Predatory Well-Being

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 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.

Natural selection is not about well-being.^{174,63,257,299}

Natural selection, in favoring heritable variation in human traits, created a paradox of the right and the good (what is right or good varies across individual DNA differences) resulting in social hierarchy and conflicts over income, wealth, privileges and power 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).³²⁵

Due to the interplay, people actively evoke, create, modify and select into environments that align with their genetic propensities, forming groups, coalitions and social hierarchies in a competition to influence and control how norms and institutions regulate the distribution of resources and power.³²⁵

DNA Outsiders

Social Eugenics

The socio-genetic effects of the interplay create the paradox and the eugenic framework of social hierarchy—political and socioeconomic structures thick with eugenic features and inequalities enforced by harms that function as social and moral goods (justified harms).

As a result, conflicts over socioeconomic status (SES) and the distribution of income, wealth, privileges and power create a jack-in-the-box 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 eventually falls, and when it does, another one jumps up like a jack-in-the-box to start the process all over again.^38,39,160

From institutionalized coercion and economic disparities that favor a few to inequities in health, happiness and longevity, social hierarchies and their 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.

The intergenerational transmission of social hierarchy and socioeconomic inequality, its robust persistence across generations and populations, is driven by the interplay of genes and environments and their heritable effects.^312,313

Psychologist K. Paige Harden and associates reinforce the importance of this point “…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

Psychologist Robert Plomin and associates make the following point: “…quantitative genetics findings indicate that measures of the environment are themselves heritable.”⁹⁰They 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

An article published by Nature in the journal “Molecular Psychiatry” makes the 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.”^313,13

Genoeconomist C.A. Rietveld writes: “A steadily increasing number of studies shows that economic preferences and socio-economic status indicators are also partly heritable.”^324,13

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

The greater the heritable effects of low socioeconomic status (SES) across a population, the greater the opportunities for high-SES individuals and groups (hierarchy elites) to control distributions of income, wealth, privileges and power that assure their SES dominance now and in the future.

Although social hierarchies and their SES structures may vary across countries, they nonetheless depend on the socio-genetic effects of justified harms and their equality exclusions (EQEXs) to enforce their prosocial legitimacy and stability.

Beginning with childhood and throughout life’s course, the interplay between one’s inherited DNA and norms and institutions, particularly the effects of justified harms and EQEXs on resource distribution and social support, is a key determinant of life course outcomes and well-being.

When low-SES children become low-SES adults that have children, norms and institutions that reinforce this SES pattern assure ongoing inequality across future generations.

Nonetheless, while differences between individuals in their inherited DNA (genetic propensities) may predict differences in socioeconomic status and well-being, the genetic contribution to these gene-environment outcomes are not impermeable, they can be mediated for better or worse by environmental influences such as rules, laws, regulations and policies.

For example, psychologist Jay Belsky writes: “Perhaps the best evidence that genetic penetrance is not fixed in stone just because someone inherits the relevant DNA for a particular phenotype can be found in GXE <Gene-X-Environment interaction> research documenting the role of the environment in influencing or moderating the strength of genetic effects.”³¹⁴

Two Examples of The Socioeconomic Effects of Justified Harms: America and Great Britain

According to a Task Force by the American Psychological Association (APA) on Socioeconomic Status: “Socioeconomic factors and social class are fundamental determinants of human functioning across the lifespan, including development, well-being, and physical and mental health.” ²⁷⁴

Generations of childhood socioeconomic inequality in America has created long lasting inequities:

The APA found: “Inequities in health distribution, resource distribution, and quality of life are increasing in the United States and globally.”²⁷⁴

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

Generations of childhood socioeconomic hierarchy in Great Britain has resulted in the following:

Psychologist Sophie Von Stumm summarizes research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies on childhood inequality in Great Britain:

“Focusing on children’s ages of 3 and 5 years, the authors show that differences in cognitive and socio-emotional development are evident already in early life, and that they are systematically associated with children’s early life environments and their genetic propensities.”

The research shows: “…these differences have long-lasting influence on later life outcomes, such as educational attainment, mental health, and income in mid-life, and that the degree of these differences has remained stable across recent generations.”³¹⁵

She makes the following key point about the research: “The analyses…demonstrate that children’s own merit is systematically associated with their family background, including the home environment that they are raised in and the genetic propensities that they inherited from their parents. These findings echo other research that demonstrated the pervasive long-term influence of family background on children’s educational trajectories, and that this influence has remained stable in the UK over the past century. By the virtue of their family background, some children will be blessed with more and some with less merit in the birth lottery; therefore, they will gain more or less profit and power over the life course. For as long as we hold on to the belief that the ones with more merit are more deserving in society than those without, and that the distribution of resources should adhere to reward claims rather than to support needs, early life childhood inequality will prevail, together with its long-term consequences.”³¹⁵

Over the course of hundreds of millions of years of natural selection, a predator organism capable of destroying the planet appeared…

