The Genetics of Evil: Are People Born Bad? - Dr Kathryn Paige Harden

1. 0:00 – 5:28

   Why Kathryn’s Last Book Was So Controversial

   1. CWChris Williamson0:00

      What happened after the publication of your last book?

   2. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden0:03

      [laughs] Oh, it was a wild time. I, I... There was a lot of controversy. There was a lot of pushback. Um, the conversations that I had with real people, not with other academics, but with just people who wrote me, people who, you know, happened to encounter the book in some way. That was fantastic.

   3. CWChris Williamson0:24

      Mm.

   4. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden0:24

      Um, people wrote me and they said, "I've always wondered why I'm so different from my parents or why I'm so different from my siblings, and your work has given me a new way of understanding that." They, um, wrote to me about their decision to have kids or their decision not to have kids, and how thinking about genetics has shaped that. So that part of the conversation, which is the dialogue between an author and their readers, was fantastic. I loved that.

   5. CWChris Williamson0:51

      Mm-hmm.

   6. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden0:52

      And then there was another part of the dialogue, which was me with other academics, and that was really surprising to me, um, in part because I felt like they n- some people needed to turn me into a villain in order to get their own message out. Um, and I was kind of caught off guard by that whole process, so. Um, I wish I could say that I had a thicker skin now, but I, but I don't in many ways. I, I really do care what people think. I care about getting it right. Um, so it took me a bit to think about how to get myself back out there in terms of the ideas in the wake of that.

   7. CWChris Williamson1:34

      Especially if you're doing something that you think is trying to educate people about what is true.

   8. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:39

      Yes.

   9. CWChris Williamson1:40

      I'm trying to emancipate you from ignorance and explain things that make you feel less broken and alone, and then someone comes in and says, "Well, actually, what she's trying to-"

   10. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:51

       [laughs] What she's really saying-

   11. CWChris Williamson1:54

       Dude, don't try and fucking imbue me with your perspective of who you think I am or what you think my work is. And that's where we get indignant. There's that line, right, that the only insults that hurt are the ones that we believe. I don't think that's true. I think the only insults that hurt, or the insults that hurt most, are the ones that we think other people might believe about us.

   12. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:14

       I think the insults that hurt worst are the ones in which I didn't recognize the person they were insulting. So when you write a book, you have ideas and they're literally, you know, in black and white, they're on the text.

   13. CWChris Williamson2:26

       Mm.

   14. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:27

       You can point and you can say, "Look, I wrote this." And then when someone says, "She said X," when I literally had said the exact opposite of that.

   15. CWChris Williamson2:36

       Mm.

   16. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:36

       There's something very alienating and disorienting about feeling like you are talking, but people are deliberately not hearing you.

   17. CWChris Williamson2:47

       Surely part of that must be a sense that other people could pattern match it as truth, though. Because if not... I- if, if I call you fat, you're not fat. So you go, "Well, I..." It's funny, if I, if I, if I say that you're too tanned, you've got too much fake tan on, you go, "I'm not wearing any fake tan."

   18. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden3:02

       Yeah.

   19. CWChris Williamson3:03

       So obviously that's not going to land. So I... that's what I mean, that the lens through which these criticisms at least seem to bite the most are someone somewhere might believe that this could be true.

   20. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden3:14

       That this is a version of me.

   21. CWChris Williamson3:16

       Yes.

   22. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden3:16

       That's true. The author Sally Rooney, she's a novelist, an Irish novelist, and she talks in one of her books about there's you, the author, and then there's a version of you that wears your name and has your face, and everyone talks about her, and... but it's not you, and in some ways she's saying the exact opposite s- things. And so you almost feel like there's like a doppelganger of you walking around that is making the exact opposite argument that you are and-

   23. CWChris Williamson3:42

       Mm

   24. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden3:42

       ... I think you're right that it's thinking that other people are gonna think that she's me-

   25. CWChris Williamson3:46

       Yes. Yes

   26. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden3:47

       ... is so disorienting.

   27. CWChris Williamson3:48

       This weird shadow Paige.

   28. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden3:50

       Yeah.

   29. CWChris Williamson3:51

       Yeah.

   30. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden3:51

       It's also, I think there's something about relationships. Like I don't know if you've ever been in a relationship where you say something and the other person doesn't hear it at all the way you intended, and then you end up having this fight where you're like, "But I didn't say that."
2. 5:28 – 9:21

   What Actually Pushes People to Take Risks?

   1. CWChris Williamson5:28

      You did a big four million person study. You were a part of that.

   2. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden5:31

      [laughs] I did.

   3. CWChris Williamson5:31

      What did you learn?

   4. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden5:32

      Well, it wasn't just me. There's many co-authors. Um, science, especially with this, is a, 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. Um, so we pooled DNA from four million people, mostly from, um, UK Biobank, 23andMe customers, um, 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, um, they had sex at a young age, they have more sexual partners, they have ever smoked pot, they are, um, engaging in what we call problematic alcohol use, which is drinking to the point that it causes problems in your life, um, 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 in do one of these things, but are more common in any, any one of these behaviors. Can we find genes that are just generally involved in being a risk taker?

   5. CWChris Williamson6:58

      Is that suite of things altogether risk taking? Where does the ADHD part come into that?

