The Predator’s Comfort
Racial Empathy, Evolutionary Bias, and the Struggle for a Shared Humanity.
“What if the true divide isn’t between races—but between those who’ve been hunted, and those who’ve never had to run?”
The Predator’s Comfort: Racial Empathy, Evolutionary Bias, and the Struggle for a Shared Humanity.
By Dr. Isaiah (Ike) Wilson III
“Human beings are not wicked by nature. We have been brutalized by a system that has kept us afraid of each other.”
— Assata Shakur
“Humanity is a species governed by paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.”
— Edward O. Wilson
Prelude: The Predator’s Comfort, and the Prey’s Dilemma
(Field Notes from a Florida Morning)
Let me tell you what I saw yesterday morning.
I was out on one of my regular trail walks—nothing fancy, just a steady rhythm of footfalls and reflection, the way I often sift through ideas that won’t let go of me. The sun was already up, and the world was bright, humid, still.
Florida mornings have that particular texture of heat—thick, soft, and misleadingly calm.
As I rounded a bend beside a neighborhood pond, my eye caught something—actually, a stillness that screamed louder than movement.
On the near edge of the water, a cluster of birds. All lined up like sentries. Motionless. Alert. Eyes locked—not on me, not on the trail, not on each other—but across the pond.
And there, opposite them, in the warmth of the sun, was the reason.
A large alligator. Still as stone. Head turned just slightly away from them; eyes closed. At peace.
The juxtaposition hit me like a parable.
The birds—grouped, anxious, aware. Scanning the predator.
The predator—alone, resting, unbothered.
And me? I was neither bird nor gator, but something else. Something watching. Something thinking.
In that moment, I saw a metaphor emerge so clearly, I had to stop and take the photo—that photo. You’ve seen it now.
This wasn’t just about nature. It was about us.
About how comfort is distributed in our world.
About how vigilance, hyper-awareness, and group cohesion are not choices for some—they’re survival instincts.
Because only those who’ve been hunted behave like prey.
Only those who’ve lived with the possibility of sudden danger ever develop that kind of still-grouped-alert posture.
And only those who’ve never had to do that—those who can sun themselves with eyes closed, untroubled by watchers—fail to understand what it's like to live otherwise.
That was the moment this essay began.
That was the moment the question took hold:
What does it mean to live as predator—or prey—in the human social ecologies of our time?
What if empathy is structurally limited—not because people are incapable of compassion, but because their very experience of the world has never, or at least all-too-rarely, nor as a collective ‘out-group’, required it?
What if the lack of empathy from dominant groups isn’t just moral failing—it’s some kind of nurtured and natured evolutionary insulation?
And what if the work of justice and solidarity is, at least in part, the work of unlearning the comfort of the sun?
This isn’t a fable. It’s a warning. And it’s a mirror.
Let’s look closer.
Introduction: The Predator’s Dilemma
Why is it so difficult—so persistently difficult—for dominant groups, particularly white (male) populations in Western societies, to sustain meaningful empathy toward those on the margins?
Why, in the face of overwhelming evidence of systemic inequities, of intergenerational trauma, of bodily vulnerability and economic precarity—why does genuine solidarity falter, regress, or calcify into defensiveness?
Why does the moral imperative of justice — that arc of history that MLK Jr. said bent towards justice — so often feel like a threat to those in the dominant power majority?
This essay approaches that question not simply as a moral failing, but as a biological and cultural condition.
Drawing, again, from the evolutionary frameworks of Edward O. Wilson—particularly his theory of gene-culture coevolution and the concept of epigenetic rules—we explore the possibility that empathy, far from being evenly distributed across societies or individuals, may in fact be a trait most commonly developed through experience with collective vulnerability.
And when that vulnerability is absent—when a group has never had to survive as “prey”—the neurobiological circuits and cultural practices of deep, sustained empathy may remain underdeveloped or even atrophied.
In short, what if the enduring lack of empathic resonance from dominant racial groups toward others is not only about power—but about evolutionary insulation?
This is not to excuse apathy. Nor is it to naturalize oppression.
It is, however, to explore how predatory comfort may obstruct empathic consciousness, and how centuries of unchallenged dominance can produce “cultural and biological blind spots” that no amount of individual goodwill can easily reverse.
This lens can helps explain not only individual prejudice or bias—but also the systemic recoil we now see against diversity, equity, and inclusion.
It offers a way to understand the chilling rise of “Great Replacement” ideology, not only as a fringe paranoia but as a logical (though dangerous) consequence of never having been existentially hunted. To those whose identity has always meant security, equality can feel like exposure.
We are not born with hatred. But neither are we born equally prepared to recognize suffering beyond the boundaries of our kin. That preparation—biological, cultural, historical—is what this essay explores.
I. Evolutionary Roots: Predator, Prey, and the Social Brain
In Consilience, Edward O. Wilson argued for a unification of the sciences and humanities—a consilient vision of human understanding grounded in biology but transcending reductionism. At the center of that synthesis are two concepts crucial to this essay: epigenetic rules and gene-culture coevolution.