Our Evolutionary Past

According to Science Daily, recent research published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology found the following: “Contrary to the widespread hypothesis that humans owe their evolution and survival to their dietary flexibility…the picture emerging here is of humans evolving mostly as predators of large animals.”²⁴⁴

One of the researchers, Dr. Miki Ben-Dor makes the following point about the importance of the research: “Our study is both multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary. We propose a picture that is unprecedented in its inclusiveness and breadth, which clearly shows that humans were initially apex predators, who specialized in hunting large animals.”²⁴⁴

He further explains that “…humans were an apex predator for about two million years. Only the extinction of larger animals (megafauna) in various parts of the world, and the decline of animal food sources toward the end of the stone age, led humans to gradually increase the vegetable element in their nutrition…”²⁴⁴

Paleoanthropologist Henry Bunn and Alia Gurtov describe the predatory strategy: “Early Pleistocene Homo was a successful ambush hunter, possibly using wooden spears.”³²⁶

In an article for Science entitled The Unique Ecology of Human Predators, conservation scientist C.T. Darimont and associates bring us up to date by making the following stark and sobering point about human predation in the 21^st 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

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,⁷⁸the 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

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

The following from Wikipedia makes this point about the environmental effects of human predation:

“Humans have had a dramatic effect on the environment. They are apex predators being rarely preyed upon by other species.” “Human population growth, industrialization, land development, overconsumption and combustion of fossil fuels have led to environmental destruction and pollution that significantly contributes to the ongoing mass extinction of other forms of life.”²⁴⁵

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 Norms & Behavior

In an article entitled “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

Prosocial behavior has many deceptive faces.

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 entitled “Extortion—A voracious prosocial strategy” writes: “The long-standing belief that evolved social strategies can be only nice and cooperative has been challenged.”²⁴⁷

“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.”²⁴⁷

Empathy is another characteristic of prosocial behavior.²⁹⁷

An article entitled “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

“Not all outgroups are equivalent, however. Depending on the target, people may feel not only less empathy but also pleasure (Schadenfreude) in response to outgroup members’ misfortunes.”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

Genes & 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 associates 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 goes on to summarize 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.”²⁵⁰

For example, Bartels writes: “Some people are born with a set of genetic variants that makes it easier to feel happy, while others are less fortunate.”²⁵⁰

She 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 associates 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

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

Genes and Political Attitudes That Shape Well-Being

Research by Psychologist Christian Kandler et al. found a genetic link between individuals involving their political attitudes: “People choose different political positions at least partly on the basis of their genetic makeup.”²⁵³

Political attitudes are shaped by heritable influences. For example: “…sociopolitical conservatism is extraordinarily heritable (74%) for the most informed fifth of the public—much more so than population-level results (57%)—but with much lower heritability (29%) for the public’s bottom half.”²⁵⁴

Other research exploring the relationship between genes and political attitudes in Behavior Genetics and another in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B found, respectively, that political attitudes are shaped, on average, by environmental factors 60% of the time and genetic factors 40% and that genes involved in the encoding of certain receptors in the brain for dopamine are associated with differences in political attitudes.²⁵⁵

Social Hierarchy is Social Eugenics (DNA Outsiders)

The eugenic framework of social hierarchy is rooted in the following:

There is a substantial body of research in behavioral genetics and related disciplines 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.³²⁵

One very basic example of how genes shape environments is explained in a meta-analysis on ‘genetic nurture’ showing how the genotypes of parents shape environments that influence the educational outcomes of their children.²⁹⁹

Neurobiologist Michael Meaney rounds out this point: “… 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

Psychologist D. A. Briley et al. in “Behavior Genetic Frameworks of Causal Reasoning for Personality Psychology” reinforce this point: “…individuals actively create or select environmental experiences aligned with their genetically influenced preferences and desires.”¹⁷⁷

According to psychologist Robert Plomin: “The essence of active GE <gene-environment> correlation is choice: Individuals select, modify and create experiences that are correlated with their genetic propensities.”³⁰⁰

Furthermore, the active engagement of environments is not randomly pursued.

Psychologists Frank Mann, Colin DeYoung and associates explain: “…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 and genetic researcher Sophie von Stumm et al. explain that people “are systematically assorted to environments rather than randomly distributed across them”¹ and that “children are assorted to environments in line with their genetic propensities.”¹⁰

For example, “Children’s differences in early life cognitive development are driven by the interplay of genetic and environmental factors.”¹⁰

Psychologist Sophie von Stumm et al. make this key point, “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

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.

Genetic Recombination and the Jack-In-The-Box Pattern of Social Hierarchy

Political and economic structures favorable to the genetic interests of hierarchy elites today begin to fade across generational time due to genetic shuffling and changing environmental conditions (e.g., learning, technological innovation, demographic influences, social conflicts and war).

Through genetic recombination, new DNA sequences enter a population, changing gene-environment alignments, life course goals and outcomes.