   6. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden7:03

      Oh, well, ADHD is mo- is impulsivity and hyperactivity. So s- so one way you can think about it is this is disinhibition. These are-- 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 are... get the diagnosis of ADHD because they're doing things in school that they shouldn't be doing. Um, sexual behavior is moralized. So if you're having sex at fourteen or if you're having sex with very many sexual partners, that's against kind of a conventional morality.

   7. CWChris Williamson7:39

      Mm.

   8. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden7:39

      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 had gathered enough genetic data from people. Um, 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, um, 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. Um, so it's a similar concept but just more people this time, which gives you more power. Um, and it's interesting how much people vary in those behaviors. So just, 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 ninety-nine, because you're not allowed to put three digits of sexual partners into the survey. So, um, 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.

3. 9:21 – 11:59

   What Drew Kathryn to the World of Antisocial Behaviour?

   1. CWChris Williamson9:21

      What got you thinking about wrongdoing and impulsivity and bad behavior, antisocial behavior?

   2. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden9:28

      I've kind of always been interested in it. Maybe it's the opposite of me search because I was a very not cool, not risk taking adolescent. But when I-- my first job in science was in a, um, mouse lab. So it was a behavioral neuroscience lab that studied mice, and it was studying 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 sub- substance.

   3. CWChris Williamson10:09

      More resilient.

   4. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden10:10

      Yeah, more resilient. Um, and this was me-- This was when I was a college freshman, so nineteen ninety-nine to two thousand. Ver-- You know, the... I-- When I started, the draft of the human genome hadn't even been completed yet.

   5. CWChris Williamson10:26

      Mm-hmm.

   6. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden10:27

      Um, 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, 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."

   7. CWChris Williamson11:08

      Mm.

   8. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden11:08

      We're taking this behavior that I've always seen... Um, we can get into this if you want, but I was raised a, a, 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, um, your relationship with Jesus. And now we're modeling it in mice, and now we're gonna 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. Um, and so I've, I, 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-

   9. CWChris Williamson11:56

      Mm

   10. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden11:56

       ... now I study it in people.

4. 11:59 – 20:48

   How Have We Evolved to Become Deviant?

   1. CWChris Williamson11:59

      What's the... Talk to me about the evolutionary roots before we even get into the really, really spicy stuff of the-

   2. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden12:06

      [laughs]

   3. CWChris Williamson12:06

      ... heritability of antisocial behavior and things like that. Let'sThe palate cleanser of evolutionary psychology. What's the evolutionary roots of sort of aggression, dominance, impulsivity, that kind of-

   4. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden12:17

      I 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 we 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.

   5. CWChris Williamson12:39

      Mm-hmm.

   6. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden12:39

      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. Um, our physiology has changed in ways that are less aggressive. We have... You know, we've lost our big canines, and we don't have the same huge jaw in the same way. And so there's some interesting theories about, um, essentially humans in their long journey towards becoming this incredibly cooperative species, s- we selected each other s- to be more self-controlled, more self-regulated.

   7. CWChris Williamson13:29

      Mm-hmm.

   8. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden13:30

      At the same time, w- there's, there's a countervailing force there, which is that, um, there's a lot of ways in which some risk-taking is rewarded in a society and even necessary in a society.

   9. CWChris Williamson13:47

      Mm-hmm. Mm.

   10. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden13:47

       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 so- material resources, so white men from middle to upper income families.

   11. CWChris Williamson14:09

       Mm.

   12. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden14:10

       Um, but amongst them, who was most likely to become an entrepreneur?

   13. CWChris Williamson14:14

       When controlling for white men from upper income families.

   14. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden14:17

       Yeah. Like amongst people who might have the-

   15. CWChris Williamson14:19

       'Cause there's lots of them.

   16. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden14:20

       The-

   17. CWChris Williamson14:20

       And not all of them, not many of them become successful entrepreneurs.

   18. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden14:22

       Exactly. Most of them do not, right? So amongst people who might, say, have enough resources-

   19. CWChris Williamson14:28

       Raw material

   20. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden14:29

       ... raw materials, um, who does become a successful entrepreneur? And one of the best predictors is did you engage in some delinquency as a teenager?

   21. CWChris Williamson14:38

       Risk-taking.

   22. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden14:39

       Yeah. So did you ever get... Did you... Were you ever arrested? Did you ever paint graffiti? Did you ever do... Not serious, not serious aggressive delinquency, but some an- something that was a little bit rule-breaking, maybe got in trouble at school, maybe got in trouble with the law.

   23. CWChris Williamson14:56

       Mm-hmm.

   24. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden14:57

       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 wanna do it my own way." And so I think that as a species, we, we need cooperation, but then we also need some level of risk-taking, some outliers. We need some level of deviance-

   25. CWChris Williamson15:24

       Mm

   26. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden15:24

       ... in order to push the society forward too.

   27. CWChris Williamson15:27

       The-

   28. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden15:27

       And so these things are kind of always in tension

   29. CWChris Williamson15:29

       ... the level of deviance is less because the waterline of domestication has also-

   30. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden15:34

       Will go, gone down
5. 20:48 – 25:02

   Should You Really Wait Until 30 To Try Drugs?

