Listen and Learn:

  • Why genes, like environments, tilt the playing field without determining the outcome, and what a cloned Texas bull named Second Chance (who gored his owners, unlike the sweet original) teaches us about genetic determinism
  • Why "What if you'd had my childhood?" invites sympathy while "What if you'd had my genome?" feels like an identity threat, and how DNA has become our modern "essence placeholder"
  • What the Lindsay Clancy and Andrea Yates cases reveal about the limits of our victim/perpetrator binary, and why our legal system and moral intuitions struggle when someone is both
  • How punishment shows up across the natural world, from paper wasp queens who get deposed for eating too many of their sisters' eggs to fig trees that shrivel the fruit of lazy pollinators
  • Why our retributive drive is deeply "baked into the evolutionary sauce," and why simply understanding the free will problem won't make it disappear
  • Durkheim's argument that a society without crime would be neither possible nor desirable, and how deviance drives moral innovation
  • Why accountability has become collapsed with punishment, in criminal justice and in modern parenting debates, and what a "third way" might look like
  • How the Norwegian response to Anders Breivik reframes the question from "Does this person deserve punishment?" to "How do we treat someone who has done something terrible and is still one of us?"
  • Why dehumanizing others degrades the punisher as well as the punished, and how service-based consequences might replace immiseration

Resources:


About Kathryn Paige Harden

Kathryn Paige Harden is a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, where she leads the Developmental Behavior Genetics Lab, studying how kids' and teens' DNA sequences and epigenomes interact with their environments to shape thought, feeling, and behavior. She earned her PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Virginia and trained clinically at McLean Hospital, Harvard Medical School. Her first book, The Genetic Lottery, argued that genetics matters for social equality and made her one of the most debated scientists writing for a general audience. Her new book, Original Sin, is part memoir, part behavioral genetics primer, and part philosophical reckoning with her own evangelical upbringing, arguing that the question of why people do terrible things cannot be answered by nature or nurture alone.

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