Genetic recombination is fundamental to the interplay producing individual genetic variation and therefore variation in how genes and environments combine across the life course. Because that variation is expressed only in interaction with environments, no genome fixes a life course outcome in advance…which is why strict genetic determinism is indefensible.

However, genetic recombination also does something else. While genes on their own do not determine life course outcomes, the blind spots of institutional design unwittingly allow genetic determinism by default to sneak through the door.

When institutions are designed as if the gene-environment 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 traits and penalize others.

The point is not that genes don’t matter. The point is that elites and institutions decide which traits are rewarded, which are penalized and whether disadvantages are reversible or permanent across a person’s life course.

By failing to recognize the interplay, we fail to see how institutions can convert recombination-generated variation into entwined, mutating hierarchies enforced by system-justified harms and equality exclusions (EQEXs).

Political, economic or governmental systems that ignore the nature and social impact of the interplay do not refute determinism…they make genetic differences more predictive of outcomes and less reversible over a person’s life course, producing genetic determinism by default.