   1. CWChris Williamson20:48

      inverse question would be to look at schizophrenic people and think how many of you were meant to be artists, and you just had the, the, the wrong foundations for the first, you know, decade of your life. I have a, a, a friend here in Austin who was in the sort of psychedelic-y scene that is everywhere in the city-

   2. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden21:07

      Mm-hmm

   3. CWChris Williamson21:07

      ... for a, a good while, and I asked him, "Have you ever partaken in any mushrooms or anything like that?" He says, "No, man, I've got, I've got a, a few close relatives that have got schizophrenia." And I think he was 28.

   4. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden21:21

      Mm-hmm.

   5. CWChris Williamson21:21

      So once you get past 30 or 35, I think the risk of it causing-

   6. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden21:26

      It's very low

   7. CWChris Williamson21:26

      ... a schizophrenic break. But-

   8. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden21:28

      Yeah

   9. CWChris Williamson21:28

      ... is this, this, this, this isn't just myth, this is actual truth?

   10. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden21:31

       No, this is true.

   11. CWChris Williamson21:32

       Oh, cool.

   12. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden21:33

       Yeah. So I think there's evidence to suggest that people who have a family history of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia are potentially neg- more negatively affected by cannabis and by hallucinogens, by psychedelic drugs generally, and that the risk for that first psychotic break is really, you know, most commonly 15 to 30, like really concentrated in young adulthood. So if you've made it to your, to your 30s without your, without experiencing a psychotic episode-

   13. CWChris Williamson22:07

       Psyche snapping in half. Yeah

   14. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden22:08

       ... you've probably passed through the period of major risk. That doesn't mean the risk is over, but it's a lot smaller.

   15. CWChris Williamson22:14

       Mm.

   16. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden22:14

       And that tracks also about brain development, where like we don't really see a fully adult brain in terms of the wiring of the prefrontal cortex until 27 to 30. So if you're thinking about not, not adding something that might disrupt brain development while it's still cohering, and then maybe it's a little bit safer, uh, after, after that period of time. I told my kids, "If you ever wanna try psychedelic drugs, you should wait until after 30."

   17. CWChris Williamson22:44

       Have you got schizophrenia in your family?

   18. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden22:46

       We do not have schizophrenia in our family.

   19. CWChris Williamson22:48

       You just didn't want them to have a psych- psychotic break anyway.

   20. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden22:50

       I, I feel like psychedelic drugs are really great. I mean, what they do is they disrupt your normal patterns of brain communication, and they allow parts of your brain to talk to each other that don't ordinarily talk to each other. And I think that can be really powerful in middle age when you're kind of tending towards a neurobiological rut, you know, when every day is the same and you're... But I think your 20s are already a chaotic time. It's already a time of rapid development, rapid neuroplasticity. I don't think there's a need to add that additional element of disruption to it at that point in age. I mean, lots of people do, but my... Uh, and I don't know. I... Is there great data on is it worse to do it at 25 versus 35 or riskier? I don't know. But I've done psychedelic drugs, and I'm a psychologist that knows something about neurobiology, and my reading of the evidence was like, "I don't think so- this would be terrible, but I think you should wait until your brain is cooked before you mess with it." [chuckles]

   21. CWChris Williamson23:56

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6. 25:02 – 31:02

   Is Punishment More About Circumstance Than Crime?

   1. CWChris Williamson25:02

      Do you think wrongdoing is something that's freely chosen then? Or are we, are we-

   2. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden25:06

      [laughs] Just going straight into the free will question here.

   3. CWChris Williamson25:08

      Yeah. Well, look, are we born-

   4. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden25:09

      Yeah

   5. CWChris Williamson25:09

      ... predisposed toward transgression?

   6. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden25:12

      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, the luck of how those have combined, um, 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 shape the person that you are. And so that person might be... well, might certainly experience themselves as freely choosing.

   7. CWChris Williamson25:46

      Mm.

   8. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden25:46

      But the person who is doing the choosing-

   9. CWChris Williamson25:49

      Yep

   10. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden25:49

       ... the person that is deciding between the options, that person is so profoundly shaped by factors outside of their control.

   11. CWChris Williamson25:59

       We're on a set of train tracks.

   12. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden26:00

       Yeah.

   13. CWChris Williamson26:01

       Yeah.

   14. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden26:01

       I mean, I, I find the free will question... Actually, I find the free will question not, not the most interesting question because, uh, the question of do we have free will is, is a question about all of us. Either all humans 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.

   15. CWChris Williamson26:30

       Mm.

   16. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden26:32

       I'm more interested in the question of, um, what, given the science, do we know about how our genes, our environments have shaped us? And then given that, given that we definitely know that, um, how shaped we are by those forces-

   17. CWChris Williamson26:53

       Mm

   18. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden26:53

       ... what role should that play in punishment and reward and how we... and, a-and again, in how we treat each other?

   19. CWChris Williamson27:01

       I completely agree. I'm not-

   20. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden27:04

       Yeah

   21. CWChris Williamson27:04

       ... particularly interested in the free will question. Annika Harris has been on. She was great. Sam's been on. I know you know him.

   22. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden27:09

       Yeah.

   23. CWChris Williamson27:10

       Like, cool. Alex O'Connor, one of my friends, is big into this.

