Predatory Well-Being
Section Headers:
Genes and Environments are Determinants of Well-Being
Homo Sapiens-A Different Kind of Predator
A Predator with Prosocial Traits
Prosocial Behavior has Many Deceptive Faces
Social Hierarchy–Human Barnyards of Inequality
Social Hierarchy is Socio-Genetic Stratification
Genetic Recombination and the Jack-In-The-Box Pattern of Social Hierarchy
Jack…Socio-Genetic Stratification-Builder and Destroyer of Worlds
Jack, Social Hierarchy & System-Justified Harms
Predatory Well-Being: A Global Problem
Is there anything more dangerous to the future of the planet than a predator with a ‘big brain’ that can make harms look like social and moral goods?
Approximately 300,000 years ago, after millions of years of genetic variation in hominin evolution, a very different kind of predator with a ‘big brain’ appeared–Homo sapiens.241
Through language, cause-effect reasoning, technological innovation and prosocial norms this cognitive super-predator would eventually open a doorway to the first very thin horizon lines of well-being—a long, healthy, happy and purposeful life.
However, the doorway to well-being reveals an evolutionary path strewn with the potholes of natural selection.63,257,299
Natural selection, in favoring heritable variation in cognition, emotion and behavior created a gene-environment paradox, the paradox of the right and the good–what is considered right or good varies across individuals and groups due to differences between individuals in their inherited DNA (genetic propensities) and the interplay of these differences with environmental conditions (e.g., social, political, economic, technological, natural and biophysical).419
The socio-genetic effects of the interplay create the stratified architecture of social hierarchy, political and economic structures thick with inequalities enforced by system-justified harms—harms that function as social and moral goods. These harms, such as coercive punishment, exclusion and inequality are justified as fair, necessary and even virtuous because they reflect the values and interests–what is considered right or good–of dominant groups.
Since the first cities and states appeared some 5000+ years ago189,203 there has been persistent social hierarchy and unrelenting political and socioeconomic conflicts due to the complex nature of gene-environment interactions across generations.
Eventually, the system-justified inequalities a social hierarchy relies on to maintain its political and economic stability begin to tear its infrastructure apart, the result of a socio-genetic pattern that has dogged human civilizations since the first cities and states appeared…when a social hierarchy rises it is only a matter of time until it begins to fail, and when it does, another one jumps up like a jack-in-the-box to start the process all over again.425
From institutionalized coercion and economic disparities that favor a few to inequities in health, happiness and longevity, social hierarchies and their system-justified harms create DNA outsiders, assuring the intergenerational transmission of hierarchy, socioeconomic inequality and conflicts over what is right and good across every country in the world.
There is something morally defective about this.
Allegrini et al. (a team that included prominent geneticist Robert Plomin) write: “While emerging evidence indicates that polygenic scores are not pure measures of genetic predisposition, previous quantitative genetics findings indicate that measures of the environment are themselves heritable.” They continue: “Our findings have relevance for genomic and environmental prediction models alike, as they show the way in which individuals’ genetic predispositions and environmental effects are intertwined.”90
In addition, they write: “Quantitative genetic theory distinguishes two types of interplay between genetic and environmental effects, genotype-environment correlation (rGE) and genotype-environment interaction (GxE). rGE occurs when an individual’s genotype covaries with environmental exposures. There are three types of rGE: passive, active and evocative.”90
Passive rGE arises when children inherit both genetic tendencies and environments shaped by their parents’ genotypes. In this scenario, parents pass on genes that predispose their offspring toward certain traits, while also creating home environments that reinforce the development of those traits. For example, children with stronger genetic propensities for academic success are more likely to be raised in families with higher socioeconomic status, which further nurtures educational achievement.90
Active rGE occurs when individuals seek out environments that align with their genetic predispositions. For instance, individuals with genotypes favoring high educational attainment may choose to live in areas that offer better educational opportunities.90
Evocative rGE takes place when genetically influenced behaviors elicit specific responses from the environment. For example, a child with a genetic tendency toward increased appetite might evoke restrictive feeding practices from caregivers.90
It is important to understand passive, active and evocative forms of the interplay are not independent of each other–they are complementary gene-environment processes.
In addition, Allegrini et al. make an important distinction between rGE and GxE: “GxE, on the other hand, refers to genetic moderation of environmental effects. That is, when the effects of environmental exposures on phenotypes depend on individuals’ genotypes. Equivalently, environmentally moderated genetic effects occur when genetic effects on a phenotype depend on environmental exposures.”90
Kweon and colleagues in “Genetic fortune: Winning or losing education, income, and health” explain that “…education, income, personality, cognitive abilities, and occupational choices are all heritable to some extent and parents pass on both their environments and their genes to offspring.”18
An article published by Nature in the journal Molecular Psychiatry makes the critical point social behaviour is heritable: “Twin studies have reported heritability estimates of 0.38–0.76 for prosocial behaviour and 0.41–0.83 for peer problems.”247
Genoeconomist C.A. Rietveld writes: “A steadily increasing number of studies shows that economic preferences and socio-economic status indicators are also partly heritable.”324
However, this is not to imply that environments are encoded in DNA. Instead, it reflects how genetically influenced traits (such as personality, cognitive style, or emotional reactivity) lead individuals to select, modify, and evoke different environmental aspects, a process which in turn contributes to socioeconomic inequality.