Epigenetic rules, in Wilson’s framing, are inherited predispositions—“soft”-wired tendencies in perception, emotion, and cognition—that influence how humans respond to the world. They are not hard determinants but shaping forces. And through gene-culture coevolution, these biological tendencies interact with cultural environments over generations, reinforcing certain social behaviors while pruning others away.
One of the most primal of these behaviors is in-group empathy—the capacity to feel with and for others.
Among social mammals, this trait has profound survival value. Frans de Waal has shown how apes, elephants, and even rats exhibit forms of cooperative compassion when group cohesion is threatened. Empathy, in this evolutionary sense, is not just moral—it is tactical. It protects the tribe.
But here’s the catch: empathy is most often extended to those within the threat perimeter—to those perceived as kin, or at least as potentially reciprocal allies. Its development is often triggered by shared vulnerability, by the knowledge that harm to another could mean harm to oneself.
Now consider the inverse. What happens when a population, over centuries, is insulated from such collective vulnerability?
What emerges, Wilson might suggest, is a neurological and cultural default state: high in control, low in empathy beyond the in-group; a bias toward dominance behaviors; a selective blindness to external suffering. In other words, the psychology of the predator—not in terms of violence, necessarily, but in terms of perceived invincibility.... and difference in ‘sense of superiority’ terms. A false, ‘faux’ sense, mind you.
The result is not active hatred. At least not solely so. It is also, in part, structural incapacity for identification with the pain of others. Not cruelty, but indifference. Not malice, but absence.
And in societies where white racial identity has long been constructed not just in cultural but in survivalist contrast to the nonwhite ‘Other’, this absence takes on systemic power.
To be never hunted is to never know what being seen as prey does to the psyche, to the body, to the collective soul.
It is from this evolutionary and cultural blind spot that much of our contemporary empathy gap is born.
II. Gene-Culture Coevolution and Racialized Empathy
Edward O. Wilson’s framework of gene-culture coevolution offers a compelling explanation for the ways in which inherited biological dispositions and learned social patterns reinforce each other across generations.
This interaction is not neutral. It shapes how groups perceive threats, assign value, and distribute care—and it evolves differently depending on the lived histories of those groups.
For marginalized communities—Black Americans, Indigenous peoples, colonized nations, women, LGBTQ+ communities—the experience of collective vulnerability is encoded not only in memory but in daily life. The cultural narratives, rituals, and adaptive behaviors of these communities often center on mutual aid, ancestral knowledge, survival under threat, and strategic empathy as a mechanism of endurance.
In contrast, dominant groups—particularly white (-male) populations in the West—have historically occupied positions of systemic safety and power. Their gene-culture loop has not required the same adaptive social strategies. The survival mechanisms of interdependence, solidarity under duress, and cross-group empathy have not been selected for in the same way. Instead, the loop reinforces autonomy, hierarchy, and emotional distance from those coded as “Other.”
This difference is not moral—it is material.
If the evolution of empathy is triggered and intensified by a shared need for defense, then it stands to reason that never being targeted creates an evolutionary void: a kind of sociocultural atrophy of empathetic instincts toward out-groups.
This does not mean white individuals cannot feel or act with compassion. It means that, systemically, there has been less evolutionary and/or cultural pressure to practice that compassion in ways that risk identity or comfort.
Consider how Wilson frames the epigenetic rule: "an inherited regularity of mental development common to all members of a species." But what is common in potential is not common in expression. The environments in which humans mature shape which capacities are amplified, and which remain latent.
Empathy is no exception.
Thus, in racialized societies, racialized empathy emerges—not as a deliberate exclusion of care, but as a result of divergent developmental pressures.
Where the marginalized must understand the dominant to survive, the dominant are under no such compulsion in reverse. Their social success does not depend on learning to empathize across lines of power. And so, often, they don’t.
This asymmetry is not only unjust. It is biologically explainable—and culturally deadly.
Because when the time comes for shared sacrifice, for broad coalitional action—say, in a pandemic, or a climate crisis, or a movement for racial justice—those without the empathic muscles will falter, retreat, or lash out. And those most in need will find, once again, that the burden of compassion falls on the already burdened.
III. Predator Psychology in Political Culture
This evolutionary logic finds unsettling parallels in political behavior.
The refusal to recognize the pain of others—especially when acknowledging that pain might require a change in power relations—is a hallmark of “predator psychology” in public life. It is a mindset that reduces justice to a zero-sum game, where any expansion of rights or resources to “them” is perceived as a loss for “us.”
This is how empathy becomes framed as threat.
We see this dynamic in backlash politics, in the rhetoric of “reverse racism,” in the weaponization of meritocracy, and in the rise of ideologies like “White Wokeism” or America First 3.0—where any move toward equity is recast as cultural betrayal or demographic extinction to the majority.
Predator psychology doesn’t always roar. Sometimes, it murmurs through policy: in school bans on critical race theory, in voter suppression laws, in the narrowing of asylum access or LGBTQ+ rights under the guise of “tradition” or preservation of “our national culture.”
These moves do not just reinforce hierarchy. They signal a fear—of loss, of replacement, of becoming the prey.