   24. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden27:13

       Yeah.

   25. CWChris Williamson27:13

       Like, i-i-it's fine. It's okay, but to me it feels like a little bit of a cognitive dead end. I'm sure maybe I'm just not smart enough to fully... I, I, I appreciate the, the arguments of determinism and-

   26. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden27:23

       Yeah

   27. CWChris Williamson27:23

       ... compatibilism, so on and so forth. Uh, but for me, a much more sort of functionally interesting one is to assume that we do and then play with the, the variables inside of it.

   28. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden27:33

       Inside of it.

   29. CWChris Williamson27:33

       Yes.

   30. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden27:34

       Yeah.
7. 31:02 – 35:14

   How Much Deviance is Written in Our DNA?

   1. CWChris Williamson31:02

      false. All right. Heritability of antisocial behavior.

   2. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden31:04

      Yeah.

   3. CWChris Williamson31:04

      What's it-- How does that look? Give me the suite of-

   4. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden31:07

      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, um, we see very high heritability, eighty percent for schizophrenia. So identical twins are not perfectly similar for schizophrenia, but if your identical twin has schizophrenia, you have a fifty-fifty shot of developing yourself, which is way higher than a base rate of one percent. So that's kind-

   5. CWChris Williamson32:03

      I thought you said it was eighty percent.

   6. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden32:05

      Uh, so, oh, the, the percent of variance is eighty percent. Um, so, 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. What 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 wanna do something and I am, 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 eighty percent, 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 par-..." They're not maltreating the child, no one's living in poverty, they're not living in a high lead environment, and this kid is still acting anti-- in this antisocial way and doesn't feel bad about it. That is the most heritable kind of subtype of conduct problems. Um, and it's a real problem in psychiatry because parents come to the psychiatrist or the doctor's office or the therapist office, and they're like, "My kid is aggressive."

   7. CWChris Williamson34:37

      Mm.

   8. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden34:38

      "And my kid doesn't feel bad about the fact they're aggressive." And that is the form of child mental health problems for which we have some of, some of the-- we have s- the fewest effective treatments for, compared to say, "My child is depressed," or, "My child is anxious," or-

   9. CWChris Williamson34:53

      Yep

   10. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden34:53

       ... you know. Even my child-- Even if your child is m- manic, there's medication for that.

   11. CWChris Williamson34:57

       Mm-hmm.

   12. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden34:58

       It's not gonna cure it, but it's gonna manage the symptoms. Whereas the persistently antisocial children, it's-- we're, we're-- we are at the limit scientifically of knowing how to, how to effectively help them and help their families.

8. 35:14 – 43:01

   Why Bad Behaviour in Kids Makes Us So Uncomfortable

   1. CWChris Williamson35:14

      How do you think most people typically interpret the behavior of a kid like that, and what's a different frame that you would give them using a behavioral genetic lens?

   2. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden35:25

      Yeah. So I think often people describe interacting with really antisocial children. The, the in-- their most common response is, is avoidance or harshness. So a lot of times when people are very callous, children or adults, you'll hear people say, "It makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up."

   3. CWChris Williamson35:48

      Mm.

   4. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden35:48

      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 neck feeling-

   5. CWChris Williamson36:12

      Pretty adaptive

   6. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden36:13

      ... and I think it's a, I think it's an old thing. Like, I mean, I think it's an evolutionarily old, um, mechanism to say, "Okay, there's something about the, the way this organism is acting."

   7. CWChris Williamson36:24

      Untrustworthy.

   8. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden36:25

      Um, or, or, and or they respond with harshness. Like I-- "They can't act this way. They have to know they can't act this way."

   9. CWChris Williamson36:34

      You know, I heard a line, a phenomenal line, from my friend Connor Beaton from Man Talks the other day. He says, "We try to control that, that which we feel we cannot trust."

   10. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden36:44

       Yes.

   11. CWChris Williamson36:45

       And you see in relationships, if you're concerned about whether or not your-- "Is, is my partner gonna stray? Are they gonna cheat on me on a night out?" That is when you will see more controlling behavior.

   12. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden36:56

       Mm-hmm.

   13. CWChris Williamson36:56

       "Well, text me when you get there. Who are you with? And how long were you out for? You said that you were gonna go... Did you go to... I saw a photo of you in the background." As opposed to, "I, it's, I feel like I can tr- I don't need to do control because the trust is there."

   14. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden37:07

       Mm.

   15. CWChris Williamson37:07

       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... I, first off, I don't trust that they're not gonna 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.

   16. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden37:30

       Yeah.

   17. CWChris Williamson37:30

       So I need to come in as this sort of external structure to constrain this behavior.

   18. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden37:37

       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 gonna allow you to have play dates. I'm gonna withdraw my affection. I'm gonna, um, verbally berate you, shame you, blame you.

   19. CWChris Williamson37:57

       Mm.

   20. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden37:58

       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-

   21. CWChris Williamson38:34

       Mm

   22. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden38:34

       ... and we respond to it with-

   23. CWChris Williamson38:36

       Lack of trust

   24. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden38:37

       ... with, 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, is that those children are the most vulnerable to harsh punishment. So the best pred- 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.