Social science geneticist Tim T. Morris et al. add this important point on the transmission of educational attainment across generations, a fundamental factor in socioeconomic status (SES) inequality, “…there are passive gene–environment correlations, which often arise owing to the inheritance of both genetic variation and environments from one generation to the next. For example, the offspring of parents with high polygenic scores for education are also themselves likely to have high polygenic scores for education owing to direct genetic inheritance. If these parents create educational nurturing environments because of their genetics, the offspring are likely to also inherit environments that improve their learning and education. Hence, the genetic variation and environment that offspring inherit are correlated, a phenomenon known as ‘genetic nurture.’”89
A recent article in Nature Human Behavior titled “Socio-economic status is a social construct with heritable components and genetic consequences” makes the point that traits influenced by genetics such as cognitive ability, conscientiousness, and social behavior play a significant role in determining an individual’s socioeconomic status (SES), which in turn governs access to resources, environments, and reproductive opportunities. These social environments, structured by institutions and societal norms, create selection pressures that gradually alter the distribution of genetic variants associated with socially advantageous traits.339
The greater the heritable gene-environment effects of low socioeconomic status (SES), the more entrenched its disparities can become across generations, giving high-SES individuals and groups (hierarchy elites) advantages that can result in greater control over resources and distribution, thereby further solidifying their dominance now and in the future.407 Moreover, SES disparities in health, happiness, purpose in life goals and longevity are not limited to the poor, they also invade the middle class.342
Genes and Environments are
Determinants of Well-Being
In exploring the biological basis of well-being, geneticist Meike Bartels et al. makes this important point about genes and well-being: “…individuals create and choose their own environments based on genetically informed preferences.”250
Research by genetic epidemiologist Margot van de Weijer and colleagues reinforce the role of genes and environments in well-being: “This finding supports the notion of gene-environment correlation for well-being, where a person’s exposure to the environment depends on their genetic predisposition for well-being.”251
Bartels summarizes the research on happiness: “Genetic studies involving twin or family designs reveal that about 30-40% of the differences in happiness between people within a country are accounted for by genetic differences among individuals.”250
She explains: “…both genetic and environmental influences are important for variation in well-being among individuals living in the same society.” “Some people are born with a set of genetic variants that makes it easier to feel happy, while others are less fortunate.”250
Bartels continues: “…genes can affect people’s choice of environments and how others react to them. At the same time, genes can influence how people are affected by the world around them — there is ‘gene-environment interaction’.” “This finding was the first, but very powerful, indication that genetic differences between people are a source of differences in happiness.”250
She further explains that: “…genetic factors can change in response to changes in our environment, which indicates an interaction between genetic and environmental factors. One implication of finding interactions between genetic and environmental factors is the potential to draw out genetic strengths and dampen genetic risks using environmental interventions.”250
Margot van de Weijer and colleagues add to this important point: “Many (socio) environmental exposures have been associated with human well-being. For example, meta-analyses suggest a role for social support, green space exposure, and socioeconomic status, among many other factors. The totality of these environmental exposures can collectively be referred to as the well-being exposome, which captures all non-genetic exposures influencing variation in well-being from conception onwards (also referred to by others as the environome).”251
“Approximately 60–70% of individual differences in well-being can be traced back to this exposome. Complementary to the exposome is the genome, all our genetic information, which accounts for the other 30–40% of individual differences in well-being.”251
Just as the genome contains all the biological instructions we inherit, the exposome represents the total environmental experiences we accumulate, from air quality and diet to social norms and economic stress. Our life trajectory depends on how these two systems–our genome and exposome–interact.
As a result, the alignment (or misalignment) of a person’s inherited DNA differences (genetic propensities) and environmental conditions from childhood through adulthood, and in particular norms and institutions regulating resources and their distribution, is a key determinant of life course outcomes and well-being.10,13,408
Homo Sapiens--A Different Kind of Predator
Sophisticated, cognitive-driven social predation is different from predator-prey interactions where the goal of the predator is to eat what it captures and kills. In the context of Homo sapiens and its computational brain,78 the nature of the predator and its prey changes.
Evolutionary biologist Richard Alexander makes the essential point: “When man developed his weapons, culture, and population sizes to levels that essentially erased the significance of predators of other species, he simultaneously created a new predator: groups and coalitions within his own species.”201
According to Andrew Whiten, a Professor of Evolutionary and Developmental Psychology and associate David Erdal, over the course of evolution humans entered a “new socio-cognitive niche” that allowed them “to function as a unique and highly competitive predatory organism.”327
In an article for Science entitled “The Unique Ecology of Human Predators,” conservation scientist C.T. Darimont and colleagues bring us up to date by making the following stark and sobering point about human predation in the 21st century: “Our global summary…revealed that humans kill adult prey…at much higher median rates than other predators (up to 14 times higher). Given this competitive dominance, impacts on predators, and other unique predatory behavior, we suggest that humans function as an unsustainable “super predator” which–unless additionally constrained by managers—will continue to alter ecological and evolutionary processes globally.”199
Cognitive psychologist Stephen Pinker makes the following point about human predatory behavior: “Because predatory violence is just a means to a goal, it comes in as many varieties as there are human goals.”202
Pinker continues: “Predatory or instrumental violence is simply violence deployed as a practical means to an end. Dominance is the urge for authority, prestige, glory, and power…ideology is a shared belief system, usually involving a vision of utopia, that justifies unlimited violence in pursuit of unlimited good.”204
Pinker provides examples of human social predation: “Romans suppressing provincial rebellions, Mongols razing cities that resist their conquest; free companies of demobilized soldiers plundering and raping; colonial settlers expelling or massacring indigenous peoples, gangsters whacking a rival, an informant, or an uncooperative official; rulers assassinating a political opponent or vice versa; governments jailing or executing dissidents; warring nations bombing enemy cities; hoodlums injuring a victim who resists a robbery or carjacking; criminals killing an eyewitness to a crime; mothers smothering a newborn they feel they cannot raise.”192
A Predator with Prosocial Traits
When our genome (Homo sapiens) appeared some 300,000 years ago180 it came with the cognitive ability to manipulate the social environment through language and cause-effect reasoning,127 opening a ‘prosocial’ door to the first thin horizon lines of what we now call well-being.
