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#1066 - Dr Kathryn Paige Harden - The Genetics of Evil- Are People Born Bad

Modern Wisdom

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  • Four Million Person Risk Taking Gene Study
    • Kathryn Paige Harden found a genetic liability for risk-taking by analysing DNA from 4 million people linked to seven behaviors like early sex, ADHD symptoms, smoking, and problematic alcohol use.
    • The study looked for genes common across those behaviors to capture a general predisposition to disinhibition and reward-seeking across the lifespan. Transcript: Chris Williamson Did you learn? Kathryn Paige Harden Well, it wasn’t just me. There’s many co-authors. Science, especially with this, is very much a group endeavor. And I was really lucky to work with two of my former trainees who are now independent scientists on that paper. So we pulled DNA from 4 million people, mostly from UK Biobank, 23andMe customers, participants in a big study called All of Us. And we were looking at what genes are more common in people who have done one of seven things. So they have ADHD symptoms in childhood. They had sex at a young age. They have more sexual partners. They have ever smoked pot. They are engaging in what we call problematic alcohol use, which is drinking to the point that it causes problems in your life. They’ve ever smoked a cigarette. And they describe themselves as someone who really likes to take risks. I’m a person who likes to take risks. So what we were looking at is genes that are more common in people who not just do one of these things, but are more common in any one of these behaviors. Can we find genes that are just generally involved in being a risk taker? Chris Williamson Is that suite of things altogether risk taking? Where’s the ADHD part come into that? Kathryn Paige Harden Well, ADHD is impulsivity and hyperactivity. So one way you can think about it is this is disinhibition. All of these things are behaviors that violate some rule, right? So someone says it’s not healthy to smoke, you shouldn’t drink if you have problems. Kids who have ADHD get the diagnosis of ADHD because they’re doing things in school that they shouldn’t be doing. Sexual behavior is moralized. So if you’re having sex at 14 or if you’re having sex with very many sexual partners, that’s against kind of a conventional morality. So they’re all things where people are engaging in a behavior in which they might experience consequences or might experience social judgment and they’re doing it anyways. So there’s a risk-taking element there and there’s a kind of reward-seeking element there. And there’s nothing magical about those seven behaviors. They just happen to be the ones in which we had enough data where enough people had done them and we could gather enough genetic data from people. And then we looked and saw what genes could we discover that are associated with all of these things? And then what else about a person’s life do they project if we can tap into this genetic liability, this genetic predisposition towards loss of risk taking. It’s actually a follow-up to a study that we published a couple years ago. So it’s a similar concept, but just more people this time, which gives you more power. And it’s interesting how much people vary in those behaviors. So just think of one of them, which is number of sexual partners. Number of sexual partners in our data set ranges from zero, so people who are lifelong abstinent, to 99 because you’re not allowed to put three digits of sexual partners into the survey. So it’s really a whole range of human behavior. And so thinking about what are the genes that influence you at literally every stage of your lifespan, from when you’re a kid to you’re turning into a sexually mature adolescent into, You know, substance use and risk-taking in adulthood. (Time 0:05:31)
  • From Diner Waitress To Mouse Brain Surgery
    • Harden began researching wrongdoing after working on opioid addiction in mice, doing delicate brain procedures to manipulate resilience to withdrawal.
    • Raised evangelical, she saw a paradigm shift from moralizing addiction to modeling and altering it biologically in animals. Transcript: Kathryn Paige Harden Opiate addiction and withdrawal in mice. So it was getting mice addicted to morphine and then taking it away and seeing if we could manipulate something about their biology, about their brain, to make them more or less addicted To that opiate substance. More resilient. Yeah, more resilient. And this was when I was a college freshman, so 1999 to 2000. When I started, the draft of the human genome hadn’t even been completed yet. But my PI was using a method where you manipulate how genes are expressed in the mouse brain. So my very first job in science, my only job before that had been being a waitress at this like diner in South Carolina that served meat and three vegetables. And you got the church ladies. So I went from that to working in this lab where my job was to basically do little brain surgery on the mouse brains. So put them on this little apparatus and drill a hole in their heads and put a little shunt in so that we could inject things in this very particular spot in their brains. And I just thought, this is awesome. Like, this feels like science fiction to me. We’re taking this behavior that I’ve always seen. We can get into this if you want, but I was raised in a fundamentalist household and a very evangelical Christian household. So I was raised to think of drug use entirely in moral terms. Like, this is about willpower. This is about your relationship with Jesus. And now we’re modeling it in mice. And now we’re going to manipulate something in mice brains in order to see if we can change that behavior. It has something to do with their genes. I just thought that was an incredible paradigm shift. And so I never really switched my interest in risk-taking phenotypes or substance use phenotypes. What I switched was the species instead of studying it in mice. (Time 0:09:50)
  • Human Self Domestication And The Value Of Risk
    • Humans show self-domestication: compared to primates we evolved reduced aggression, greater cooperation, and physiological changes that favor social regulation.
