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Chapter 1: How do genes influence our behavior?
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I work at a university in Texas, which means my university mailing address is just the address of the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas. And so I sometimes get mail from people I don't know.
Catherine Page Harden is a behavioral geneticist. She studies how our genes impact who we are and the choices we make. She's used to her work attracting interest, but among her posts one morning was something jaw-dropping.
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Chapter 2: What questions did a prisoner ask about nature versus nurture?
One day I received a letter from a man who is in prison in one of Texas's oldest and largest prisons. And he said that he committed a crime as a teenager. He kidnapped a woman and sexually assaulted her, left her naked on the side of a road. And I believe he was 15 or 16 at the time he committed this crime.
The man had read about her work in a local magazine and he had some questions.
So he wrote me and he said, I have 10 questions for you. And one of them was, what makes a child go bad, nature or nurture? And I was just really stunned by the letter.
It became the jumping off point for her new book, Original Sin, on the genetics of wrongdoing, the problem of blame and the future of forgiveness.
Why should it matter if it's nature or nurture? Why do we look for answers for why we do the things we do? And when we look to science, are we also sort of looking for absolution in those explanations?
So today, I talked to Paige about what our genes can predict about our behavior and asked, if our genes make us more likely to commit a crime, are we just as guilty? I'm the Guardian science editor, Ian Sample, and this is Science Weekly. Catherine Page Harden, welcome to Science Weekly.
Now, the letter we just heard about came at an interesting time because it coincided with a paper your lab produced linking DNA differences with people's tendency to behave in ways that we as a society punish. So take me through that research. What were you looking at and what did you find?
Yeah, so the technical term of what we're looking at is called externalizing spectrum behaviors, which is a mouthful. And it's basically the idea that sometimes people have problems that are internal, like depression and anxiety, and sometimes people have life problems that are more external.
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Chapter 3: What findings link DNA differences to antisocial behavior?
So they come into conflict with social norms, moral norms, legal norms. And externalizing behaviors can range from the very minor. So you smoke cigarettes even though you know that it's bad for you. You drink alcohol to the point that it's a problem in your life. To various serious harms like you aggress against another person.
So what we were looking at is could we identify specific DNA sequences, differences in the DNA letters between people. that are correlated with being more likely to engage in not just one form of externalizing, but all of them.
So these are genes that make it more likely for you to smoke and also to drink and also to have sex with more people and also potentially to aggress against another person. And for some people listening, you might think, well, having sex with lots of people and aggressing against someone, those are totally different behaviors. One is not necessarily harmful in any way. And that's absolutely true.
But what all of these behaviors have in common is that at least someone in society says you shouldn't do them and you do them anyway. And so what we see is that there's genes that are in common across all of these things.
And there's an idea in there then that people can be genetically predisposed or more at risk of criminality. And that's obviously controversial. It's unsettling in some ways. But you make the case in the book that there are many other things that we used to put down to sort of nurture environment that actually have turned out to have these genetic components.
Things like obesity, things like religiosity, even autism. People put that down to environmental factors. too many decades ago.
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Chapter 4: How do externalizing behaviors manifest in society?
Yeah. So there's this idea that we can kind of pre-intuit or pre-know which behaviors are going to be influenced by genes and which aren't. But then if we look in our history, we can see obvious examples where we were wrong in the past and our intuitions have shifted in response to science. So schizophrenia used to be thought to be the result of a
schizophrenic mother, and we now know that it is very strongly heritable. We used to think of obesity in terms of sloth and gluttony, and now, especially in the age of Ozempic, we can see that it's profoundly biological and can be manipulated by injecting a peptide in your body.
So we can see over time that societies always kind of have a carve out where we think, well, this behavior is somehow floating free of our body. But that's almost never the case. All of our behavior is being produced by a body, by a brain, and that brain is going to be shaped by the genes we happen to inherit.
How much difference does each actual gene variant make?
So ordinarily, for the vast majority of people and for the vast majority of genetic variants, a difference between us and our genes makes only the tiniest bit of difference to our probability of of showing a behavior. I think the best analogy for helping people understand this is to think about height.
So there's a few people who inherit genes for gigantism that make them very tall or genes for dwarfism that make them very short. But most of the reasons why people are taller or shorter is because there's thousands of genes scattered throughout the genome That might make you a millimeter taller or a millimeter shorter.
But even though each one of those genes only has a tiny effect, you could have many, many, many height-increasing genes, and then you're going to end up on the tails. And it's the same sort of thing for behavior. So we're looking at things that are what are called massively polygenic, so poly meaning many, Genic meaning, obviously, genes. So there's many, many genes involved.
Each one of them is just like adding a little tiny hair to the scale. But we have a large DNA sequence, and we have a lot of genetic variants. And so they can add up so that it makes a large difference at the tails of the distribution.
And you talk about these polygenic scores, which look at the contributions of lots of genes and how they correlate with risky antisocial behaviors. But even when you look at sort of groups of genes where these effects may add up, is it possible to attribute causation at like an individual level or, you know, Are there other factors you have to consider?
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Chapter 5: What role do genes play in predicting criminality?
So we intend to think of causes as probabilistic difference makers. So if you inherited something, it makes a difference to the probability of showing a behavior. And our best evidence that these genes are actually causal is that we see that they make a difference even within families.
So if the genes are associated with behavior, even when comparing between siblings or even when controlling for your parents' genes, that's pretty good evidence that those genes are operating causally. But everything we're talking about with human behavior doesn't have just one cause. So it's not nature or nurture, genes or environment. It's always genes and the prenatal environment.
and the social structures that you're being raised in, and your access to material resources, and poverty, and lead exposure, the idea that we're going to find the smoking gun, the thing that is the cause of behavior, just isn't realistic.