According to anthropologist Richard Wrangham, this cognitive ability drove a selection process where collective intentionality in the form of a language-based conspiracy allowed ‘males of low fighting prowess’ to cooperatively plan the execution of physically aggressive and domineering alpha males.180
Wrangham writes: “The evolution of this newly sophisticated cognitive ability would have led subordinates to socially select against aggressive fighters, creating a reverse dominance hierarchy.”181
The result, according to Wrangham, was an evolutionary decline in reactive aggression.
Wrangham writes: “The evolutionary decline of reactive aggression would have opened increasing possibilities for social selection and self control to contribute to the development of prosocial tendencies.”181
Cultural anthropologist Christopher Boehm, who introduced the theory of ‘reverse dominance hierarchy,’182 gives us a visceral picture of prosocial behavior in our hunter-gather ancestors where “angry, punitive social selection” processes targeted “free-riding bullies and others who couldn’t control their antisocial impulses”183
According to Boehm, “Egalitarianism involves a very special type of hierarchy”185 that “can stay in place only with the vigilant and active suppression of bullies, who as free riders could otherwise openly take what they wanted from others who were less selfish or less powerful.”186
Boehm writes, “Humans naturally form hierarchies when they live in groups.”187 “In despotic social dominance hierarchies the pyramid of power is pointed upward with one or a few individuals…at the top. In egalitarian hierarchies, the pyramid of power is turned upside down, with a politically united rank and file dominating…”188
Prosocial Behavior has Many Deceptive Faces
In an article titled “Culture and Prosocial Behavior” in The Oxford Handbook of Prosocial Behavior, behavioral scientist Irina Feygina and psychologist P.J. Henry write: “Organized society, as it exists around the world, would not be possible without prosocial behavior.”150
However, they also point out: “…all groups have core prosocial practices that permit their functioning, but those prosocial practices manifest differently across groups.”150
“The difference in prosocial behaviors across cultures…becomes a question of who is prosocial, and to whom, and under what circumstances.”150
While prosocial norms and behaviors are essential to social cooperation, they also ‘paradoxically’ play a pivotal role in ‘predatory well-being’ and how harms are turned into social and moral goods.
Prosocial norms can motivate people to help others in distress and to be other-regarding and altruistic in those efforts, however, what is prosocial to an individual, group or society can be a threat to others.
There is a difference between prosocial norms and behaviors based on Nazism and prosocial behavior in the Jewish populations they targeted.
For example, social psychologist C. Daniel Batson makes the point that altruistic and egoistic motivations, both of which are characteristics of prosocial behavior, can be shaped to justify goals and behaviors for “…moral, amoral and immoral reasons.”123,297
Interesting research by Manfred Milinski at the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Biology titled “Extortion—A voracious prosocial strategy” writes: “The long-standing belief that evolved social strategies can be only nice and cooperative has been challenged.”246
“Experiments found potential extortioners at a frequency of about 40% implying the limit frequency of extortion. Hence, about 40% of the people in the real world might be potential extortioners disguised as nice folks.”246
Empathy is another characteristic of prosocial behavior.297
An article titled “Empathy” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy by Karsten Steuber makes this point: “…empathy induced altruism can lead to behavior that conflicts with our principles of justice and fairness. One, for example, tends to assign a better job or a higher priority for receiving medical treatment to persons with whom one has actually sympathized, in violation of the above moral principles.”248
Neuroscience research on empathy by social scientist Mina Cikara and psychologist Susan Fiske further demonstrates the good and bad nature of empathy:
“One reason social psychologists and more recently cognitive neuroscientists have been interested in understanding empathy is because it is such a potent predictor of helping behavior.”249
“A cursory reading of the emotion, empathy, and perception–action literatures might leave one with the impression that people spontaneously experience empathy in response to seeing another person in distress. Recent developments in social psychological and cognitive neuroscience research suggest otherwise: People frequently fail to empathize to the same extent with outgroup members as ingroup members.”249
Feygina and Henry make this summary point about prosocial behavior: “…despite the human capacity for prosocial cultures and communities, exploiters can prevail.”151
Differences and conflicts over prosocial behavior across individuals and cultures are not easily overcome because prosocial behavior is heritable, shaped by genetic and environmental influences that vary across different cultures and populations.153
For example: “Twin studies have reported heritability estimates of 0.38–0.76 for prosocial behaviour…”247
For these reasons, disagreements over prosocial norms, inequality, resource distribution, religious beliefs, fairness and justice remain common and extensive across the world.154
Social Hierarchy-- Human Barnyards of Inequality
5000+ years ago when the first cities and states began to appear pyramid-shaped (top-down) social hierarchies came too.189,203
Historical sociologist Daniel Chirot makes the essential point: “There is little question that the transition from gathering and hunting societies to early agriculture created increasing inequalities of wealth and the subordination of the many by the strong few, and that this was accompanied by a great increase in the incidence of war.”191
“The state came to be viewed as the private domain of the ruler, and the people as mere tools of his power, hardly superior to domestic animals.”191
These human barnyards of inequality, controlled by big men, chiefs and kings have not left our social hierarchies—they have merely evolved into more complex political and economic structures. In Europe these inefficient political and economic structures came and went in a fury of social conflicts and war.