    • Yet selection also preserves risk-taking because entrepreneurs and innovators benefit from deviance, so variation remains adaptive. Transcript: Kathryn Paige Harden Mean i think we’re still figuring it out in fact i have a project on this going on right now to think about can trace some of the the specific evolution of the genes that are associated with These behaviors um but there is a theory that essentially humans have self-domesticated that they if you look at us compared to our most you know closest genetic ancestor in comparison To chimpanzees, all of us, all humans, males and females, juveniles and adults, engage in less aggression, more cooperation. Our physiology has changed in ways that are less aggressive. We have, you know, we’ve lost our big canines we don’t have the same huge jaw in the same way. And so there’s some interesting theories about essentially humans in their long journey towards becoming this incredibly cooperative species. We selected each other to be more self more self-regulated. At the same time, there’s a countervailing force there, which is that there’s a lot of ways in which some risk-taking is rewarded in a society and even necessary in a society. So I talk in my book about this one study where they looked at who was most likely to be a successful entrepreneur by the age of, I think, 35 in the United States. And it was people who had some level of, you know, what we might think of as social privilege or material resources. So white men from middle to upper income families. But amongst them, who was most likely to become an entrepreneur? Chris Williamson When controlling for white men from upper income families. Yeah. Like amongst people who might have- Because there’s lots of them and not all of them, not many of them become successful entrepreneurs. Kathryn Paige Harden Exactly. Most of them do not, right? So amongst people who might say have enough resources. Raw materials. Raw materials. Who does become a successful entrepreneur? And one of the best predictors is did you engage in some delinquency as a teenager? Chris Williamson Risk-taking. Kathryn Paige Harden Yeah. So were you ever arrested? Did you ever paint graffiti? Did you ever do not serious aggressive delinquency, but something that was a little bit rule-breaking, maybe got in trouble at school, maybe got in trouble with the law? And you know entrepreneurs. Like that tracks, right? Like you can think of them as people who are like, there’s a conventional way of doing things and I don’t really care that that’s the conventional way of doing things. I want to do it my own way. And so I think that as a species we we need cooperation. (Time 0:12:17)
  • Prioritize Practical Questions Over Free Will Debates
    • Don’t get stuck on abstract free will debates; instead use science to ask how genes and environments shaped behavior and what that implies for punishment and treatment.
    • Harden recommends focusing on actionable questions: which influences matter and how should they shape accountability, reward, and rehabilitation. Transcript: Kathryn Paige Harden Just going straight into the free will question. Yeah. Chris Williamson Well, look, are we born predisposed toward transgression? Kathryn Paige Harden I think we’re definitely predisposed to our transgressions. I think that luck, the luck of having your genes, the luck of having your parents, luck of how those have combined, the choices that you make when you’re not really old enough to know the Ramifications of those choices, you know, the choices that you make as a young teenager, all of that really shaped the person that you are. And so that person might be, well, might certainly experience themselves as freely choosing. But the person who is doing the choosing, the person that is deciding between the options, that person is so profoundly shaped by factors outside of their control. We’re on a set of train tracks. Yeah. I mean, I find the free will question, actually, I find the free will question not the most interesting question because the question of do we have free will is a question about all of Us. Have free will or all humans don’t have free will. And even if we don’t have free will, we still have to figure out how to treat each other and we still have to figure out how to get on with the business of life. I’m more interested in the question of what, given the science, do we know about how our genes, our environments have shaped us? (Time 0:25:06)
  • High Heritability Of Early Callous Antisocial Behavior
    • Childhood antisocial behavior can be highly heritable — estimates near 80% for kids with callous-unemotional traits, comparable to schizophrenia heritability.
    • When antisocial conduct co-occurs with trauma or maltreatment, heritability estimates drop and environment plays a larger role. Transcript: Kathryn Paige Harden The suite of it. Okay. So antisocial behavior are doing things persistently that violate social norms, moral norms, the rights of others. And so in childhood, this looks like skipping school, lying to parents, that’s mild forms, to robbery, to stealing, to hurting another person, beating them up, to torturing the family Cat, cruelty to animals. What we see is that the heritability, which is, to back up a second, heritability is, are people who are more genetically alike more behaviorally alike? So we see very high heritability, 80% for schizophrenia. So identical twins are not perfectly similar for schizophrenia, but if your identical twin has schizophrenia, you have a 50-50 shot of developing yourself, which is way higher than A base rate of 1%. Chris Williamson I thought you said it was 80%. Kathryn Paige Harden So the percent of variance is 80%. So that’s kind of a benchmark that I think that people can have in their heads about like a highly heritable mental disorder is something like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. We see is that childhood antisocial behavior is nearly as heritable as schizophrenia, particularly if you’re looking at kids who also have what is called callous unemotional traits. So callous unemotional traits is basically like psychopathy in children. So children who hurt others, break rules, upset their parents, and don’t feel bad about it, don’t feel guilty about it. And that’s not just risk-taking. That’s not just I want to do something and I am risk-tolerant. There’s also an element of, again, callousness, of lack of empathy towards whether other people are hurting in that scenario. So what we see is that in children who have, you know, early onset of antisocial behavior and antisocial behavior accompanied by these callous, unemotional, lack of guilt, lack of Remorse feelings, some of the heritability estimates are also at 80%, just as high as schizophrenia. Now, not every child who has antisocial behavior shows this lack of remorse, lack of empathy, and some of them seem to be, you know, dealing with environmental factors that are causing Them to act out. So they might have a trauma history. They might have a maltreatment history. So what you see is the heritability of antisocial behavior tends to be lower in those kids. That seems to be more of a response to your environmental circumstances. Whereas it’s the kids where you look at the parents and you’re like, these seem to be completely average parents. They’re not maltreating the child. No one’s living in poverty. They’re not living in a high-led environment. And this kid is still acting in this antisocial way and doesn’t feel bad about it. (Time 0:31:07)
  • Harsh Punishment Backfires On Antisocial Children
    • Adults typically respond to callous antisocial kids with avoidance or harsher punishment, but those kids are least responsive to punishment and more sensitive to reward.
