Catherine Page Harden

Disinformation is very similar.

It's another variable that's probabilistically related, and it can serve to be a control for research.

That's kind of the least sexy application, but the one that scientists are most interested in.

It can serve to humanize people, to remind us that no one chose the body and the brain that they have by the time they're an adult from a legal perspective.

And it can help us see who's being left behind.

I think we're already in the realm of eugenics.

There was ads in the New York City subway a few months ago saying, have your best baby.

And it was an ad for a direct-to-consumer polygenic testing company for embryos.

And this technology was

raises really urgent questions about our values and the tensions between those values.

I think what's important for people to understand is not only are these genes not deterministic, but genes don't have a one-to-one relationship with behavior.

Genes do lots of things in our body because what they do is they code for proteins and their proteins are involved in lots of different processes.

So for instance, genes that are associated with an elevated risk for schizophrenia are also associated with higher chances of going to college.

Is that a good gene or a bad gene?

It's neither.

And the core of eugenics is projecting our normative judgments about good genes.

and bad down into the genome.

When it comes to the specific genes that we're looking at in relation to aggression and antisocial behavior,

We also see that they're associated with positive risk-taking.

We also see that the people who are most likely to be entrepreneurs by the time they're 30 or 35 have a history of delinquency in adolescence.