Kathryn Paige Harden

So he didn't go into details about his family history.

But he did say, as we say in Texas, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

When he's referring to that, he's implying that there's some similarity with his parents.

But he doesn't know whether he's similar to his parents because...

his parents provided him his environment or because maybe inherited some sort of genetic liability towards violence or towards aggression from his family.

And that's exactly the problem that we're often trying to figure out scientifically.

We can clearly see that

Violence runs in families, that addiction runs in families, and it seems to run in families not just because parents are raising their children, but also because there seems to be some genetic predisposition to aggression, to violence, to antisocial behavior that's being passed down from parent to child.

I think often the science on how people might inherit these liabilities towards violence or aggression have been interpreted as if they make that responsibility go away.

If you inherited something, then you're off the hook.

Whereas I think what it does is it adds something along with that need for responsibility.

We both are responsible for what we do because that's a condition of being a grown up in relationship with other people.

But at the same time, do we have to hold people responsible in a way that makes them responsible?

maximally suffer or is maximally punitive.

And that's where I think the genetics is really interesting because it can soften our sense that maybe this person could have always acted otherwise and so therefore they really deserve to be punished.

What I want to shift people's thinking away is not who deserves to be punished because they could have done otherwise, but how do we hold people accountable given

Yes.

And we see that not just in people, but in every cooperative system.

If you look at colonies of bacteria, if one bacterium takes too much of the minerals that they all need, the other bacteria will send out signals that will hurt the freeloader, the one that's taking too much.

If we look at...