   25. CWChris Williamson39:04

       Why do you think that is?

   26. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden39:06

       I think, I think there's a couple reasons. One, I think that we're back to your friend. I'm not saying you're antisocial, but this, this, you know, a- attitude towards risk and potential negative consequences. Some people are much more sensitive to punishment than other people. They learn immediately from punishment, or they're like, "I lost it all. Let's go again," and I'm, I'm willing to do that same thing over and over again. You see this even with animals, where some rats, if you train them to press a lever, and they get alcohol for it, and then midway through the experiment, you switch it such that instead of getting alcohol, they now get shocked. Most rats, 75 to 80%, will stop pressing the bar. They're like, "Well, okay. Well, I used to be able to get drunk off of this, but now I'm getting shocked, so I'm not going to do this anymore." But there's a minority of rats that will actually increase their rate of behavior. They will start pressing the bar more, and I think some of that is like, "I'm not learning from..." to anthropomorphize the rat, if I'm the rat in the situation, "I'm not learning from punishment. I learned really well from reward, so maybe this time, maybe this time, it'll be the time that I get this reward that I'm expecting." And I think that there's the same sort of individual differences between people, where some people are very reward sensitive and not at all punishment sensitive. If they don't learn from being punished, then punishing them isn't gonna help them learn, right? Like, that, it's... And what we see with children with antisocial behavior is that they're... One way to think about it is it's almost like a learning disability, this inability to learn from pain, learn from negative consequences.

   27. CWChris Williamson40:53

       Mm.

   28. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden40:53

       And so the parent is like, "Well, that didn't work. How do I ratchet this up further?"

   29. CWChris Williamson40:58

       Yeah. Make it more extreme.

   30. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden40:59

       More extreme. You don't get your phone for two months. You don't get to see any of your friends. N- we're, we're gonna take everything that you like out of your room. You don't get to do sports.
9. 43:01 – 47:43

   When Do You Become Truly Responsible For Your Actions?

   1. CWChris Williamson43:01

      What, um, what about when this evolves into adulthood?

   2. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden43:05

      Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that's what's, I think, so troubling and difficult for our moral intuitions is that by the time someone's a man, if they're still impulsively hurting other people-Then of course we feel outrage at that. How could you do that? How can we stop you? Other people need to be protected from you. But every single one of those people was once a child, and that evokes more of our empathic response of did they, did they ever really have a chance to be a different sort of man-

   3. CWChris Williamson43:42

      Mm

   4. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden43:42

      ... if they, if all of... so much of this is rooted in the experiences and in the neurobiology of their childhood development. So where this really, I think, comes, I think comes to a, um, a crucible where we don't really know what to do as a society is around adolescent school shooters. I mean, you see how confused our response to this is, right?

   5. CWChris Williamson44:05

      Mm-hmm.

   6. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden44:05

      If someone's 15... You now have states, some crimes where the shooter is being tried as an adult and their parents are being charged as responsible for providing with the gun. And when you see something like that, you're like, we have no idea what to do with teenagers as a culture if we're saying both the parents are responsible for their behavior and a 15-year-old is responsible for themselves as if they were a grown-up. That's a sign of, I think, deep moral confusion on the part of our society about what we're gonna do with... What do we do with people who harm, and their harming is rooted in this long developmental process that started way before they were, you know, really able to make any real choices about who they were gonna be or how their lives were gonna go.

   7. CWChris Williamson44:58

      There is definitely a question, when do you become culpable for your own actions?

   8. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden45:01

      Yeah.

   9. CWChris Williamson45:01

      We don't look at a two-year-old-

   10. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden45:03

       Yes

   11. CWChris Williamson45:03

       ... and say, "Well, th-they've got a nature, oh, he, he's a bit fussy, bit boisterous." And then you roll the clock forward and he's five years old and pulling the wings off flies in the garden outside. And then you roll the clock forward a little bit more and he's setting fire to stuff in school and bullying the kids, and this is now his fourth different education establishment and he's been put on some special segregated thing, and he's 14 and he's hanging around with gangs, and he's... What, what, where, when do we say you are now culpable for your actions in this way?

   12. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden45:34

       Well, I think that as humans, as individual humans, that differs by people and it's really kind of a... I mean, it's sort of also like when is an animal conscious? You know, it's a, it's a sliding scale. There's a lot of gray there. And then you have a criminal legal system that's trying to take this fuzziness between a thirteen and an eighteen-year-old and say, "Okay, this is the age."

   13. CWChris Williamson45:57

       Mm.

   14. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden45:57

       At, you know, at 16 or at 15 you can be tried as an adult. And but before that you're, you're a child. This isn't just the United States, this isn't just, uh, high-income countries. They have the same debates in, um, in the aftermath of genocide, um, i-in Africa in several countries because of the use of child soldiers. And there's been this exact same problem, which is if someone be- w- someone was recruited by an army to be a soldier and hooked on drugs and given a m- machine gun at 13, and at 18 they're still a combatant and committing war crimes, to what extent are they culpable-

   15. CWChris Williamson46:44

       Yeah

   16. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden46:44

       ... for that? Are they a victim because they were, they were made to go to war, or are they an agent that we're holding responsible because now they're a grown man and they're still doing these things? Um, in my book I talk about how some of the most successful programs for the re-entry of these child soldiers are communities where there's rituals that, that both recognize that they were hurt and also ask them to, um, kind of admit responsibility and take responsibility for the actions that they've committed.