For example, “According to military historian Quincy Wright, Europe had five thousand independent political units (mainly baronies and principalities) in the 15th century, five hundred at the time of the Thirty Years’ War in the early 17th, two hundred at the time of Napoleon in the early 19th, and fewer than thirty in 1953.”192
Economist Paul Seabright in his book “The Company of Strangers,” explains that states pursuing prosperity through military strength and states pursuing military strength through prosperity face the same threat to their security.
Seabright writes, “…wealthy states can become a source of fear to their neighbors, since the strategy of trading with those neighbors rather than fighting them may not outlast the emergence of a major disparity in military strength. And insecure neighbors are not necessarily good news. They divert resources from peaceful investments that might help both parties toward expensive and dangerous military technology, and they can be tempted by opportunities to strike preemptively in order to forestall the risk of facing a preemptive strike themselves.”296
Furthermore, Seabright makes this important point: “The popular modern view that trade between neighbors makes warfare less likely…is one that has no reliable basis in history.”296
Seabright also describes the predatory nature of state systems (social hierarchies) and the moral tradeoffs they justify in their ‘prosocial’ pursuit of resource dominance.
“The European powers abolished the transatlantic slave trade in the early nineteenth century, but the systematic slaughter of indigenous inhabitants of their colonies continued. These included the aboriginal inhabitants of Australia and Tasmania (the latter of whom were entirely wiped out), the hereros of German South-West Africa (now Namibia) in 1904, and what may possibly be the largest single genocide in history, the killing of up to ten million Congolese by Belgian colonists between 1880 and 1920—a startling average of one murder every two minutes, day and night, for forty years. Such slaughter may even have been encouraged by the fact that, with the end of slavery, these inhabitants no longer represented an economic resource for their murderers; they were simply in the way.”296
Our Eugenic Barnyards Today
Sociologist Veronique Mottier in the Oxford handbook of the history of eugenics makes this important point about eugenics and modern states: “The eugenic vision of the nation as an ordered system of exclusion and disciplinary regulation was central both to the formation of national identity and to the workings of modern welfare. The national order of the welfare state was founded on the notions of community and solidarity. However, entitlement to welfare provisions has always been conditional.”261
Sir Francis Galton invented the term eugenics in 1883.262
In his book, Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development, Sir Francis Galton writes: “There exists a sentiment, for the most part quite unreasonable, against the gradual extinction of an inferior race. It rests on some confusion between the race and the individual, as if the destruction of a race was equivalent to the destruction of a large number of men. It is nothing of the kind when the process of extinction works silently and slowly through the earlier marriage of members of the superior race, through their greater vitality under equal stress, through their better chances of getting a livelihood, or through their prepotency in mixed marriages. That the members of an inferior class should dislike being elbowed out of the way is another matter; but it may be somewhat brutally argued that whenever two individuals struggle for a single place, one must yield, and that there will be no more unhappiness on the whole, if the inferior yield to the superior than conversely, whereas the world will be permanently enriched by the success of the superior.”263
Finally, it is important to understand: “Eugenics does not require racism—biological superiority need not be premised on racial hierarchy. In fact, early eugenic research in the United States studied white families thought to have “degenerate” attributes— criminality, pauperism, alcoholism, and prostitution were the chief worries.”264
Social Hierarchy is Socio-Genetic Stratification
There is a substantial body of research in behavioral genetics showing differences in cognition, affect and behavior are driven by an interplay between a person’s inherited DNA differences (genetic propensities) and environmental conditions (e.g., social, political, economic, technological, natural, and biophysical).1
As a result of the interplay, people evoke, select into, modify and create environments that correlate with their inherited DNA differences, forming groups and coalitions that align with their social preferences in a competition to influence and control how norms and institutions regulate the distribution of income, wealth, privileges and power.420,423
This is socio-genetic stratification, reinforced by the ‘jack-in-the-box’ pattern of rising and falling social hierarchies.425
According to psychologist and behavioral genetics researcher Sophie von Stumm and colleagues: “Children’s differences in early life cognitive development are driven by the interplay of genetic and environmental factors,”10 where “children are assorted to environments in line with their genetic propensities.”10
Sophie von Stumm et al. explain: “The two best predictors of children’s educational achievement available from birth are parents socioeconomic status (SES) and, recently, children’s inherited DNA differences that can be aggregated in genome-wide polygenic scores (GPS).”13
Furthermore, the active engagement of these environmental factors does not occur on a random basis.
Psychologists Frank Mann and Colin DeYoung make the following point: “…individuals are not randomly assigned to social-relational environments. Rather, individuals select into and evoke responses from environments based on their heritable characteristics.”224
Psychologist D. A. Briley et al. in the European Journal of Personality reinforce the point: “…individuals actively create or select environmental experiences aligned with their genetically influenced preferences and desires.”177
Neurobiologist Michael Meaney writes: “… individuals are not passive recipients of experience, we actively construct environments on the basis of temperaments, self-esteem, and sociability, all of which can potentially be influenced by the genome. What this means, very simply, is that certain environmental influences may be crucial for some individuals and less so for others. Conversely, because environmental factors regulate gene expression, genetic factors may be a more significant source of influence in some individuals than others.”25
While research in behavioral genetics has shown that people evoke, select into, modify and create environments that correlate with their inherited DNA differences, in a social hierarchy these environmental factors include norms and institutions that select back with rules, regulations and policies that enforce inequality. For example, there are individuals and groups whose advantages in income, wealth, privileges and power depend on SES inequities.
Moreover, these socio-genetic effects have geographic significance.
Research published in Nature Human Behavior involving the ‘genetic correlates of social stratification’ examined the geographic clustering of genes and its effect on socioeconomic status (SES).