    • Harsh control often removes attachment and escalates antisocial trajectories because these children learn poorly from negative consequences. Transcript: Kathryn Paige Harden I think often people describe interacting with really antisocial children. Their most common response is avoidance or harshness. So a lot of times when people are very callous, children or adults, you’ll hear people say, and makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. There’s this sense that there’s something eerie or off or off-putting about a child or an adult that doesn’t seem to be displaying the kind of empathic distress at another person’s Distress that we typically see in other humans. And I think that spidey sense feeling that my hair is on the back of my head. Pretty adaptive. And I think it’s an old thing. Like, I mean, I think it’s an evolutionarily old mechanism to say, okay, there’s something about the way this organism is acting. Untrustworthy. And or they respond with harshness. Like, they can’t act this way. They have to know they can’t act this way. Chris Williamson You know, I heard a line, a phenomenal line from my friend Connor Beaton from Mantalks the other day. He says, we try to control that which we feel we cannot trust. Yes. And you see in relationships, if you’re concerned about whether or not you’re, is my partner going to stray? Are they going to cheat on me on a night out? That is when you will see more controlling behavior. Or text me when you get there, who are you with and how long we out for? You said that you were going to go, did you go to, I saw a photo of you in the background as opposed to, I feel like I can try, I don’t need to do control because the trust is there and it feels Like it’s sort of the same here this this child that doesn’t seem to be showing pro-social behavior and isn’t remorseful uh i don’t trust that if they first off i don’t trust that they’re Not going to do something bad and if they do do something bad i’m not convinced that they would own up to it or tell me or care enough to learn to not do it again. So I need to come in as this sort of external structure to constrain this behavior. Kathryn Paige Harden Yeah, I think that’s totally true. And I think with kids, the temptation is control and control through harshness. So I’m going to take away all your toys. I’m not going to allow you to have playdates. I’m going to withdraw my affection. I’m going to verbally berate you, shame you, blame you. I’m going to spank you or use some sort of other corporal punishment. There are these studies from the 90s where they take a child with conduct problems and they bring them into the lab and they have them interact with a woman who’s not their mom. So this is just a volunteer, no interaction with the child. And they see over the course of the interaction that even this stranger begins to respond to the child with no warmth, with coercion, with harshness, with impatience. And I think that’s a very, again, I think that you’re picking up on the right thing, which is there’s a fear and an uncertainty and we respond to it. Lack of trust. With a lack of trust, with a control. And also the way that we try to control children in our culture is often through a lot of harshness. The problem is that those children are the most vulnerable to harsh punishment. So one of the best predictors of an antisocial child escalating in their antisocial behavior is how harshly have they been punished by the grown-ups in their lives. (Time 0:35:26)
  • MAOA X Chromosome Mutation Caused Familial Violence
    • A rare MAOA mutation on the X chromosome caused severe antisocial violence in one Dutch family, illustrating how single-gene effects can profoundly impair moral behavior.
    • Men were affected because they have one X; sisters with two X chromosomes were typically unaffected, highlighting sex-linked genetic vulnerability. Transcript: Kathryn Paige Harden But if you add them all up then you get an appreciable effect one that’s meaningful but there are studies of rare genetic variants and there’s one very famous study that was done in the 1990s where they looked at a rare variant on a gene on the x chromosome and that gene was called maoa so your monoamines are how your neurons are talking to each other. It’s like serotonin’s a monoamine, dopamine’s a monoamine. So monoamine oxidase is an enzyme that basically is like a Pac-Man eating the neurotransmitter in your brain. And if it doesn’t work well, then you get this incredible buildup of the signals that your brain ordinarily uses to communicate with each other. Okay, so why is that important? In this one family where they found this genetic variant on the X chromosome, It made the MAOA enzyme not work. And all the men in that family suffered from extremely serious antisocial behavior problems, whereas their sisters were completely typically functioning. So the men, one raped his sister, one committed arson, one stabbed his boss with a pitchfork. Huge levels of antisocial violence in this family. And their sisters and their moms were like, what the fuck is going on here? Like, why do my sons and my brothers keep doing this and we don’t have this problem? And it’s because they have two exes. And so if they inherited the mutation, it didn’t matter because there was another functioning version of the body. To regress them back toward the mean. To kind of dosage, like they could compensate for it. Whereas if you’re a man and you only have one ex and you got this, you know, 50-50 shot, which of your mom’s exes are you getting? 50-50 shot whether or not you were going to be antisocial. So that’s a rare variant. You know, the vast majority of people who are deeply antisocial do not have this MAOA problem. Chris Williamson They can’t use the MAOA excuse. Kathryn Paige Harden They can’t use the MAOA excuse. (Time 0:57:42)
  • Distinguish Accountability From Retribution
    • Harden separates accountability from punishment: accountability aims to prevent harm and protect others, while punishment is deliberate suffering as retribution; she rejects deserved suffering.