   17. CWChris Williamson47:19

       Wow.

   18. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden47:19

       Whereas we have very little like that within the American criminal legal system, even within a lot of our relationships. Like, I did a terrible thing, I'm now an innocent victim, and these are all the reasons that it sh- that I, I was shaped to do that. Holding both of those in your head at the same time, I think is a challenging thing for us.

10. 47:43 – 53:47

    Is Addiction in Your Genes?

    1. CWChris Williamson47:43

       What about addiction?

    2. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden47:45

       Addiction, I mean, I think addiction is this very similar process. I think that some of the most sophisticated philosophers are people in recovery from addiction. Like li- like practical philosophers. Because think about what being in recovery for addiction asks you to do. Even just the steps in AA. It's I'm powerless against alcohol, I'm gonna submit to a higher power, I'm going to atone and ask for forgiveness from other people, I'm gonna vow to do differently today. So it's this... I, I think that's a beautiful example of holding in mind those two things that I was just saying-

    3. CWChris Williamson48:24

       Mm

    4. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden48:24

       ... which is there's lots of reasons, including my brain, including my biology, that I'm addicted to alcohol. I am powerless. I'm admitting my powerlessness against this, and I'm taking responsibility, I'm seeking forgiveness, and I'm vowing to behave differently today, one day at a time.

    5. CWChris Williamson48:44

       Yeah.

    6. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden48:45

       And there's nothing about the academic philosophy of free will that gets you to that point. That is both radical compassion for a self that's been shaped by forces beyond your control and a determination to seek whatever agency and responsibility that you can in, like, in this current, present moment. Um, so I think the addiction is an area in which we are starting to get to a both and perspective. Um, when it comes to violence, we have a lot harder time doing that because then there's victims that aren't-You know, you can say like, "Oh, the addict's just hurting themselves." That's not usually true. There's also other people hurt by that. But, um, moving the, the... Keeping that tension in mind for other things like we do for addiction, I think is, um, is a m- is a move that's difficult to do, but I think a necessary one.

    7. CWChris Williamson49:45

       Yeah, because the, the blast radius of damage begins to cover other people.

    8. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden49:50

       Yeah.

    9. CWChris Williamson49:50

       And in that we have a desire for retribution, revenge, to make an example of somebody, et cetera, et cetera. I guess, is there not a relationship between people's genetics and their ability to choose or enact agency?

    10. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden50:06

        Yeah, that's such a good question. I, [sighs] I really do think that everyone has... I think that everyone can change. I don't think that everyone's capacity to change necessarily comes through their own willpower. I think often people change because their community helps them change.

    11. CWChris Williamson50:24

        Well, does our willpower come from our own willpower?

    12. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden50:27

        Yeah. I mean, I, I think the will... I think everything about us is related to our genetics.

    13. CWChris Williamson50:32

        Mm-hmm.

    14. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden50:32

        Like, there's no part of ourselves that's exempt from coming from the brain that we have. I think often people think of, "Well, my sins are the genetic part. That's the flesh, my addiction, my riskiness, my temptation, my tendency towards aggression." And then there's some s- you know, willpower or, like, overcoming part that's, like, somehow not your body or sometime, somehow not your genes.

    15. CWChris Williamson50:58

        Hmm.

    16. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden50:58

        Um, that's... Everything is related to your genetics, both, both your smoking and your quitting of smoking, both your addiction and your recovery. Even your belief in free will is heritable-

    17. CWChris Williamson51:11

        Hmm

    18. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden51:11

        ... uh, is more similar in identical twins. I mean, it's, it's-

    19. CWChris Williamson51:15

        Athletic persuasion-

    20. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden51:15

        Yeah

    21. CWChris Williamson51:15

        ... size of stomach, ghrelin release, da, da, da, da, da.

    22. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden51:18

        Yeah. I mean, it's this... Again, heritability, her- heritability studies or twin studies or genetic studies are never gonna tell you, like, this part's your body because this other part is your soul or your spirit. It's all your body. It's turtles all the way down. It's genotype all the way down. You're never gonna find some aspect of yourself that's sort of exempt from being embodied. Um, I talk in my book about this, uh, study of twins reared apart where, um, two of them met in later life and realized that they were both very religious and both believed in both free will as a reflection of God's grace. And the author of the study was talking about the irony that they see themselves in terms of this s- you know, spiritual freedom, but even that belief in their spiritual freedom is very similar to their long, long-

    23. CWChris Williamson52:18

        [chuckles]

    24. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden52:18

        ... separated-

    25. CWChris Williamson52:19

        Mm-hmm

    26. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden52:19

        ... identical twins.

    27. CWChris Williamson52:20

        I can see where you're going. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

    28. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden52:22

        Um, then the study was done by this guy Lyndon Eaves, who was, in addition to being a behavior geneticist, also an Anglican priest, um, who... a fellow Englishman who felt... c- came over to the United States. And what I love about Dr. Eaves' writing, I guess Reverend Eaves' writing, is that he really resists either/ors. He's like, "I am a man of the cloth, and also I have studies showing that your genes affect-

    29. CWChris Williamson52:53

        Man of science

    30. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden52:53

        ... whether or not you believe God." Right? So, like, how do we put those together? That's kind of a mystery of being human.
11. 53:47 – 1:03:24

    Are Men More Prone to Antisocial Traits?