Evolutionary biologist T. Ryan Gregory writes: “…inheritance operates through the replication of DNA sequences…errors in this process (mutations) and the reshuffling of existing variants (recombination) represent the sources of new variation.”²⁵⁷

Research by psychologist K. Paige Harden and associates explains: “…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

Due to the generational effects of genetic recombination and its impact on gene-environment alignments, the legitimacy and stability of norms and institutions is under constant socio-genetic pressure.

Inevitably, new prosocial dilemmas and conflicts arise threatening the stability of existing social hierarchies.

Each new generation, due to genetic recombination and changing environmental conditions (such as technological innovation) tries to establish its gene-environment alignments through the internalization of existing norms and institutions.

Researcher and scholar Carlotta Perez writes: 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

As a result, due to increasingly complex gene-environment effects brought about by population growth and stratification, technological change, economic shocks, disease, climate change and war, the prosocial glue (e.g., ingroup altruism and outgroup hostility) that keeps sociopolitical and economic structures temporarily stable eventually weakens causing these structures to wither, decay and eventually collapse.

Over the last 5000+ years this pattern has been ubiquitous in surplus-producing societies, where repeating cycles of social upheaval and violence have been integral to change–when a social hierarchy collapses another one jumps up like a jack-in-the-box to start the process all over again.^38,39,160

One only needs to go to Wikipedia (The Politics Portal: Topics & Categories) to see the range of political regimes that have come and gone (and then come again).

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

The contribution of the jack-in-the-box pattern to the future of the human genome has been resources and quality life years stolen from lower socioeconomic levels of our social hierarchies to benefit the life course happiness of hierarchy elites.

The DNA Barnyards of Social Hierarchy

5000+ years ago when the first cities and states began to appear ^189,203 pyramid-shaped (top-down) social hierarchies came too.

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 15^th century, five hundred at the time of the Thirty Years’ War in the early 17^th, two hundred at the time of Napoleon in the early 19^th, and fewer than thirty in 1953.”¹⁹²

These state conflicts, spurred by political and military threats driven by the paradox, contribute to a predatory pattern.

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

Aristotle had a Eugenic Vision of Community

Aristotle described the perfect political ‘regime’ as one where “People have equal rights only if they are equal according to nature.”²⁵⁹

Christopher C.W. Taylor, a world-renowned authority and scholar on this subject describes Aristotle’s political regime as “…an exploiting elite, a community of free-riders whose ability to pursue the good life is made possible by the willingness of others to forego that pursuit. Even leaving aside the question of slavery, the ‘ideal’ polis is thus characterized as systematic injustice.”²⁶⁰

Sociologist Veronique Mottier in the “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

The Eugenic Structure of Social Hierarchy

Social Eugenics: The ability to modify, own and control environments (natural, political, economic and social) is the power to own human genomes, to control people’s life course trajectories and health, happiness and longevity outcomes, and ultimately how evolutionary fitness affects well-being.

Social Eugenics is where norms and institutions arrange resource distribution (e.g. income, wealth) to favor the health, happiness, educational goals and longevity of individuals with preferred genetic characteristics and propensities.

Social Eugenics is where individuals with disfavored genetic characteristics and propensities suffer constraints on their health, happiness, educational attainment goals and longevity that benefit individuals whose genetic characteristics and propensities are preferred.

Social Eugenics is where norms and institutions are embedded with equality exclusions (EQEXs) favorable to the well-being of individuals with preferred genetic characteristics and propensities.

Social Eugenics—people deserve only what they can pay for independent of help or support from others and what they can pay for is determined largely by their genetic characteristics, talent, place of birth, family pedigree and educational attainment.

Social Eugenics is the ownership and control of natural and social environments to the benefit of a few.

Social Eugenics is the manipulation of heritability to suit the social preferences of a few.

Natural Selection & Well-Being

Biologist R. Haven Wiley provides this explanation of how natural selection works: “Natural selection, along with mutation, migration, and drift (randomness), produces evolution. Evolution is a change in the genetic structure of a population of organisms. In the simplest case, it is a change in the frequencies of alleles in the population.”²⁶⁵

“Natural selection then occurs when individuals differ in their survival or reproduction in ways associated with differences in their alleles. It is important to point out that natural selection does not result merely from differences in survival or reproduction of individuals. It also requires heritability of those differences.”²⁶⁵

“Natural selection is thus a change in the frequencies of alleles in a population as a result of differences in the survival and reproduction of individuals that carry those alleles. It is a matter of arithmetic: in any population, genetic variants spread when they leave more copies in successive generations.”²⁶⁵

Over the course of human evolution natural selection favored the cognitive ability to exploit “cause-and-effect reasoning and cooperative action”¹²⁷(prosocial behavior), allowing our genome to dominate and extract resources from practically every living thing on the planet—including each other.¹²⁸

However, natural selection is not about well-being.