    • She argues societies can hold people accountable without embracing retributive systems that cause needless suffering. Transcript: Kathryn Paige Harden Oh that’s the heart of the heart’s the heart of the the question. I want to pull apart two ideas which were very confounded in my mind too, which is accountability and punishment. So in my mind, punishment is deliberately making someone suffer as retribution for the harm that they’ve caused, whereas accountability is saying, you’ve done this, you’ve harmed Someone, we as a community are enforcing our rules that you don’t get to do that, and we’re doing what we need to do to keep you from doing it again and keep other people safe. The United States, we hold people accountable, but we do it through a very retributive punishment system. We incarcerate more people in worse conditions than any other country has ever done in the history of the world. I think it’s more people were incarcerated at the height of mass incarceration than were ever put in the gulag by the Soviets. Like it’s a, we have a truly massive incarceration, carceral state here. So I want to reframe your question. And I think your question is so good. And your question is the question that I started my book at. I started my book thinking, well, can we justify punishing people? And who deserves to be punished based on what we know about science? And I have come to the conclusion that I don’t think anyone deserves to suffer. And that doesn’t mean that we have no rules and we don’t hold people accountable. (Time 1:03:36)
  • Genetic Explanations Can Increase Retributive Sentences
    • Presenting genetic explanations to jurors often increases recommended sentences; people who believe violence is inherited recommend harsher punishment out of fear of recidivism.
    • Environmental causes are judged more mitigating, while genetic attributions can paradoxically fuel retribution. Transcript: Kathryn Paige Harden Like okay so there’s an experiment where they have people well there’s several but i’m going to tell you about this one um where they have just ordinary average americans come into the Lab and they are um given information about a number of hypothetical sperm donors. And they say, you know, some people say this sperm donor speaks French. This sperm donor is 6’4”. This sperm donor has a college education. This sperm donor has bipolar disorder. This sperm donor was later found to have committed a violent crime. And then they have to estimate what is the likelihood that a child conceived from this sperm would be tall, would graduate from college, would speak French, would also commit a violent Crime themselves. And then they ask, okay, so in this situation in which the child conceived from the sperm donor has committed a violent crime. Here’s details of the crime. You’re on the jury. You have to recommend the sentence. How many years in prison do you think this person should get? So this person, I’m forgetting the exact details, but it’s something along those lines in the study. This person came up to a couple and they were leaving a movie theater and they tried to rob him. And they ended up, you know, killing the male half of the couple with like a box cutter. So violent, impulsive. Now they have a superhero for a son. And so they’re asked to put themselves in the jury’s place. I’m asking you this. So if you were a juror and you had this case in front of you, how many years in prison would you recommend as a sentence for that? Chris Williamson Just from that crime. Kathryn Paige Harden Just from that crime. You don’t know anything else? Chris Williamson 20? Yes. Kathryn Paige Harden So that’s right about the average. I think the average in the study is between 20 and 25 years. But what they find is that the people who believe that violence can be inherited, so the people who believe that if the sperm donor was violent, the child conceived from that sperm is Violent regardless of their upbringing, actually suggested higher prison rather than lower. Chris Williamson We need to keep that person incarcerated because they have so little control over their behavior that they might go and do it again. Kathryn Paige Harden Yes, exactly. So there’s this interesting thing where both genes and your environment combine, they interact, they’re interwoven to shape the person that you become, who’s more or less likely To do these things. But people reason about the genetic causes and the environmental causes differently. Whereas the environmental causes are more likely to be seen as mitigating. If you say this person committed a crime, but he was beaten by his parents. Chris Williamson Oh, wow. That is so crazy. Kathryn Paige Harden Whereas if you say this person committed a crime and his dad also was violent and he maybe even has inherited genes and makes you more retributive. (Time 1:16:04)
  • Use Biology To Temper Retributive Impulses
    • Recognize retribution as an evolved cooperation-enforcement reward that releases dopamine when wrongdoers suffer, so it’s psychologically powerful but potentially harmful.
