The Jungle of Human
Individual Differences
Much of human psychology and social conflict is about the strivings and difficulties people face in their endeavors to have a healthy, happy, long and purposeful life in the DNA jungle of human individual differences.
The long shadow of hierarchy and inequality has revealed its biological origins, opening a new frontier for egalitarians and a different way of looking at the politics and economics of inequality, fairness and life course well-being.
We See Each Other...And the World...Through the Biological Lens of Our Individual Differences
Every art, science, innovation and technology aimed at satisfying a preference or need, or producing something good is linked to an interplay between genes and environments moving in synchronicity.
Like fingers across a piano’s keyboard, genes and environments produce life course trajectories with many variations and outcomes.
A substantial body of recent research in behavioral genetics and related disciplines has created a general consensus that individual 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
Genomic research is at the forefront of a great social transformation, a DNA revolution, a Quality Life (R)evolution…
Understanding how environmental conditions effect gene expression and behavior is the key to unraveling the political and socioeconomic complexities of hierarchy, economic inequality and inequities in health, happiness and longevity.
For example, according to psychologist Robert Plomin there can be “hundreds of thousands of SNPs associated with complex physical, physiological and psychological traits…accounting for just .0002 of the variance.”2
However, it is essential to not lose sight of the fact these SNPs (DNA variants) do not operate independent of environmental conditions because “genetic and environmental effects are intertwined.”3
Biologist R. Haven Wiley writes: “Across the entire spectrum from predominant influences of the environment to predominant influences of the genome, the development of an organism is always an interaction of its particular genome and its particular environment.”4
The Dynamic Complexity of Environments
A key factor in these gene-environment alignments is the complex and unsystematic nature of environments. A person’s genetic propensities do not change while environmental conditions are never exactly the same from one moment to the next.5
Psychologist Sophie von Stumm and Katrina d’Apice explain the environmental aspects of the gene-environment interplay:
“Just like SNPs are spread across the entire genome, these environmental factors occur across all times, locations, and types of experiences, including—but not limited to—natural, biophysical, social, cultural and economic environments—that is, the environome. And just like a single SNP, a single environmental factor is unlikely to independently account for much variance in psychological differences.”116
“In contrast to the genome, the environome is pure change: No moment in people’s lives is like any other before or in the future. Notwithstanding some environmental factors exert relatively stable influences over time, such as the characteristics of the family home that children are raised in.”117
Psychologist Robert Plomin et al write: “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
We are not passive participants in our social environments…
We evoke, select into, create and modify environments that correlate with our inherited DNA differences (genetic propensities), forming groups and coalitions that align with our genetically-shaped social preferences in a competition to influence and control how norms and institutions regulate the distribution of income, wealth, privileges and power.6,7,13,14,43,234
The alignment or misalignment of a person’s genetic propensities with norms and institutions (e.g., laws, regulations and policies) in the social environment is a determinant of socioeconomic status, life course well-being and quality life years lost or gained.6,7,13,14,125,43,234
At the core of human civilization, every belief or desire aimed at producing something good is influenced and in an ultimate sense bounded by the conditions and limitations of how genes and environments affect behavior and life course outcomes.
Written by WGW
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