Evolutionary psychologist Max Krasnow puts it this way: “The currency of natural selection is reproductive fitness. Selection does not operate on quality of life. Selection can shape motivational mechanisms in the service of reproductive fitness over ancestral environments that may attend to facets of quality of life, but only to the extent that those facets reliably predicted reproductive fitness over ancestral environments.”¹⁷⁴

Physician and evolutionary biologist Randolph Nesse offers this perspective: “We were not designed for happiness. Neither were we designed for unhappiness. Happiness is not a goal left unaccomplished by some bungling designer, it is an aspect of behavioural regulation mechanisms shaped by natural selection.”⁶²

According to Nesse: “Natural selection gradually sifts variations in DNA sequences. Sequences that create phenotypes with a less-than-average reproductive success are displaced in the gene pool by those that give increased success.”⁶²

Nesse continues: “Happiness and unhappiness are not ends, they are means…They are aspects of mechanisms that influence us to act in the interests of our genes.”⁶²

While natural selection favors the survival and reproduction of genes and traits that are advantageous in certain environments, it has no goal or purpose. Natural selection is a blind and unconscious evolutionary process.²⁵⁷

In this regard, Robert N. Brandon, Emeritus professor of philosophy and biology at Duke University has characterized natural selection as “…differential reproduction that is due to differential adaptedness (or fitness) to a common selective environment.”²⁶⁶

Justified Harms

Driven by the interplay of their inherited DNA differences and environmental conditions (e.g., social, political, economic, technological, natural and biophysical), people actively shape their social environments, pursuing goals and desires that align with their genetic propensities in a competition, largely group-based, to acquire resources and support beneficial to their social preferences.³²⁵

This is the gene-environment framework of social eugenics.

Norms and institutions are environments shaped by genetic influences. These rules, laws, regulations and policies regulate social behavior and the distribution of resources, making them determinants of this competition and its outcomes.

Turning harms into social and moral goods (justified harms) is a low cost means of modifying and creating norms and institutions favorable to these genetic influences.

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.

Is there anything more dangerous to the future of the planet than a super-predator with cognitive abilities capable of turning harms into social and moral goods?

Justified harms—harms turned into social and moral goods–are a predatorial form of prosocial behavior and altruism–the self-deception²² ‘self is good’ when it harms others to control resources and environments beneficial to its genetic interests and social preferences.

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.³²⁵

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

In a social hierarchy, norms and institutions and the justified harms that enforce them are a fundamental means of social control.

Justified harms make laws, rules, constitutions and religious beliefs superior to any harms they may cause.

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, allowing it to invade every aspect of a Quality Life.

By turning harms into social and moral goods the moral problem of a predator justifying ‘self is good’ when it harms others to satisfy a need or desire is resolved.

In a social hierarchy, 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 justified harms with the result brutal incarceration, torture, gulags, ghettos and their ubiquitous graveyards justified as beneficial (prosocial) to the common good.

These 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 (justified harms) is the power to dominate resources and distribution.

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.”^158,267

Equality Exclusions (EQEXs)

Equality Exclusions (EQEXs) are the practical application of justified harms to the rules, laws and policies that make up the political and economic infrastructure, the norms and institutions, of a social hierarchy. They establish the prosocial framework of hierarchy and its social eugenic structures.

For example, 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 race, ethnicity, culture, religion, 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.

One way this socio-genetic selection process occurs is through system justification. For example, in their article “From System Justification to Social Condemnation,” Martorana, Galinksky and Rao explain: “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

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 those on top?

The Problem of What is Right and Good

Differences between individuals in their inherited DNA and the interplay of these differences with environmental conditions (e.g., social, political, economic, technological, natural and biophysical) is a determinant of differences in life course outcomes and well-being.³²⁵

As a result, the interplay creates a competition between individuals and groups to create, modify and control environments advantageous to their DNA differences, creating a paradox of the right and the good where the distribution of income, wealth, privileges and power is determined by harms that function as social and moral goods (justified harms).

In a social hierarchy, rules regulating behavior and resource distribution may be deemed right while the socioeconomic environment created by these rules is far from good for every person in the hierarchy.

When justified harms determine what is right and good across individual DNA differences, the result is social hierarchy and socioeconomic inequality.

For example, justified harms and their equality exclusions (EQEXs) are a low cost means for hierarchy elites to reinforce altruistic loyalties to the eugenic structure of a social hierarchy. The lower cost of maintaining the legitimacy and stability of socioeconomic inequality allows hierarchy elites to extract resources from descending levels of the hierarchy with minimal cost and resistance.

When high socioeconomic status (SES) individuals and groups use justified harms to create and sustain their genetically-influenced SES advantages, this is social eugenics.

An important step in penetrating these eugenic structures is to remove the moral illusion self-is-good when self physically or mentally harms other to satisfy a need or desire.