And that fear, unacknowledged, becomes rage. It becomes conspiracy. It becomes identity.
And under Trump’s America, it becomes national policy.
IV. Contemporary Resonance: The Great Replacement, Global Reaction, and the Prey’s Perception
This brings us to the chilling rise of The Great Replacement conspiracy theory—a modern myth rooted in ancient instincts.
At its core, this theory posits that white populations in the West are being systematically “replaced” by immigrants, Muslims, Jews, or nonwhite births—driven, supposedly, by globalist elites or liberal governments. It is not merely a theory. It is a primal narrative of inversion: the predator imagining itself hunted.
This fantasy is compelling because it flips the moral script. Suddenly, dominance becomes victimhood. Power becomes innocence. Prejudice becomes self-defense.
But it is a false preyhood—a myth of persecution constructed in response to the possibility of equality.
The Great Replacement resonates not because it is true, but because it speaks to a deep evolutionary panic: that the loss of supremacy is indistinguishable from annihilation.
From Christchurch to Buffalo, NY; from Capitol Hill to Charlottesville, this myth has metastasized across global networks, echoing the language of ancient bloodlines, existential threat, and civilizational collapse. It feeds off the same gene-culture feedback loop that stunted cross-group empathy in the first place—and now weaponizes it.
The irony is brutal: those who have never been hunted are now the loudest to scream "invasion." And in doing so, they replicate the very dehumanization they claim to fear.
Meanwhile, the real prey—Black mothers, queer youth, displaced refugees—are left to defend themselves once more, hoping not for mercy, but for recognition.
V. From Explanation to Obligation – Breaking the Evolutionary Cycle
To explain is not to excuse.
If we accept the premise that certain empathic deficits are reinforced through evolutionary and cultural pathways, then our moral challenge is not lessened—it is heightened. Understanding the roots of racialized indifference must be a prelude to intervention, not resignation.
This is where Wilson’s consilience becomes more than a conceptual goal—it becomes a strategic imperative.
If human nature is a product of both genes and culture, then culture becomes our tool for bending the arc of our nature toward justice. We cannot edit our DNA at scale. But we can “disrupt the feedback loops” that keep old hierarchies intact.
We do this not by expecting an evolutionary leap in consciousness, but by designing systems, norms, and narratives that incentivize empathic development where it has been culturally dormant.
That begins with re-educating the dominant group—not in the form of guilt appeals or moral scolding, but through:
Exposure to the historical and emotional truths of the preyed upon;
Immersion in cross-racial and cross-cultural coalitions where mutual dependence reshapes perspective;
Structural accountability that makes injustice costly and solidarity rewarding.
In other words, culture must outpace instinct.
Think of empathy not as an innate virtue, but as a muscle. For some, that muscle has been forged by lived trauma. For others, it has atrophied through disuse. But muscles can grow—with tension, repetition, and discipline.
This is where the arts, the humanities, civic education, and inclusive leadership matter. Not just to inspire, but to rewire.
We must create spaces where the default human condition is not suspicion, but curiosity; not fear, but fellowship.
And this requires something that Wilson reminds us is part of our nature, too: the capacity for foresight. We are not bound to act out our evolutionary past. We are uniquely equipped to “imagine new futures”—to choose among them, and then to build them.
VI. Closing Reflections: Empathy After the Hunt
Let us return to the core claim of this essay: that those who have never been socially hunted struggle to develop sustainable empathy for those who have.
This is not an indictment.
It is an insight.
It asks us to reconsider what kind of moral work is necessary to build an equitable society—not just legal reform or representation, but transformative contact across the predator-prey divide.
Because in truth, no one escapes the loop. A society that trains its most powerful to remain emotionally distant from the suffering of others will, eventually, turn that distance inward. It becomes loneliness. It becomes paranoia. It becomes collapse.
To heal, we must level the field of pain—not by spreading suffering, but by redistributing awareness. The goal is not to make the comfortable suffer. It is to make the insulated see.
Edward O. Wilson believed in unification across knowledge domains—but also across moral domains.
That the unity of knowledge must be matched by a unity of care. That the species that conquered the world did so not by competition alone, but by collaboration, storytelling, and shared intention.
The question before us, then, is not whether empathy is natural.
It is whether we will fight for it—even if it isn’t.
🔚 Epilogue: “The Prey Remembers What the Predator Forgets”
There is a proverb that circulates in diasporic communities: “Until the lion tells the story, the hunter will always be the hero.”
We are at a moment where the lions are speaking. The stories of the hunted—of Blackness, of exile, of womanhood, of queerness, of statelessness—are shaping the consciousness of a new century.
But the hunter still holds the pen in too many rooms.
This essay is a plea—not for pity, not for vengeance, but for vision. A vision rooted in science and sharpened by lived justice. A vision that dares to imagine a world where no one must prove their pain to be believed—and where those never hunted choose, by will and design, to stand with those who were.
Because the truth is this: the future belongs to those who can feel beyond themselves.
And only then—only then—will the predator and the prey become, at last, something new: Human(e).
“CLICK ON THE PIC” … BUY THE BOOK!
Beautifully written! Thanks.