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Toward a Unified Stratification Theory: Structure, Genome, and Status Across Human Societies While social scientists and geneticists have a shared interest in the personal characteristics
instrumental to status attainment, little has been done to integrate these
disparate perspectives. This is unfortunate, as the perspectives offer complementary
insights, which, if properly combined, stand to substantially improve understanding
of the stratification process. This article synthesizes research from the social sciences
and genetics to develop a multistage theory of how social structure moderates
the influence of the genome on status outcomes. Its thesis is that the strength of
the genome’s influence on status is primarily moderated by two properties of social
structure—levels of resource inequality and social mobility. Thus, it is theorized
that under conditions of low inequality and high social mobility, the influence of
the genome on status will be high relative to conditions of high inequality and low
social mobility. The essential logic is (1) as inequality increases, the characteristics
and abilities intrinsically useful in status attainment are increasingly influenced by
individuals’ social backgrounds and decreasingly determined by their genomes; and
(2) as social closure and inequality increase, the utility of these characteristics and
abilities to status attainment is diminished. In sum, a model of status attainment
is developed proposing that while both genome and social background influence the
status attainment process, the relative importance of these factors is determined by
the surrounding structure of the society.