When preventing harm depends on the threat or infliction of a harm (punishment), the harm may be right in the sense it is preventing another harm. However, this does not mean harming people to prevent a harm is a social and moral good. When harms can function as social and moral goods, harms become an instrument of power necessary to uphold and sustain what is considered good.

In the “Principles of Biomedical Ethics” the problem of harmful actions is described as follows: “Harmful actions that involve justifiable setbacks to another’s interests are, of course, not wrong. They include cases of justified criminal punishment, justified demotion of an employee for poor performance in a job, and discipline in schools.”³¹¹

While the examples cited are important social issues that require solutions, if justified harms are the solution to these and other problems involving socioeconomic fairness, justice and well-being, we will never free ourselves from the moral consequences of quality life outsiders—people being punished for their DNA differences—social eugenics.

The resolution of these ‘eugenic-driven’ prosocial conflicts over resource distribution & well-being will be a key determinant of the future of humankind and the planet

Genes & Inequality

In an article published by “Science Advances,” social science geneticist Phillip Koellinger and associates write: “Socioeconomic status (SES), typically measured by income, education, occupation, and neighborhood quality, is a powerful predictor of important life outcomes including physical and mental health, academic achievement, and cognitive abilities.”²⁷⁶

In “Genetic Fortune: Winning or losing education, income, and health,” Koellinger along with psychologist Kathryn Harden et al. write: “It is well-known that people with high SES also tend to live longer and healthier lives than those with lower SES.”¹⁸

They explain the difference between high SES and lower SES: “Our findings illustrate that inequalities in education, income, and health are partly due to the outcomes of a genetic lottery.”¹⁸ However, they also found that advantages created by the genetic lottery for higher socioeconomic status and health can be offset through “environmental pathways such as education.”¹⁸

They continue: “Conceptually, genetic endowments are a form of luck — they are one-time, irreversible, exogenously given, individual-specific endowments that result from the natural experiment of meiosis that randomly mixes the genotypes of one’s biological parents.”¹⁸

“We have shown here that genetic fortune for high income, in the form of random genetic differences between siblings, contributes to inequalities throughout the life course, influencing the education people attain, which occupations they pursue, how much they earn, the quality of the neighborhoods they live in, and the type of health outcomes they will tend to experience in late adulthood.”¹⁸

“Our results illustrate how tightly health, skills, work, achievements, and genetic luck are coupled: the idea that human agency in the form of choices and effort could be neatly separated from luck is unsubstantiated in light of the life-long consequences of the genetic lottery that influence behavior and achievements.”¹⁸

Psychologist Kathryn Harden, in her book, “The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA matters for social equality” makes this important point about genes and social environments:

“At every level of the social ladder, children who have a certain constellation of genetic markers are more likely to be upwardly socially mobile than other children who did not inherit those markers. But if they were born into poverty, even the most genetically advantaged children will still have a lower socioeconomic status in adulthood than children who have no genetic advantages but were born to wealth.”²⁹⁸

A substantial body of research in behavioral genetics and related disciplines has demonstrated differences between individuals in their inherited DNA (genetic propensities) align with differences in their educational attainment (EA), socioeconomic status (SES) and healthy life longevity.^{120,121,17,26,215}

In a social hierarchy, high EA’s create and reinforce political and economic structures that favor their genetically-influenced social preferences and advantages, extracting economic value from lower SES individuals and groups.

Polygenic Scores, Educational Attainment & Inequality

Research by psychologist Chandra A. Reynolds and associates found “…a strong association between educational attainment and all late-life health outcomes.”²⁷⁰

They also found “…both attained education and measured genetic propensities for education were partially uniquely related to health in late life, with higher genetic propensities and higher levels of education predicting better health and lower mortality.”²⁷⁰

Research by Koellinger, Harden et al. found that: “Across the board…a higher income PGI <polygenic index> is associated with more favorable lifetime outcomes including higher educational attainment, higher occupational wages, living in a better neighborhood, a lower BMI and waist to hip ratio, lower blood pressure, a lower chance of being hospitalized…”¹⁸

The result has been institutional barriers that protect the genetic interests of hierarchy elites (social eugenics), creating political and SES advantages for individuals and groups better aligned to norms, institutions and policies that regulate resource distribution and power in their favor.

This has important environmental effects that extend across generations.