    1. CWChris Williamson53:47

       is there a difference in heritability of antisocial behavior that's sexed? Do men-

    2. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden53:56

       Yeah

    3. CWChris Williamson53:57

       ... inherit more, uh, accurately m- m- more... Is, is, is the heritability, uh, greater effect on boys than it is on girls?

    4. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden54:07

       Generally, no. But I... There's one exception that I wanna come back to. So what we see is that the genes that are associated with antisocial behavior in boys also affect girls. If you have a fraternal twin... If you're female and you have a fraternal twin that's a male sibling, then his antisocial behavior predicts your likelihood of manifesting it, um, that the same liabilities are, uh, reflected in the same way. So the same genetic liabilities make you more likely to be physically aggressive. They make you more likely to be relationally aggressive.

    5. CWChris Williamson54:44

       Hmm.

    6. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden54:44

       They make you more likely to be substance using. They make you more likely to be risk taking. It's just for everything, the mean for men, the average for men, is shifted up.

    7. CWChris Williamson54:55

       Mm-hmm.

    8. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden54:55

       So-

    9. CWChris Williamson54:56

       Oh, so the same impact would have a... Sorry. The, the-

    10. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden54:59

        The same-

    11. CWChris Williamson55:00

        ... the same raw materials would have a greater impact in real life. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

    12. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden55:03

        Yeah.

    13. CWChris Williamson55:03

        Yeah. The same way as women commit suicide... Sorry, women attempt suicide more than men, but men commit suicide more than women.

    14. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden55:10

        Yeah.

    15. CWChris Williamson55:10

        Just their ability to enact violence, antisocial stuff tends to be greater-

    16. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden55:15

        Yeah

    17. CWChris Williamson55:15

        ... so it's magnified. Right. Interesting.

    18. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden55:16

        And so, you know, part of that is around social opportunity. Like, for many years, you know, women were very discouraged from drinking, very different... were discouraged from smoking, so you saw a big sex difference in smoking and drinking. Now it's more socially acceptable for women to smoke and drink, and so that average difference has narrowed, and it's the same genes that seem to be involved in both.The exception there is that most of our current studies have focused on what are called the autosomes. So we have twenty-three pairs of cor- chromosomes. One pair is the sex chromosomes, XY or XX, in typically developing children. And then the other twenty-two pair are the same across sexes. And nearly all of our contemporary studies have focused just on those twenty-two pairs of autosomes for kind of boring technical reasons that I'm not gonna get into. We're just now really diving into the X chromosome to see is there something about the X chromosome that might have specific effects on antisocial behavior. And the reason why that's interesting is because men only have one X, whereas women have two, and so men are much more vulnerable to the effects of a genetic variant that's X-linked because they don't have another copy to compensate.

    19. CWChris Williamson56:37

        Oh, that's so cool.

    20. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden56:39

        So that's why colorblindness, for instance, is much more prevalent in men than versus women 'cause it's a sex-linked... It's an X chromosome-linked s- uh, um, genetic variant.

    21. CWChris Williamson56:49

        That is so sick.

    22. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden56:51

        So the reason why we think the X chromosome might be important, um, is... Uh, and again, just to back up a second, most of what we study in our lab is what we would call common genetic variation. So these are genetic differences between people that exist in at least five percent, sometimes people say at least one percent of the population. The thing about common genetic variants is that, um, they're common, which means that they are likely to have a relatively small effect in isolation. Because if they had a big effect, evolution would make them not common, would weed them out very-

    23. CWChris Williamson57:29

        Yep

    24. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden57:29

        ... very quickly. So you have this trade-off between how common is a genetic variant and how-

    25. CWChris Williamson57:34

        How big of an-

    26. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden57:34

        ... big of an effect it-

    27. CWChris Williamson57:34

        Yeah

    28. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden57:35

        ... how powerful it is.

    29. CWChris Williamson57:35

        Yep.

    30. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden57:36

        Um, so what we're looking at is lots of common genetic variants, each of which have a tiny effect, but if you add them all up, then you get an appreciable effect, one, 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 f- on, um, a gene on the X chromosome, and that gene was called MAOA. So, um, your monoamines are how your neurons are talking to each other. It's like serotonin's a monoamine, dopamine's a monoamine.
12. 1:03:24 – 1:11:09

    If It’s Genetic, How Do We Justify Punishment?

    1. CWChris Williamson1:03:24

       It kind of makes me think, well, if suffering and vice are highly inherited, how do we justify punishment?