    • Use that awareness to design systems that satisfy justice needs without indulging costly, pleasure-driven punishment. Transcript: Chris Williamson Checkout. That’s L-I dot com slash modernw and modern wisdom at checkout. What about what else has been experimentally tested around retribution? I’m pretty interested in the role that this has. Kathryn Paige Harden So retribution is something so retribution is in my mind the desire to make another person suffer it is a instinct that emerges very early in childhood development there’s some great Work by paul and his colleagues showing that, you know, three-year are not that retributive, but by the time you’re five, five-year will pay stickers, you know, their version of money, This prize that they really like, in order to see someone who has been portrayed as taking away a ball clubbed by a puppet. So it’s like you, children will pay to see someone that they think is a ball taker, like physically hit. Chris Williamson What do you think that is? Before we even get into that, what is the emotional drive for retribution? Kathryn Paige Harden I think it’s an evolved cooperation enforcement mechanism. I think that we experience dopamine really being released. We experience this kind of neurobiological mechanism of wanting when we do things that historically have been good for human survival and fitness, right? Like we don’t go walk around and being like, oh, maybe I should eat in three days. Like it feels good to eat. It feels good to have sex. It feels good to drink water because we have to do all of that to exist and survive and propagate our genes. And we also feel good. We also see dopamine being released in the ventral striatum when we see someone who’s been portrayed as a wrongdoer be made to suffer. Chris Williamson Is that being tested experimentally? Kathryn Paige Harden Yes, you can see that in the scanner. So ordinarily, if you see someone be hurt, you have an empathic response. But if that person who’s being hurt is first portrayed as violating some cooperative or moral norm, then what you see in the scanner is that people show a pattern that’s consistent with Reward when they see that person suffer. And I think the fact that you see it in the same areas, in the same neurotransmitters, as you see other basically rewarding processes is a clue that this is something that was necessary. That sense of at least outrage and willingness to endure some cost in order to enforce your cooperative norms against someone else. Chris Williamson Willingness to endure some cost? Kathryn Paige Harden So one way that we can also see whether or not someone’s finds something rewarding is are they willing to pay for it? Like, children will pay stickers. Adults will pay money. And so that, there’s these economic games where you see how much digital money will someone pay for the opportunity to punish a freeloader. (Time 1:26:43)
  • Norway’s Measured Response To Mass Murder
    • Harden contrasts Norway’s response to Anders Breivik: maximum sentence was 21 years with humane prison conditions and reflection on societal corruption by indulging retribution.
    • Norway balanced safety and recognition of the perpetrator’s humanity rather than purely maximal retribution. Transcript: Kathryn Paige Harden The United States does. They incarcerate way fewer people. They incarcerate them in less harsh institutions for much shorter periods of time. And it’s very rare for them to have like a mass shooting event. And, but they had this guy anders brevik who um shot i think 60 children on a um an island they were there for a summer camp it was the worst mass murder in norway’s history um this is someone Who has had like who had terrible genetic and environmental luck. He had a very unstable mother. And also he was described as someone who was antisocial from the time he was three or four. Norway has this incredible wraparound social welfare state. And so you can see the notes from the social worker being like, this child is aggressive and violent. The other kids aren’t allowed to play with him because he keeps torturing their pets when he’s five. So even in this environment where there’s incredible social resources, this person still grew up and still grew up to be violent. Found the trial fascinating um because they ultimately sentenced him to the maximum sentence in norway which is 21 years doesn’t seem like a lot it’s what like four months per child And they gave him he’s in the maximum security prison which there was an Instagram meme, which is, is this a Norwegian prison or a London hotel room? And people can’t tell the difference between them. The only thing that puts it away is the security camera dome on the ceiling of the prison room. So things that seem quite cushy for an American system. And in the trial, you see the reckoning of a society where they are saying, this person did a horrible thing. We have our maximum retributive impulses towards him. Of course we do. He murdered our children. And he is still one of us, and how will it corrupt us and our culture to indulge those maximum impulses? So we want to keep our society safe, but we’re recognizing that he’s still one of us. He’s still Norwegian. He’s still part of our society. And from an American perspective, it was wild, like, reading this trial transcript because it was a way of feeling that retribution but not leading entirely with it and also recognizing The inherent humanity of this person who’s part of their society. (Time 1:39:49)
  • Childhood Epigenetic Plasticity Links Early Poverty To Later Health
    • Epigenetics (DNA methylation) modifies gene expression across the lifespan and is most plastic in early childhood, linking poverty, stress, and future health outcomes.