The research makes this important point: “Socioeconomic status is not distributed randomly across geographic space, which leads to geographic clustering of alleles that are associated with SES-related traits such as educational attainment.”285
According to their research, the exodus from the coal mining regions of Great Britain is an example of how occupational and educational attainment (EA) factors affect migration: “Our results show that people with a genetic predisposition for higher cognitive abilities are leaving these regions, likely attracted by better educational or occupational opportunities in other regions. In fact, the people who were born in coal mining areas and migrated to better neighborhoods have higher average EA polygenic scores than people born outside of these regions.”285
Their research makes the point that socioeconomic status varies systematically by region, such that genes linked to SES-related traits—like educational attainment—can become geographically clustered. With educational attainment exhibiting strong assortative mating, such mating patterns can over time deepen social inequalities across generations.285
Genetic Recombination and the Jack-In-The-Box Pattern of Social Hierarchy
Psychologist Sophie von Stumm and Katrina d’Apice summarize a fundamental principle in contemporary behavioral genetics: “There is broad consensus that people’s differences in affect, behavior, and cognition result from the interplay between genetic propensities and environmental conditions.” In their article, von Stumm and d’Apice also introduce the concept of the environome, which “…encompasses all environmental influences that give rise to people’s differences in affect, behavior, and cognition.”1
Behavioral geneticist and psychologist Robert Plomin et al. make this important point about the environome: “A comparison between the genome and … the environome is instructive. In the genome, millions of inherited differences in DNA sequence have been identified and their tiny individual associations with a trait can be summed to create polygenic scores…In contrast, for the environome, there is no fundamental unit of transmission…”118
This distinction has important implications for social stratification. While genetic inheritance follows well-defined biological rules, environmental transmission is diffuse, historically contingent, and institutionally mediated. As Plomin and colleagues note, genomic variation can be decomposed into millions of DNA variants whose small effects can be aggregated into polygenic scores, whereas the environome lacks any fundamental unit of transmission or stable inheritance mechanism.118
Consequently, gene-environment inheritance introduces a persistent source of variability that environmental conditions such as social institutions can only imperfectly regulate.
Genetic Recombination as a Mechanism of Intergenerational Reshuffling
Across generations, genetic recombination systematically destabilizes the transmission of social advantage. During sexual reproduction, DNA variants carried by parents are randomly assorted and recombined, producing offspring whose genetic endowments differ meaningfully from those of their parents and siblings.257 Mutation introduces new genetic variants into populations, while recombination reshuffles existing variants into novel genotypic combinations, ensuring that trait constellations associated with parental success are rarely transmitted intact.257
The result is substantial within‑family variation and differences in cognitive ability, health, personality, and motivation, even among siblings raised in similar environments.298,258
In their article, “Genetic Fortune: Winning or Losing Education, Income and Health,” Kweon and colleagues write: “…each child is the result of a natural experiment that randomly mixes the genetic sequences of her biological parents. Thus with the possible exception of monozygotic twins, all children who share the same biological parents exhibit random genetic differences.”258
Large‑scale genomic studies demonstrate that these differences contribute to intergenerational variation in educational attainment, income, occupational status, and health outcomes.426
At the population level, genetic recombination reinforces a persistent tendency–‘regression to the mean’–limiting the gene-environment continuity of dominant elites across generations. Moreover, while institutions may attempt to reduce these effects, they do not eliminate the underlying genetic reshuffling that continually redistributes traits relevant to social and economic success.
Gene–Environment Mismatch
Social and political institutions are typically designed around relatively stable assumptions (e.g., laws, regulations) regarding the distribution of status, income, wealth and power within a population. However, as a result of genetic recombination, institutional arrangements that successfully allocate resources and status in one generation may become increasingly misaligned with the trait distribution of subsequent generations.
Research on gene–environment interplay demonstrates that the expression and social effects of genetic propensities depend strongly on contextual conditions, including educational systems, labor markets, and technological regimes.427
When environments change rapidly, the correspondence between genetic predispositions and social outcomes shifts accordingly.
Accelerated changes in technology amplify gene-environment mismatches. For example, Researcher and scholar Carlotta Perez explains: when a “new techno-economic paradigm appears” there is an “increasing mismatch between the economy and the social and regulatory systems.”221
Eventually a transition occurs to the new paradigm of inequality.
Perez makes this point: “Gradually as the rich and the successful get richer and more successful, while the poor or weak get poorer and weaker, the legitimacy of the established political regimes comes increasingly under question…”222
Taken together, genetic recombination and environmental change generate a structural tension at the core of social hierarchies. Institutions temporarily stabilize inequality by constraining access to resources and opportunities, while the interplay of genes and environments across a population continuously reintroduces variation.
Rather than viewing social hierarchies as either biologically determined or socially constructed, they can be conceptualized as dynamically unstable gene-environment equilibria periodically sustained through institutional control but persistently challenged by the interaction of genetic variation and environmental transformation.
Periods of apparent stability thus contain the seeds of future disruption, as recombination ensures that each generation inherits not only institutions, but also a redistributed set of traits that those institutions must continually renegotiate.
Jack…Socio-Genetic Stratification
Builder and Destroyer of Worlds
Over the last 5000+ years a ‘jack-in-the-box’ pattern has been ubiquitous in complex, surplus-producing societies–when a social hierarchy and its socioeconomic inequities appear to be firmly in place, it is only a matter of time before it begins to fail with another one rising to take its place–starting the process all over again.425
Both Walter Scheidel and Peter Turchin have documented recurrent historical patterns in which rising inequality contributes to the degradation of social, political, and economic structures over generations, often culminating in severe crises or breakdowns. 425
When a political and economic structure becomes hierarchically rigid and uncompromising—optimized to suit the preferences of a dominant socioeconomic class—the effects of shifting gene-environment alignments across a population can destroy the legitimacy of even long-standing institutions, resulting in social clashes, revolutions and war over resources and power.