There's something I want to ask a bit more about, because in the book you say there's no way to meaningfully distinguish between nature and nurture, that our genes and our environment combine in ways that are just impossible to pick apart.
But I wonder if you could unpack that because clearly you're saying, and sometimes drawing on these twin studies, you're saying that you can isolate genetic components and you can say that genes do affect the chances of someone doing something.
So you can measure different factors and you can loosely categorize them as I'm measuring your DNA, so I'm measuring your genes, or I'm measuring the amount of income that your family makes, and so I'm measuring your environment. But as soon as we shift our attention from measuring how people differ to trying to understand why those differences matter,
We inevitably end up in the world of gene environment interaction. So we know that poverty gets under the skin to change how your genes are expressed. We know that children with genetic differences experience different environments because adults respond to them differently. That line between nature and nurture gets real fuzzy real fast.
So the influence of these gene variants in the average person is still nowhere near deterministic. We're getting away from the idea of genes being deterministic, thank goodness. So if that's the case, what is the value of the kinds of polygenic scores that you're interested in? If they're not going to say, yes, this person is destined to be a rongan, what is the value of those scores?
I'm going to use the word rongan. I'm going to try to put that in my southern accent and take that from here. So I think it's helpful to think about how we use other variables that are not deterministic but do make a difference. So we know, for example, that children who are raised in poverty are more likely to develop substance use problems. That's not deterministic.
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Chapter 6: How do polygenic scores relate to behavior?
I don't know how it is here, but in the American criminal legal system, it's very common in the sentencing phase for the defendant's representation to talk about, well, how has his or her life been shaped by these environmental factors? And again, it's not that if you were maltreated or you were raised in a poor home, you were destined to commit a crime.
But it does help the jurors and the judge perhaps understand how might he have come to this place in their life. So I think genetic information. 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.
Coming up, from the lab to the fertility clinic, the troubling real-world applications of polygenic scores.
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some of this work can feel unsettling. And we know that fertility clinics are already offering embryo selection using polygenic scores, and they are selling selection for lowering risk of certain cancers, but even IQ, whatever they mean by IQ, and psychiatric conditions like bipolar and schizophrenia, which leads you to the question of whether the kind of work that
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Chapter 7: What ethical concerns arise from genetic research?
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. So is risk-taking always a bad thing? Is lack of conformity to society's norms always a bad thing? Absolutely not.
I think America is a real Wild West right now in terms of lack of regulation, but also just lack of democratic participation and debate about how do we want to use this technology and how do we not want to use this technology. And I don't think it should be one person or one company's vision for how this technology is deployed.
And it's interesting, again, how you go through in the book where risk taking can have different outcomes depending on the environment that that risk taking person is born into. And so if you're risk taking and you happen to be born into an extremely wealthy family on the West Coast and you get into the tech world, then maybe your trajectory is one that's praised by society.
But maybe if you are born into a different family under different circumstances, that risk taking might end up with you just stealing loads of cars and Exactly.
I was having this conversation with a friend of mine, and she said, well, wouldn't everyone, if they had the chance, select their child to be, you know, the least likely to be addicted to drugs, the least likely to have ADHD? And I said to her, didn't you have a child with a fighter pilot? Like, you—
mated with someone whose entire job depends on taking risks and the ability to manage those sensations, even at the real negative physical consequences of crashing this plane into the ocean. So I think we have this idea that less risk-taking is always good, but our behaviors often belie that statement.
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Chapter 8: How should our understanding of genetics inform accountability?
I mean, I've loved being in London this week, in part because you walk down the street and you see such variety, and variety really is necessary to human flourishing.
And coming back to the premise of the book, this question of whether we might feel differently about someone's crimes if we knew there was a genetic element to them. What do you feel the evidence shows at the moment?
I think the evidence shows that our intuitions are wildly all over the place, depending on the person, depending on the person that's being judged and depending on the crime. So sometimes genes tend to have a humanizing effect or a mitigating effect. And that happens when... There's this idea that there's a person, and then the genes are constraining that person's agency in some way.
My genes made me do it. I couldn't have done otherwise. That's a more determinist story about genes. But it's very easy to slip into a more essentialist framing of genes, which really sees the genes as a reflection of who a person really is. They're bad to the bone. They're a bad seed.
And that tends to make us more punitive or at least less likely to trust that there's hope for rehabilitation and change in the future. Genetics is a very, very new science. And our ideas about heredity and sinfulness and can we inherit something that makes us blameworthy are much, much, much older. And so the new science is kind of being grafted onto these much older debates that we have.
And so finally, Catherine, I want to know where you come down on all of this. Maybe you're, you know, delaying coming down on one side, but how do you think that the knowledge you and others are gaining should inform our approach to accountability, to punishment?
So I won't say how I think everyone should approach this, but I will tell you how I have ended up approaching it. As someone who has spent most of her adult life thinking about how her genes connected to the bad things or the things that are called bad that people do. And I would say that it has made me much less punitive.
And I live in one of the most punitive states and one of the most punitive countries in the world. Because I see how my life could have gone differently, not just if I had been born into a different family or different environmental circumstances, but if there had been a different combination of DNA letters when, you know, the egg or the sperm that made me happened.
I don't think of people as inherently bad or inherently good. I'm just continually reminded of our common fallible humanity when I think about genetics.
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