    • While transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in humans is controversial, childhood epigenetic changes propagate across cell divisions and can predict long-term aging and health. Transcript: Kathryn Paige Harden Yeah, I mean, so the idea of epigenetic inheritance, so the idea of, so your genome is your DNA, your DNA sequence, and then your epigenome, which is, and your DNA is the same in every cell In your body, and it’s the same every day of your life. Whereas your epigenome is everything on top of your genome that affects how the genome is read in a cell. Your epigenome is why your neurons are different than your liver cells and why you look different than you did when you were nine. You have the same DNA, but you have a different body now, and that’s because of these epigenetic changes. So epigenetic inheritance is this idea that not just the DNA sequence, but something about the epigenetic marks that affect how the gene is read could be transmitted from parent to Offspring. That is a really difficult and controversial area of research. Like some biologists think that humans do not inherit the epigenome. What egg and sperm cells do is they strip out, you know, most of the epigenetic marks so that they aren’t inherited. There is some animal models and mice that- Do we not just see one about probably in mice maybe the the children of mice that had exercised more were yeah so in humans research on epigenetic Inheritance is really hard to do in multiple generations of data the confounding is terrible and i um i’m okay with social and political controversies but even i have not waded into Epigenetic inheritance. I do do stuff on epigenetics within the lifespan of a child, right? So, like, how does your environment… Chris Williamson What’s real and what’s bullshit about epigenetics? Oh, gosh. Kathryn Paige Harden I mean, I think there’s these cultural memes about, like, all of trauma is epigenetically inherited or that you can’t believe anything from behavior genetics because it’s all actually Epigenetics. I think those are vast oversimplifications. I think we understand. I gave a talk for a group of students on campus last week and they were like, well, how do you, you know, I’m not really that interested in genes because of everything we know about epigenetics. And I was like, what is, what do we know about epigenetics? Like, what exactly are you thinking about? This is actually a very new area of research. What did they say? Humans, they had no answer to that question. Great statement. So, I mean, I’m fascinated. The sort of epigenetics that I study is called DNA methylation. So methylation is the addition of a methyl group, which is kind of like a chemical tag that binds to the DNA sequence at particular spots and changes how DNA is expressed. And I’m really interested in the DNA methylation, particularly in children, because I’m interested in the idea that we can look at how, you know, poverty or stress or trauma or insults To health that are ultimately going to affect your, you know, your aging 60 years later. How are they getting under the skin in early life long before we can actually see any of these health problems? Like we know that children who are, for instance, being raised in poverty are likely to die sooner. It’s very hard to see the health consequences of poverty when children are four because four-year are healthy. Like four-year all look healthy. Chris Williamson But is that not, how do you know the difference between epigenetic impact and just during a period where you really needed to feed a body and an immune system, it didn’t have the fuel to Be able to do it. The epigenetic stuff feels to be a little bit more deep and long lasting, as opposed to this is a more transient, important period where, like if you just never went to the gym, well, I’m Smaller and weaker, but I’m smaller and weaker because I didn’t do the thing required to make me big and strong. Yeah. Kathryn Paige Harden I mean, so that’s, you’re right that like there’s a phenotype of a child, which is like, what is their growth status? Are they overweight? Are they too short for their age? Do they have more infections than usual? And the epigenome is getting at something that’s like, you know, more at the level of the cellular machinery. (Time 1:58:21)
  • Give Cash To Parents To Improve Child Outcomes
    • Provide direct material support to parents because cash transfers lower maternal stress, improve breastfeeding and delay childcare, producing measurable benefits for children.
    • Harden cites ongoing cash-transfer trials where extra monthly funds improved parental behaviors tied to child development. Transcript: Kathryn Paige Harden We’re working with a group that is doing a cash transfer, unconditional cash transfer. So essentially cash gifts to low-income moms. So some moms get 30 extra dollars a month and some moms get $300 extra per month. And then the kids have been followed. They’re now six. And so we are looking at, did cash to moms change children’s epigenetics? Chris Williamson And the mechanism that that would move through would be moms had an alleviation of stress, less cortisol, better nutrition. Kathryn Paige Harden So there seems to be, moms who get money don’t report that many much lower levels of stress. They do report being better able to breastfeed as long as they wanted to. And they delayed the start of child care. So if they wanted to stay home with the baby for longer, they could. Chris Williamson This feels less epigenetic. Kathryn Paige Harden And they also uh it improves the nutrition of the child so they’re spending the extra money on i get it this to me doesn’t feel that epigenetic though (Time 2:06:42)
  • Embryo Selection Could Undermine Social Solidarity
    • Embryo selection raises social risks: even if it reduces individual suffering, normalising selection could stigmatize families who choose not to or cannot select, altering solidarity toward disability.
    • Harden worries about how turning chance into choice shifts societal expectations and responsibility for health outcomes. Transcript: Chris Williamson What’s your perspective on embryo selection? Kathryn Paige Harden I have very complicated feelings about embryo selection. Okay, so the first thing I want to say is I think that having a child again is an incredibly risky, ultimately optimistic thing. And I think babies are good. So I really support people’s right to build their families on their own terms, even if that’s not the terms that I would build them on. I think reproductive autonomy is really, really important. Good disclaimer. I think that’s very, very important. I think that there are some situations in which the upsides seem very, very clear to me like if you have a disorder that’s prevalent in your family and you want to mitigate even by a few Percentage points the risk of that and that’s what’s going to make you feel safe to bring a child into the world like that feels like a good to me um here’s what i worry about those are those Are the pros The things I worry about is one, you said yourself that no one understands genetics. Like it’s polygenic scores and genetic risk assessments are complicated to understand and complicated to communicate even to experts. And I do worry about are the claims that some companies are making, are they being matched by the evidence and are they being communicated to prospective parents in a way that appropriately Conveys the sort of uncertainty? Chris Williamson As far as I can see, the only company that’s even remotely close is Harasite. If it’s not them, I think everybody else, and even they, are still at the absolute frontier of how it is that they put this. Kathryn Paige Harden And they, to their credit, have been very transparent about their statistical models and their reasoning, which not all companies have done. Chris Williamson I think they’re trying to do it right. Kathryn Paige Harden I think there’s also the larger question. I wrote about this on my sub-stock recently, which is how does something becoming a choice, particularly around the body, change everyone else’s experience, even if they don’t make That choice. (Time 2:13:46)
  • Selecting Against Antisocial Traits Risks A Conformist Society
    • Widespread embryo selection for ‘low antisocial’ traits could produce a highly inhibited, conformist population and remove the genetic variation that fuels innovation and societal change.