This jack-in-the-box pattern of rising and falling hierarchies has consistently siphoned resources and quality life years from lower socioeconomic individuals and groups, fueling the prosperity and longevity of entrenched elites across generations.
Historian Walter Scheidel makes this essential point: “Thousands of years of history boil down to a simple truth: ever since the dawn of civilization, ongoing advances in economic capacity and state building favored growing inequality but did little if anything to bring it under control. Up to and including the Great Compression of 1914 to 1950, we are hard pressed to identify reasonably well attested and nontrivial reductions in material inequality that were not associated, one way or another, with violent shocks.”193
Scheidel continues: “…increases in inequality were driven by the interaction of technological and economic development and state formation…effective leveling required violent shocks that at least temporarily curtailed and reversed the disequalizing consequences of capital investment, commercialization, and the exercise of political, military and ideological power by predatory elites and their associates.”194
While Scheidel’s historical accounts do not drill down into biological explanations of this rise and fall pattern, we argue the pattern nonetheless betrays its gene-environment roots.
While dominant individuals and groups attempt to freeze institutional preferences in both current and future generations, the human genome is an engine of variation. When genomic variation meets environmental variation (e.g., social, political, economic and so on) ‘Jack’ is set in motion.
‘JACK’ represents biological resistance to the prospects of permanent socioeconomic subjugation to the preferences of a few, resulting in a ‘Jack-in-the-Box’ effect where the gene-environment drive to control environments and resources eventually explodes the political and economic structure of state systems that attempt to ‘freeze’ inequality within and across generations.
Jack, Social Hierarchy & System-Justified Harms
Jack describes a socio-genetic pattern of hierarchy and socioeconomic inequality transmitted across generations by the interplay of genes and environments.
A fundamental feature of this socio-genetic pattern is political and economic structures dependent on system-justified harms—harms that function as social and moral goods.415
System-justified harms are exclusionary or coercive acts–punishment, denial, erasure–that are framed as necessary, fair or even virtuous because they preserve the dominant group’s moral order and access to well-being.
System-justified harms suppress and standardize behavior to match the political and economic structure of a social hierarchy, creating descending levels of status, income, wealth and power enforced by what punishment has always been—a harm functioning as a social and moral good.
When a harm functions as a social and moral good, the harm is turned into a morally right, fair, just and fully deserved punishment.
When a harm is used to produce what is considered morally right, fair, just or fully deserved social outcomes, it is prosocial to punish people for their inherited DNA differences.
System-justified harms represent a predatory distortion of prosocial behavior, where acts perceived as ‘good’ conceal the extraction and control of resources aligned with the genetically-shaped social preferences of dominant groups.
System-justified harms are a prosocial instrument of power regulating individual and group conflicts over norms and institutions–primarily the distribution of income, wealth, privileges and power–driven by a competition to create, modify and control environments that align with genetically-influenced social preferences, the result of an interplay between genes and environments across a population.415
While prosocial behavior is often defined as behavior beneficial to others, the degree to which a behavior is prosocial is shaped by the match (alignment) between a person’s genetically-influenced preferences and rules, laws and policies (norms and institutions) in the social environment.177,409
In a social hierarchy, norms and institutions and the system-justified harms that enforce them are a fundamental means of social control.
System-justified harms make laws, rules, constitutions and religious beliefs superior to any harms they may cause.
System-justified harms magnify the prosocial legitimacy of in-group norms and institutions and the fairness of out-group hostility, making them a low cost means to turn coercion and social dominance into prosocial goods.
When a political or socioeconomic harm can produce outcomes deemed morally right, fair, just and fully deserved, the harm can disappear into the political and socioeconomic fabric of the hierarchy, transforming the harm into a social and moral good.
By turning harms into social and moral goods the moral problem of a predator justifying ‘self is good’ when it harms other to satisfy a need or desire is resolved.
In a social hierarchy, system-justified harms turn coercion, intimidation, oppression, tyranny, torture, incarceration, execution, deprivation, war, hierarchy and inequality into morally right, fair and prosocial forces for the common good.
By giving harms moral standing as something good, equality exclusions (EQEXs) can invade every aspect of social and economic life, remaining invisible behind their prosocial shield, disappearing into the systematic structure of a country’s norms and institutions.
Once there, no moral thought or constraint concerning the least advantaged justifies social change because their inequality is their burden in life and therefore fully deserved.
In this sense, one can look upon the sociopolitical and military conflicts of past centuries as prosocial wars between well-organized state systems over competing system-justified harms with the result brutal incarceration, torture, gulags, ghettos and their ubiquitous graveyards justified as beneficial (prosocial) to the common good.
These system-justified harms are the means by which individuals and groups best at manipulating fairness norms to their advantage can guard and preserve system-justified social hierarchy from one generation to the next.
For example, individuals and groups on top of a social hierarchy in terms of income and wealth have a large population to exploit by shaping and controlling distribution structures. As Nobel Laureate Angus Deaton writes: “… squeezing even small amounts out of each of a large number of working people can provide enormous fortunes for the rich who are doing the squeezing.”16
The power to shape norms, institutions and punishment (system-justified harms) is the power to dominate resources and distribution. System-justified harms are a low cost means of modifying and creating norms and institutions that reinforce social hierarchy and its socioeconomic inequalities.