For example, psychologist Robert Plomin and associates write: “…quantitative genetics findings indicate that measures of the environment are themselves heritable.”⁹⁰

“Polygenic scores effects on EA are partly accounted for by their correlation with environmental effects; similarly, environmental effects on EA are linked to polygenic scores effects.”⁹⁰

“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. This suggests that both genetic and environmental effects must be taken into account in prediction models of complex behavioral traits such as EA.”⁹⁰

Inequality & Longevity

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

“Although these trends are also occurring in many industrialized nations, an examination of income, poverty, and inequality in the United States suggests a special reason for concern. In the United States, median household income showed a steady progression upward from the 1960s through the 1990s but subsequently leveled off and even slightly declined. Moreover, this overall trend masks marked differences in the experiences of those at various economic levels.”²⁷⁵

“As shown … those in the top 5% of the income distribution have enjoyed substantial increases in their incomes, but for those at the bottom, income has been largely stagnant. As a result…the income gap between those in the top 5% of the income distribution and those in the bottom 40% has been increasing. When income distribution in the United States is compared with that in other industrialized countries, the income of those in bottom 10% of the U.S. distribution is lower, and that of the top 10% higher—leading to a much larger gap.”²⁷⁵

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

Psychologist Alexander Browman et al. make the following point about SES in America: “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

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

The APA Task Force makes the point that race is a determinant of longevity in America: “On average, African-Americans lived eight years less than Hispanic men and six years less than White men”²⁷⁸

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

Epigenetics & Well-Being

Epigenetics Defined

Riya Kanherkar, a post-doctoral research fellow at the Institute for Cell Engineering writes: “The literal meaning of the term epigenetic is “on top of or in addition to genetics.” The series of chemical tags that modify DNA and its associated structures constitute the epigenome, and include any genetic expression modifier independent of the DNA sequence of a gene. The genome defines the complete set of genetic information contained in the DNA, residing within the cells of each organism.”²⁷⁹

“The epigenome, on the other hand, comprises the complex modifications associated with genomic DNA, imparting a unique cellular and developmental identity. The epigenome integrates the information encoded in the genome with all the molecular and chemical cues of cellular, extracellular, and environmental origin.”²⁷⁹

“Along with the genome, the epigenome instructs the unique gene expression program of each cell type to define its functional identity during development or disease. The epigenome also, in some sense, represents the ability of an organism to adapt and evolve through expression of a set of characteristics or phenotypes developed in response to environmental stimuli.”²⁷⁹

It is also important to note that epigenetic influences do not change DNA sequences.²⁸⁰

Examples of Epigenetic Research

Hillary Hurd Anyaso at “Northwestern Now,” an online publication at Northwestern University, summarizes research by McDade and associates showing “poverty leaves a mark on our genes.”

She writes: “Previous research has shown that socioeconomic status (SES) is a powerful determinant of human health and disease, and social inequality is a ubiquitous stressor for human populations globally. Lower educational attainment and/or income predict increased risk for heart disease, diabetes, many cancers and infectious diseases, for example. Furthermore, lower SES is associated with physiological processes that contribute to the development of disease, including chronic inflammation, insulin resistance and cortisol dysregulation.”²⁸¹

“In this study, researchers found evidence that poverty can become embedded across wide swaths of the genome. They discovered that lower socioeconomic status is associated with levels of DNA methylation (DNAm) — a key epigenetic mark that has the potential to shape gene expression — at more than 2,500 sites, across more than 1,500 genes.”²⁸¹

Psychologist K. Page Harden and associates: “…found that children and adolescents growing up in more socioeconomically disadvantaged families and neighborhoods and children from marginalized racial/ethnic groups compared to their more privileged peers exhibit DNA-methylation profiles associated with higher chronic inflammation, lower cognitive functioning, and a faster pace of biological aging.”²⁸²

Interesting recent research shows that physical pain can be influenced by the social environment. Larissa J. Strath et al. used chronic knee pain as an example: “While novel, this study highlights the role that SES may play on the epigenomic environment in relation to chronic knee pain. Findings add to the body of literature that suggest that pain is not just a simple biological experience, but can be influenced by our social environment through a social–biological link (ie, epigenetics).”²⁸⁴

Social Stratification is a Justified Harm

Research in behavioral genetics has shown people evoke, select into, modify and create environments that correlate with their inherited DNA differences.³²⁵

However, the SES structure of social hierarchy selects back with rules, regulations and policies that enforce inequality.

High socioeconomic status (SES) individuals and groups have socio-genetic interests to protect to sustain their differential advantages in income, wealth, privileges and power in a social hierarchy.

These socio-genetic effects have geographic significance.

Research published in “Nature Human Behavior” by geneticist Abdel Abdellaoui et al. examined the geographic clustering of genes and its effect on socioeconomic status (SES):

“Since we have been able to measure DNA at a sequence level, studies have shown that the geographic distribution of alleles are not random and have mapped striking geographic patterns of ancestry.”²⁸⁵

Their research points to the “…genetic consequences of social stratification, a key characteristic of human civilizations whereby society groups their people into strata based on SES.”²⁸⁵

They go on to make 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

They summarize their findings concerning “…the genetic consequences of social stratification, a key characteristic of human civilizations whereby society groups its people into strata based on SES. SES is generally based on occupation, income and EA, which are influenced by many environmental and genetic factors, and are associated with a wide range of physical and mental health outcomes. SES is not distributed randomly across geographic space, which can lead to geographic clustering of alleles that are associated with SES-related traits such as EA. EA is known for its high levels of assortative mating, which may be further induced by geographic clustering. This may exacerbate social inequalities across generations.”²⁸⁵

In America, social stratification has long term socio-genetic consequences

In America, between 1800 and 1860, the enslaved population increased from approximately 700,000 to 4 million due to increased demand for cotton from Europe and in particular Great Britain.²⁹⁵

Slaves were essential to meet the demand, not only increasing production but also reducing costs and improving profits.²⁹⁵

This is but one example of social hierarchy and its ‘eugenic’ structure.