    • Harden warns against top-down reproductive engineering because diversity supports evolution and cultural adaptability. Transcript: Kathryn Paige Harden We are going to, like, stop murders in this country because we’re going to, like, breed the sen genes out of people. And you did that for several generations. And so at every generation, you selected only the least risk-taking, most inhibited, least antisocial. Is that a world you want to live in? Is that you’ve selected people who are most likely to go along and get along and do well in school and be great at having a boss and like be really good at working a desk job and like are very Very self-controlled perhaps to the point of too self-controlled but like do you when you think about your family and your friends and the cities that you’ve chosen to live in do you Want to live in a place that’s populated only by the most puritanical and inhibited among us? Like, probably not. I wouldn’t. Chris Williamson You get to sort of a God’s eye coordination problem here though, right? You parents, what we really need is to keep some of this high externalizing behavior in the gene pool. So we would like you to pay the price so that we can continue to have this grist for the mill that can spread randomly between. Kathryn Paige Harden I mean, I think you’re picking up on like a really fundamental, like, you’re exactly right, which is that we put so much pressure on individual parents to be entirely responsible for The care of their children, to mitigate any bad outcomes. And we live in a society in which society is better off when we have variety, when we have genetic diversity. Like, there is no evolution without mutation. There is no… The sociologist Emile Durkheim had this passage that crime is necessary to every society because unless you have people who are willing to do things differently, a society will never Evolve. Chris Williamson But you are asking parents to pay a high price if they are the ones that have to deal with the child that pays the price. Kathryn Paige Harden And that’s why I think there isn’t, this is why I feel like the dictating reproductive policy from the top down. (Time 2:26:13)
  • Modern Medicine Doesn’t Necessarily Crumble The Genome
    • ‘Crumbling genome’ fears ignore niche construction and evolutionary context: buffering selection pressures via medicine is not unique and evolution isn’t teleological.
    • Harden argues short-term worries about genome decline from modern medicine overextrapolate from recent decades. Transcript: Kathryn Paige Harden So I think that being able to hear is a good thing. I also know that there’s plenty of people in the deaf, capital D, deaf community who would willingly select a non-hearing child, a child that can’t hear if they could, to carry on the Community. Chris Williamson I’ve seen the personhood of the deaf community, the denial of the personhood of the deaf community. Kathryn Paige Harden I think as a psychologist and a geneticist, I think of what’s good or bad in an evolutionary sense is always being relative to an environment. Like white fur is good when it’s snowy a lot and it starts to be bad as soon as it’s not snowy a lot if you’re a rabbit. And not really good or bad in some sort of like absolute sense. So I can see the argument that’s like, given that humans will always have some novel pathogens because bacteria and viruses evolve a lot faster than we do. Like having an immune system that can keep up with that is going to be good for most of the environments that humans will likely face in our evolutionary future. (Time 2:35:19)
  • Sex Differences Matter Mostly At The Extremes
    • Sex differences in traits (aggression, impulsivity) are real but distributions overlap greatly; differences matter most at statistical extremes rather than for most individuals.
    • Harden suggests institutions (e.g., schooling) should account for developmental and sexed differences so both boys and girls have fair opportunities. Transcript: Kathryn Paige Harden Is unfair the word that I would use to that? Chris Williamson We’re being asked to modify our behavior in a manner that women aren’t simply because of what modern society. Kathryn Paige Harden Well, I mean, this has been Richard Reeves’ argument. I don’t know if you’re familiar. He wrote a voice in that show. Chris Williamson Oh, really? Kathryn Paige Harden So, you know, like, if we’re not going to change schools, then we should redshirt all the boys and give them an extra year as the only. Because asking a five-year boy to do developmentally the exact same thing as a five-year girl isn’t unfair in his in his comparison you’ve spent a lot of time talking about dominance And aggression i want to i want to go up a level to think if i can articulate this in terms of sort of like more general principles and then go back to your your specific question so in questions Like this when we think about fair or unfair, just or unjust, I’m still very heavily influenced by Rawls, political philosopher John Rawls, and his thought experiment, which is, if You didn’t know what hand you were going to be dealt in the natural lottery and in the social lottery, what rules would you want for society? And that’s an interesting question to think like, if I didn’t know whether or not I was going to be a man or a woman, would I set school up the way that school is set up now? And I can’t, I actually wish that I could like inhabit the mind of a man for a day just to see like, is it really different? Is it very similar? I’d be fascinated with that. I can’t do that, but I have a son, I have a child. And so I can get to, given what I know about sex differences in brain development, in rates of ADHD, in rates of conduct disorder, how would I design an educational system such that my Sons and my daughters would have an equal opportunity to thrive in them? And it sure as heck wouldn’t be what we do now. I mean, my son’s in middle school and I think it’s culturally insane what we do. Like there is no culture on earth before industrial capitalism that was like, do you know what we should do with our 12 and 13 year old pubertal boys? We should put them inside all day, Ask them to sit still with each other and no older boys and no younger kids and no responsibilities. And we should put a 25-year woman in charge of them. Chris Williamson And we should get them to learn stuff that they won’t be able to remember a decade later. (Time 2:37:30)
  • Read Original Sin For Genetics Of Vice And Forgiveness
    • Read Harden’s new book Original Sin to explore genetics of vice, blame, and forgiveness with practical courtroom and parenting implications.