In this regard it is important to remember, as biologist Peter Richerson et al. reminds us: “If punishing is sufficiently cheap for punishers and sufficiently costly to the punished, punishment can stabilize any behavior.”158
Equality Exclusions (EQEXs)
When social systems reward certain heritable traits and suppress others, they don’t just shape opportunity, they shape moral perception. What begins as a biological difference becomes a moral distinction, legitimized through laws, ideology and institutional design.
Equality Exclusions (EQEXs) are the practical application of system-justified harms to the rules, laws and policies that make up the political and economic infrastructure, the norms and institutions, of a social hierarchy.
The term Equality Exclusions (EQEXs) describes how system-justified harms become embedded in the rules, laws, and policies that structure social hierarchies, effectively legitimizing inequality through institutional design.
They are social and moral justifications of inequality when a person’s inherited DNA differences (genetic propensities) do not align with system-justified norms and institutions.
Individuals and groups in the upper socioeconomic structure of a hierarchy protect their socio-genetic dominance with equality exclusions (EQEXs).
The political and economic structures of social hierarchies are embedded with EQEXs that steal quality life years from people whose inherited DNA differences are poorly matched and aligned with their social environments.
EQEXs are embedded in the norms, institutions and prosocial structure of every social hierarchy in the world.
EQEXs justify resource distributions that create disadvantages for individuals and groups whose genetic and social characteristics are regarded as inferior or a threat due to differences in race, ethnicity, culture, religious beliefs, education, occupation, income, wealth and social status.
EQEXs make it fair, just and prosocial for individuals and groups in the upper levels of the social hierarchy to extract resources and quality life years from descending levels of the hierarchy.
EQEXs motivate people to perform prosocial (altruistic) acts beneficial to the hierarchy even when these altruistic actions make them worse off.
In their article “From System Justification to Social Condemnation,” Martorana, Galinksky and Rao discuss ‘system justification theory’: “System justification theory holds that elites are producers of hierarchy legitimizing myths, and that low-power individuals are consumers of these myths, while elites and low-power individuals together complicitly maintain the hierarchy.”21,337
Psychologist William Von Hippel and evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers explain: “…system-justification theory as elaborated by Jost and colleagues argues that there are a variety of motivational reasons why people support the status quo, even when they are clear losers in the current system with very little likelihood of improving their situation. Such system-justifying beliefs among those at the bottom of the social ladder serve the purposes of those at the top of the ladder, in part by preventing agitation for social change. This argument suggests that system justification might be considered a variety of self-deception imposed onto low-status individuals by high status people who benefit when those beneath them accept their low status as legitimate and do not struggle against it. This argument also suggests that the consequences of self-deception might be wide ranging, as a process that evolved to facilitate the deception of others appears to have effects that manifest themselves from an intrapersonal all the way to a societal level.”22
For individuals whose inherited DNA differences (genetic propensities) are a poor socioeconomic match to a society’s norms and institutions, it becomes practical to ‘know your place’ even when doing so makes one worse off.
How much of your quality life supply chain reinforces social hierarchy inequalities?
EQEXs create ‘quality life gradients.’
A ‘quality life gradient’ appears when individuals with higher incomes, wealth and status add quality life years to their lifespan while those further down the gradient see little if any change.
What sort of life is it for people in the lower socioeconomic levels of a hierarchy who spend their lives in social environments that prioritize the quality life years of hierarchy elites?
System-Justified SES Inequality in the United States
Socioeconomic status (SES) is fundamental to social stratification, predicting life course outcomes and well-being based on a range of factors that include educational attainment, income level, occupational status and wealth.383 Moreover, it is important to understand that SES inequalities are not restricted to those with lower incomes, they also invade the middle class.342
Psychologist Alexander Browman et al. write: “Compared to their higher-socioeconomic status (SES) peers, youth from low-SES backgrounds face daunting systemic barriers to educational attainment in the United States.”31
According to economist Anne Case and Nobel Laureate Angus Deaton: “Without a 4-yr college diploma, it is increasingly difficult to build a meaningful and successful life in the United States.”97
They explain the BA divide has created the following inglorious social effect: “In the richest large country in the world, with frontier medical technology, expected years lived between 25 and 75 declined for most of a decade for men and women without a 4-yr degree.”98
Researchers Daniel Oesch and Nathalie Vigna make the following point about the decline in quality-of-life years for the working class in the United States: “Objective indicators show that over the last few decades the working class has been left behind in many respects in the Western world. Notably, their real incomes have stagnated. The most tangible sign that the quality of life of the working class has declined comes from mortality rates in the United States, showing that the life expectancy of lowly educated middle-aged whites has been falling since 1999.”96,428
Research by economists Raj Chetty and David Cutler et al. found “In the United States between 2001 and 2014, higher income was associated with greater longevity, and differences in life expectancy across income groups increased.”99
Nobel laureate Angus Deaton explains the health and mortality gap created by income distribution: “Not only does the top 1% of the income distribution live longer than everyone else, but the gap in life expectancy at 40 years of age is widening, and there has been little gain in life expectancy among the lowest income individuals living in the United States. The infamous 1% is not only richer, but much healthier. Conditional on reaching 40 years of age, individuals in the top 1% of income have 10 to 15 more years to enjoy their richly funded lives and to spend time with their children and grandchildren, and they are pulling away from everyone else. Inequality in health reinforces inequality in income, and perhaps even a longer life is for sale.”100
According to the APA Task Force on Socioeconomic Status: “Inequities in health distribution, resource distribution, and quality of life are increasing in the United States and globally.”274
Furthermore, in February of 2022, the APA passed a resolution concerning poverty and socioeconomic status (SES)…They describe the plight of low-SES children in America: “…the impact of poverty on young children is significant and long lasting, thus limiting opportunities to achieve improved SES, where poverty is associated with substandard housing, hunger, homelessness, inadequate childcare, unsafe neighborhoods, and under-resourced schools; and low-income children are at greater risk than higher-income children for a range of cognitive, emotional, and health-related problems, including detrimental effects on executive functioning, below average academic achievement, poor social emotional functioning, developmental delays, behavioral problems, asthma, inadequate nutrition, low birth weight, and higher rates of pneumonia.”274
The resolution continues: “…living in poverty is associated with differences in structural and functional brain development in children, adolescents, and adults in areas related to cognitive processes that are critical for learning, communication, and academic achievement, including social emotional processing, memory, language, and executive functioning…”274
In addition, the APA Task Force also found: “The rates of poverty for children in the United States are among the highest in the industrialized world. For instance, 22.4% of U.S. children live in poverty, compared with 2% in Sweden, 7.9% in France, l3.3% in Spain, and l8.8% in the United Kingdom.”275
Climate Change: A System-Justified Harm
While the possibilities of a nuclear holocaust have been with us for more than 70 years, another threat to the planet driven by conflicts over socioeconomic dominance and power has also emerged.