These social eugenic structures still have a foothold in the 21^st century, hidden in the serpentine language of justified harms.

The Richest Countries in the World have the Means to Eliminate Socioeconomic Inequality and Poverty…HOWEVER

In a blog article in 2014, Reihan Salam at The National Review described how poverty in the U.S. could be eliminated: “1. Assume 50 million Americans in poverty in 2012, using the SPM (described in this post). 2. Assume the poverty rate is $12,000 3. For simplicity assume that the average income of those 50M is thus $6,000 4. That means that everyone in poverty could be lifted above the poverty threshold with 50M*$6,000 = $300 billion 5. Assume that the $300B is simply transferred from the incomes of the top 1% 6. That would mean that the income of the 1% goes down from $2T to $1.4T.”

Salam then makes this observation, “the reason we don’t create such a transfer program is that influential high-earners would fight it tooth and nail.”²⁶

Climate Change—A 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.

Ask yourself this question–How much of your Quality Life Supply Chain reinforces the status consumption ills of social hierarchy that now threaten the biosphere of the planet?

Over the last 5000+ years, approximately .00011% of the planet’s 4.5 billion year existence, the accumulating resource extractions of social hierarchy, its 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.²³⁰

Why worry about the biosphere? Scientist and author Vaclav Smil makes this point: “Without a biosphere in good shape, there is no life on the planet. It’s very simple. That’s all you need to know. The economists will tell you we can decouple growth from material consumption, but that is total nonsense. The options are quite clear from the historical evidence. If you don’t manage decline, then you succumb to it and you are gone. The best hope is that you find some way to manage it.”²³¹

In “Nature Energy,” Social and Environmental Scholar Paul C. Stern and associates 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,” Professor of Sustainability 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: “Lobbying has a strong influence on energy-related public policy. Whether people lobby directly or through their roles in private or non-profit organizations, the greatest influence comes from small numbers of highly influential people. Citizen action by elites has previously been a strong force against mitigating climate change.”²⁸⁷

“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

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

They continue: “Decades of research has found that individuals living in disadvantaged environments are at greater risk for numerous negative health outcomes, particularly chronic diseases driven by inflammation such as cardiovascular disease, several cancers, and metabolic disorders.”²⁸⁸

“Despite modern scientific insights into mechanisms underlying these diseases, rates of chronic disease are rising throughout even the most economically well-off nations. One explanation for this finding lies in people’s inherent drive to achieve a relatively advantaged status.”²⁸⁸

They add this point about the political power of hierarchy elites and status: “Almost 60 years ago, Richard Hofstadter described the American political landscape as “paranoid”, based on observations of “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.” Here, we explored these themes by examining the psychological associates of perceived status threat–the burgeoning concern about the loss of power of the dominant.”²⁸⁸

“In line with Hofstadter’s description, we found strong relationships between perceived status threat and both conspiracy mentality and subclinical paranoia. Further, while there were those across the political spectrum who endorsed concerns with status threat, we replicated prior work showing an association between perceived status threat and political conservatism. Finally, we observed a small but significant positive association between perceived status threat and age.”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. make 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

Meritocracy—A Justified Harm

The word merit defined as “deserving of reward or punishment,” entered the English language in the late Middle Ages, its roots reaching back to the Latin word mereri meaning to “earn, deserve.”²⁹²

There are individuals and groups across every country and political economy in the world whose advantages in income, wealth status and power are the result of social hierarchy, economic inequality and system-justified inequities in health, happiness and longevity.

Well-Being Across Individual, Cultural and DNA Differences is a threat to the quality life privileges and pleasures they enjoy and pursue.

They defend their advantages by making the moral claim people are unequal in their talents, abilities, effort and productivity and as a consequence some people are less deserving. For them, a fair and just world is one where some people are more deserving.

Meritocracy invests in the power to control environments to suit its elites

In a meritocracy, high educational attainment (EA) leads to occupations with higher incomes, wealth accumulation, social influence and privileges, which in turn leads to advantages in health, happiness and longevity.^86,87,29

For example, according to economist Branko Milanovic: “a deeply entrenched new class structure” is appearing, a heritable “self-sustaining upper-class” due to the genetics of assortative mating and meritocracy.⁹²

Researcher F. A. Torvik et al., in an article for Nature write: “Assortment based on educational attainment may have particularly broad consequences. It could pose a societal challenge by concentrating human and economic resources and could present a health challenge because genetic influences on educational attainment correlate with most health phenotypes. Furthermore, educational attainment has increased massively over the last few generations.”⁹³

For meritocrats, a fair and just world is one where differences in education, occupation, income and wealth should determine differences in the quality life privileges, pleasures and outcomes people experience.