    • The book offers scientific findings, case studies (prison letters), and policy-relevant arguments about punishment and rehabilitation. Transcript: Kathryn Paige Harden Do you think of the lux maxing movement as a geneticist i mean i know very little about this um at the end of the day like i’m a middle age college professor so i am like somewhat buffered From online world from what I read it does seem to me to be very ironic because um it seems that some of the interventions are making people infertile like I’m going to I’m going to look Smacks and take a bunch of testosterone and ruin my ability to like procreate feels really deeply ironic. Chris Williamson Like genetic seppuku. Kathryn Paige Harden Yes, exactly. And also my friend, Paul Eastwick, who I think you talked to. I did a couple of weeks ago. He did. Paul is an old friend. I’ve been talking about research with him for 15 years. And when I first met him, I was like, what do you mean you don’t believe in made value? Like, I don’t believe you that that doesn’t exist. And now I’m like, oh, made value exists among strangers and acquaintances. And then it declines as people get to know each other. That actually makes total sense to me. But I am very convinced by his argument that the core task of evolution was how do we survive and raise the next generation? And so our biggest boon towards that was the ability to form pair bonds and attach to each other, not to outcompete strangers like, signals vaguely related to genetic fitness. Chris Williamson So what do you think it says that that’s what’s being optimized for now by young men? Oh. Kathryn Paige Harden What do you—I mean, you’re—you are a younger and a man. So what do you—like, what do you think? I actually don’t—it feels very nihilistic. Feels like if we were looking at this in another species and we were like, there’s a subset of the young mammals who aren’t dating, aren’t interested in romance, aren’t interested in Chris Williamson Reproducing, but are interested in extreme body modification to give the signals that typically would be attractive by the other sex but not in order to get the other sex yeah so the Lux maxing community i think is pretty broad and in that will be a subset of guys who are doing it in order to get sexual access to women they go they want to get laid they want to get laid so They’re going to be tall or they want to go to the gym to get jack i did i did lux maxing right it was called going to the gym yeah um so a couple of interesting things this is definitely this Is kind of an inevitable end point or one of the points along the journey of understanding behavioral genetics, understanding some mate preferences from women, at least aesthetically For men. Because when you combine those two things together, there are certain things that are going to be more difficult for you to change without doing something that’s extreme. And if you are growing up inside of a culture that is making it increasingly difficult for guys to get in front of women in a way that seems warm and welcomed, if you’re in a post-MeToo world, Where approaching women in public is something that many young men have been told that they shouldn’t do, that you have a little bit of a tall girl problem. Socioeconomic success amongst women means that they’re rising up through their own competence hierarchy. So there’s ever fewer men that are above and across from them. So if they want to date, typically on average, a woman wants to date a man as educated or more than her and as wealthy or more than she is and as tall or more than she is, you end up with an ever-increasing Group of high-performing women and an ever-decreasing group of ultra-high men. If you do that and you keep on pushing, I think what you’re actually seeing is guys competing with other guys as a way to find some end goal. You’ll even hear it in the way that they speak like clavicular, who’s kind of the number one of this. He’ll say, I don’t care about getting girls. I just want to mog. And what he means is I want to out alpha other guys. And what he’s talking about with that, like mogging is not just good looks, it’s formidability. And I’m sure that you’ve seen a lot of the stuff around male formidabilities as good, if not a better predictor of sexual success than Lux are. So it’s a really funny, I don’t think that this is what’s meant to happen, but they’ve ended up at what the outcome should be in any case, which is formidability is better, a better predictor Of male sexual success than attractiveness tends to be by pushing for formidability that’s coded in a very man way it’s all about brow ridge heavy cheeks like strong jawline being tall Kathryn Paige Harden Like maybe this is just me being extremely out of touch but i’m a woman i’ve been married twice i dated other people. I’ve been in relationships. I have, you know, I’m a heterosexual woman who has been involved in heterosexual relationships since I was 15. So nearly 30 years now. Every time I read this description of what women or especially like educated or high income or like, you know, women who have some social status want. But they’re looking for an apartment or how they pick partners, who they choose to have sex with. Surprises me because it bears so little relationship to how I have ended up in sexually satisfying, romantically satisfying relationships. And I think particularly with the education thing, I’ve long thought, you know, I’ve, I’m, my first husband, uh, I met during graduate school. So he has the exact education as me um my second husband has i guess on paper less education than me made less money than me when we first met um so i’m in one of those relationships that people Suggest shouldn’t happen which is like people marrying like across or down as a woman socioeconomically yeah and i’m like but my husband is extremely competent. Chris Williamson Like he can- But you know what competence is a predictor for future socioeconomic success. That is how that would get netted down, right? I guess so, but I- And it’s the same thing. Kathryn Paige Harden I always- But I think the sense of like, you want what you, you know, the competence is a signal for like socioeconomic status. I actually think it’s the reverse. Like if I reflect on what I want, I’m like, I want a man who knows how to contribute to the family (Time 2:49:25)