The Biology of a Savage Nation

I am not here to soothe you. America has always been a traumatic place — not just for the conquered, not just for the enslaved, but for everyone who set foot on this soil. From the first contact onward, this continent has been a running sequence of shock events: plague, famine, collapse, war, disease, fire, flood. Trauma wasn’t incidental here; it was structural and constant. And science now makes it clear: repeated trauma can rewrite the body. Epigenetics shows that severe stress is not only a memory — it can be tracked as chemical marks on DNA (often via methylation) that sometimes persist into the next generation.

Trauma from Day One

Pre‑Columbian America was a managed landscape, not wilderness. After contact, “virgin‑soil” epidemics (smallpox, measles, influenza, typhus) drove catastrophic population collapse across the Americas — with scholarly estimates often ranging ~80–95% in some regions over the colonial period.[1] Whatever the exact fraction in any given locale, the direction is not disputed: repeated epidemic waves, famines, and displacement produced society‑wide trauma from the start.

The Science of Inheritance

Human natural‑experiment cohorts demonstrate durable biological echoes of shock exposure:

• Famine (in utero): People conceived during the Dutch Hunger Winter show lower methylation at the imprinted IGF2 locus ~60 years later; similar famine‑linked DNA‑methylation differences are seen at multiple loci.[2][3]

• Genocide/Extreme Trauma (parent → child): In Holocaust families, methylation at stress‑pathway gene FKBP5 differs in survivors and their adult offspring (often in opposite directions) with parent–offspring correlations; follow‑ups specify maternal‑exposure links and glucocorticoid sensitivity.[4][5]

• U.S. disaster (prenatal stress): Pregnant mothers directly exposed to the 9/11 attacks and developing PTSD had lower cortisol, mirrored in their one‑year‑old infants — consistent with in‑utero programming of the HPA axis.[6]

• Indigenous historical trauma (U.S.): Among Alaska Native participants, symptoms of “historical loss” associate with differential DNA methylation at several CpGs; stronger cultural identification tracks with better wellbeing, suggesting social buffering.[7]

Consensus guardrail: in humans, evidence is strongest for intergenerational effects (F0→F1, including prenatal exposure). Claims of robust transgenerational inheritance (persisting after germline reprogramming into F2/F3 without direct exposure) remain debated.[8]

American Shock Aftershock

America stacks mass shocks within generational time: colonial epidemics and starvation, Civil War bloodletting, the 1918 Influenza Pandemic (the deadliest on record, with an estimated 50 million global deaths), mid‑century polio waves, the Great Depression and Dust Bowl, late‑century deindustrialization, the 2008 crash, COVID‑19.[9][10][11] Each wave adds to population‑level stress exposure. The difference across groups is not whether they are hit but how they recover — a function of wealth, race, and geography — which shapes whether marks persist into the next generation.

Equal Exposure, Unequal Recovery

Race and class modulate burden, but epidemics and collapses repeatedly cross class lines. Wealth accelerates recovery; it does not provide immunity. That is why the biological burden is shared even when the social positions are not: the top of the pile stands on rubble.

The Savage Feedback Loop

Trauma can recalibrate the stress system (HPA axis), biasing toward hypervigilance and threat reactivity. That fuels more conflict, which produces more trauma, which etches deeper biological traces — a loop. With shocks arriving every generation, the system rarely gets a full reset. The result looks primitive because the body is primed as if life is always at stake.

Diagnosis, Not Excuse

This is not essentialism and not a pardon. It is a diagnosis. Biology is plastic: when the cycle eases, many marks fade. But denial keeps the loop running.

Conclusion

And this is where the savagery weaves into the fabric of our society — not just as myth or metaphor, but as a biological scar. Generations lived and died through plagues, collapses, wars, and famines, and those shocks wrote themselves into our cells. We carry it in blood chemistry, in stress reflex, in metabolism. The American story is not innocence lost; it is trauma recycled. The choice remains: acknowledge the inheritance and break the linkage, or keep circling the frontier with the next shock already inbound.

References

  1. Nunn, N., & Qian, N. (2010). The Columbian Exchange: A History of Disease, Food, and Ideas. Journal of Economic Perspectives. (Estimates of 80–95% Indigenous population decline; discussion of disease and collapse.) PDF ; see also Crosby, A. Virgin‑Soil Epidemics (classic framing). PDF .
  2. Heijmans, B. T., et al. (2008). Persistent epigenetic differences associated with prenatal famine exposure. PNAS. PNAS / PubMed.
  3. Tobi, E. W., et al. (2009). DNA methylation differences after exposure to prenatal famine. PNAS. PMC.
  4. Yehuda, R., et al. (2016). Holocaust exposure induced intergenerational effects on FKBP5 methylation. Biological Psychiatry. PubMed / Full text.
  5. Bierer, L. M., et al. (2020). Intergenerational effects of maternal Holocaust exposure on FKBP5 methylation. Biological Psychiatry. PubMed.
  6. Yehuda, R., et al. (2005). Transgenerational effects of PTSD in babies of mothers exposed to 9/11. Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. JCEM; see also Yehuda (2008) review on cortisol/PTSD risk. PubMed.
  7. Rogers‑LaVanne, M. P., et al. (2023). Association between gene methylation and experiences of historical trauma in Alaska Native peoples. International Journal for Equity in Health. Article.
  8. Khatib, H., et al. (2024). Calling the question: what is mammalian transgenerational epigenetic inheritance? Frontiers in Genetics. (Critical review; human TGEI remains controversial.) PMC.
  9. CDC. 1918 Influenza Pandemic. (Overview, mortality context.) History • H1N1 overview • EID review.
  10. CDC. Poliomyelitis. (U.S. epidemics; 1952 peak >21,000 paralytic cases; elimination of wild poliovirus in U.S.) Pink Book • About Polio.

Scope note: The citations support the biological mechanisms and exemplar shock events. Where precise percentages for early colonial mortality are debated across regions and eras, we rely on established syntheses (e.g., Nunn & Qian; Crosby) rather than a single fixed number.