However, polygenic advantages and disadvantages are not independent of environmental influences that can amplify or diminish the expression of these advantages because environmental conditions can be manipulated by norms and institutions that vary across countries and cultures, and across generations.

For example, economists Philippe Aghion and Rachel Griffith make this important point about innovation, competition and lobbying: “… yesterday’s innovators tend to become entrenched incumbents … <that> try to prevent future innovation and new entry. The decline in US productivity growth, together with the increase in… rents since the early 2000s, illustrates this fact.”²⁹⁴

“…incumbents prevent new entry and thereby preserve their rents. But precisely because they get in the way of new entry and creative destruction, lobbying activities reduce both productivity growth and social mobility.”²⁹⁴

“In fact one can show, using cross US states panel data on lobbying, that: (i) like innovation, lobbying is positively correlated with the top 1% share of income; (ii) unlike innovation, lobbying is negatively correlated with social mobility and entrant innovation; (iii) unlike innovation, lobbying is positively and significantly correlated with the Gini coefficient (i.e., with broad inequality).”²⁹⁴

Corporate Hierarchy & Well-Being

--A Justified Harm

Take for example a corporate executive and the office clerk. While there is obviously a difference between someone with the talent and ability to manage a complex business or corporate structure and someone less capable, should this difference justify exclusionary and status-ranked differences in a person’s access to the resources and social support necessary for positive well-being?

A consistent feature of social hierarchy is norms and institutions that allow individuals and groups on top of a hierarchy to extract resources from individuals and groups stratified into descending levels of the hierarchy. The result has been quality life years gained for some individuals and groups and quality life years lost for others.

There are individuals and groups that flourish from social norms, rules, laws and moral codes that justify life course differences in well-being based on a person’s status in a corporate or business hierarchy.

Corporate hierarchies employ a substantial percentage of the working population, establishing wage and benefit norms across different sectors of the U.S. economy.

These corporate structures determine the value of a person’s education, skills and capabilities, setting income and benefit standards accordingly.

Individuals more capable of managing a complex business structure are selected to fill executive positions while those less capable fill other positions in the hierarchy.

Hierarchical differences in job titles and responsibilities correlate with income and benefits received.

For example, the CEO’s income and benefits are markedly higher than the income and benefits of clerks in the same corporate structure.

The result is income and benefit differences between the CEO and the clerk that function as determinants of socioeconomic status (SES) and well-being.

While no one wants people with lesser abilities and talents running complicated corporate structures (or flying a passenger plane or performing surgery), does this mean they deserve inferior life course outcomes and well-being?

Artificial Intelligence & Justified Harms

AI Colonialism and Quality Life Years Lost

Social hierarchy, economic inequality and inequities in health, happiness and longevity, the result of individuals and groups competing to arrange and align environmental conditions (e.g., social preferences) favorable to their genetic interests, has been fundamental to complex, surplus-producing societies.

These genetic-based power hierarchies rely on norms and institutions embedded with equality exclusions (EQEXs) that hijack prosocial norms to enhance the prestige and power of individuals and groups with dominant incomes and wealth.

Over the next several decades, powerful individuals and groups whose income, wealth and power is conditional on social hierarchy and economic inequality will depend on AI technologies to assure their continued dominance.

Journalist and data scientist Karen Hao, writing in MIT Technology Review makes this powerful point about AI colonialism: “The AI industry does not seek to capture land as the conquistadors of the Caribbean and Latin America did…”

Instead, she explains, corporations use ‘algorithmic management’ to manipulate low income workers, pitting them against each other to squeeze more profits from their “cheap and precarious labor, often in the Global South, shaped by implicit ideas that such populations don’t need or are less deserving of livable wages and economic stability.”¹¹³

In addition, according to Hao, South Africa is experiencing an “unfettered deployment of AI surveillance” that is threatening to send it back into its past. She writes: “AI is impoverishing…the same communities and countries already impoverished by former colonial empires.”¹¹³

AI technologies will be the low-cost means by which quality life elites extract quality life years and experiences from people worse off.

Their first goal will be ‘regulatory capture’ to assure limited political and regulatory constraints. If successful across the world there is an altogether horrific prospect that quality life elites will be in a position to determine the political and socioeconomic future of practically every worker on the planet.

For billions of people in the world today and billions more to come, the heritable social consequences of SES predation are relentless and unforgiving.

The result has been Orwellian barnyards where people in the lower levels of a hierarchy spend their lives servicing the well-being of their DNA masters.

We need a new global currency of well-being based on quality life years created, extended and sustained across individual and cultural differences.

It begins here…

Self has no political, economic or moral space separate from the well-being of Other

Written by WGW

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