Over the last 5000+ years, approximately .00011% of the planet’s 4.5 billion year existence, the accumulating resource extractions of social hierarchy, its system-justified harms and EQEXs have fed the status consumption appetites of hierarchy elites in the Anthropocene resulting in climate change and a threat to the biosphere.
In Nature Energy, social and environmental scholar Paul C. Stern and colleagues make the point about climate change and socioeconomic status: “People with high socioeconomic status disproportionally affect energy-driven greenhouse gas emissions directly through their consumption and indirectly through their financial and social resources.”286
In Nature Communications, Thomas Widemann et al. write: “…the world’s top 10% of income earners are responsible for between 25 and 43% of environmental impact. In contrast, the world’s bottom 10% income earners exert only around 3–5% of environmental impact.”287
They continue: “Remarkably, consumption (and to a lesser extent population) growth have mostly outrun any beneficial effects of changes in technology over the past few decades. These results hold for the entire world as well as for numerous individual countries.”287
In Nature Energy, Nielsen et al. explain: “By virtue of occupational status, high-SES people disproportionally influence organizations’ GHG emissions directly through occupying positions such as owner, manager, board member, employee and consultant, and indirectly influence the emissions of their suppliers, customers and competitors. On average, those who achieve leadership in private organizations begin with an SES advantage.”286
“For example, top-level officials in Fortune 500 companies disproportionally come from elite colleges and universities, have attended high-prestige private secondary schools and still, despite diversity efforts, are predominantly male and white.”286
Writing in BioScience, ecologist William J. Ripple et al. make the following important points about climate change and inequality: “The impacts of climate change are already catastrophic for many. However, these impacts are not unfolding uniformly across the entire globe. Instead, they disproportionately affect the world’s most impoverished individuals, who, ironically, have had the least role in causing this issue.”288
“We warn of potential collapse of natural and socioeconomic systems…where we will face unbearable heat, frequent extreme weather events, food and fresh water shortages, rising seas, more emerging diseases, and increased social unrest and geopolitical conflict.”288
Writing in Nature Sustainability, Savelli et al. add this important point about water: “Our results show that urban water crises can be triggered by the unsustainable consumption patterns of privileged social groups. Critical social sciences explain that these patterns are generated by distinctive political–economic systems that seek capital accumulation and perpetual growth to the exclusive benefit of a privileged minority. In other words, there is nothing natural about urban elites overconsuming and overexploiting water resources and the water marginalization of other social groups. Instead, water inequalities and their unsustainable consequences are products of history, politics and power.”291
The Industrial Age, driven by coal-powered machines, steam engines, and later oil and electricity, unleashed powerful technological systems that have dramatically increased greenhouse gas emissions.347
Since 1850, fossil-fuel-based industrialization has driven not only climatic destabilization but also the growing concentration of wealth.394,350
Even more recently, warming has accelerated substantially since the end of World War II, with temperatures rising at approximately 0.18°C per decade since the 1970’s.347
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change affirms that nearly all net global warming since the mid-19th century is attributable to human activities, primarily fossil fuel combustion.347 Moreover, a growing body of research has linked climate change to worsening economic inequality. Economist Lucas Chancel shows that the wealthiest 10% of the global population now account for nearly half of all emissions, reflecting long-term structural imbalances rooted in the fossil-fuel economy.392 An article by sociologists Brett Clark and Richard York offers a theoretical explanation, arguing that capitalism’s systemic drive for expansion inherently relies on fossil energy, generating both environmental degradation and economic stratification.398 Extending this, Dario Kenner in his book Carbon inequality: The role of the riches in climate change demonstrates how the wealthiest individuals not only emit more carbon but also exert disproportionate political influence to preserve their fossil-fuel-based wealth, blocking climate action and reinforcing the very system driving ecological breakdown.394
Moreover, a broad spectrum of global conflicts ranging from the World Wars to regional revolutions have occurred alongside the upheavals of industrial capitalism, imperial rivalries and the tensions of postcolonial transitions.349
Who are we…and what have we done?
Across the world, billions of people today–and countless future generations–face the relentless inheritance of socioeconomic predation embedded in the structures of hierarchy and its inequalities.
The result is and will continue to be Orwellian barnyards where people in the lower levels of a hierarchy spend their lives servicing the well-being of their socioeconomic masters.
However, there is one practical pathway to escape the global problem of predatory well-being. It will require a new vision of the Internet, AI technologies and democracy and it begins with a global vision of a very different future world: Well-Being Across Our Individual & Cultural Differences.
…by WGW
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