    2. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:03:36

       Yeah. [sighs] That's the heart of the... the heart's the heart of the question. I, I want to pull apart two ideas which are... were very confounded in my mind too, which is accountability and punishment. So in my mind, punishment is, um, deliberately making someone suffer a- 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." Um, 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, um, were incarcerated at the height of mass incarceration than were ever put in the Gulag by the Soviets. Like it's a... y- we have a truly massive-

    3. CWChris Williamson1:04:53

       Wow

    4. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:04:53

       ... um, incarceration and car- carceral state here. So I, I wanna reframe your question, and I, I think your question is so g- and it-- your question is the question that I started my book at. I started my book thinking, "Well, can we justify punishing people if... and how do we-- who deserves to be punished based on what we know about science?" And I, 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. And pulling those two things apart is-

    5. CWChris Williamson1:05:35

       It's a very unsexy argument.

    6. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:05:37

       It's very unsexy.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:05:38

       It's incredibly unsexy.

    8. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:05:39

       Well, you know, because Americans like the either/or.

    9. CWChris Williamson1:05:43

       Simplicity.

    10. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:05:44

        Simplicity.

    11. CWChris Williamson1:05:44

        Yeah.

    12. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:05:45

        Like, um, there's a philosopher H-Hannah Pickard who, who writes about what she calls the rescue blame trap. And the rescue blame trap is this vacillation that we do where we say, "This person stabbed his boss with a pitchfork. This person committed a horrible sexual crime. They did it. They deserve to be punished for it because they did it. They did this horrible thing." And then you think, "Oh, but they were maltreated. Oh, but their genes. Oh, but their neurobiology. Oh, but their extenuating circumstances." Maybe all of that rescues them from blame.

    13. CWChris Williamson1:06:28

        Mm.

    14. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:06:29

        And that lasts for about thirty-five seconds until you think about what a horrible thing they did.

    15. CWChris Williamson1:06:35

        Mm.

    16. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:06:35

        And then you go back to the rescue. And it's this very unsatisfying cycle that we do, see- seesawing between the... this, this person is awful and... but I can also... I'm a scientist, I can think about all the extenuating circumstances. And it's unsexy and nuanced and, and difficult, and I think takes a lot of imagination, practical and moral. But what if you're trying to keep both of those things at the same-- in your head at the same time, rather than seesawing back and-

    17. CWChris Williamson1:07:10

        Does that mean that somebody who commits a murder but has a particular genetic profile should get extenuating circumstances, should be treated in a different way by the court?

    18. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:07:18

        I, I mean, I think that they... I mean, I think what we do now, which is, like, let's lock you up with no therapy and no education and no possibility of ever being rehabilitated and never getting out again, um, that's not good for that person, which we might not care about. But we also know that it doesn't work to defer violent crime. It, like, it's just, like, not very effective.

    19. CWChris Williamson1:07:43

        I, I agree. I, I've had a couple of conversations about the ineffectiveness of, uh, like retributive justice-

    20. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:07:49

        Yeah

    21. CWChris Williamson1:07:49

        ... just punishing for the sake of it. Let's use something else that isn't quite as... are contentious is whether or not the penal system works well.

    22. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:07:56

        Mm-hmm.

    23. CWChris Williamson1:07:56

        Let's say that somebody has the genes to make them a high desire for sexual novelty.

    24. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:08:01

        Yeah.

    25. CWChris Williamson1:08:02

        They cheat in a relationship, and they have every genetic variant-

    26. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:08:06

        [laughs]

    27. CWChris Williamson1:08:06

        ... under the sun-

    28. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:08:08

        Yeah

    29. CWChris Williamson1:08:08

        ... that predisposes them to it, and their dad cheated on their mom. They had all of the environmental factors that reinforced it. Should that person's partner take them back more easily knowing that they had... If we were able to say, "Well, my 23andMe or my Intellex DNA came back and actually said that my dopamine ba- I've, I've got the COMT variant, the, like, the AA for this, which means that my dopamine baseline's-

    30. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:08:32

        Mm-hmm
13. 1:11:09 – 1:26:52

    Should Genetic Disadvantage Mean Lighter Sentences?

    1. CWChris Williamson1:11:09

       about the genetic lottery and the fact that people start from different genetic baselines-

    2. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:11:15

       Yeah

    3. CWChris Williamson1:11:15

       ... certain people, uh, i- if your impulse control is better, you're probably gonna do better in school. You're probably gonna do better in higher... I, I have to assume-

    4. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:11:24

       Yeah. Yeah

    5. CWChris Williamson1:11:24

       ... that you'll do better in higher education. It means more qualifications, it means-

    6. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:11:26

       You're less likely to be suspended for-

    7. CWChris Williamson1:11:28

       Yes

    8. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:11:28

       ... like bringing a gun to school.

    9. CWChris Williamson1:11:29

       Y- y-

    10. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:11:29

        Yes.

    11. CWChris Williamson1:11:29

        All of these-

    12. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:11:30

        I can see that in the data. Yeah

    13. CWChris Williamson1:11:31

        ... all, all of these things, and, uh, is it fair to say that one of the, um, perspectives that you have about the world is that trying to relevel some of the genetic inequality so that everybody gets a more equal access to be able to be successful in life is one of the things that, that we should go for?

    14. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:11:50

        I think it can be. So-

    15. CWChris Williamson1:11:52

        So but just on the-

    16. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:11:52

        Yeah

    17. CWChris Williamson1:11:53

        ... i- if, if that's the case-

    18. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:11:54

        Yeah

    19. CWChris Williamson1:11:55

        ... when it comes to having somebody who stands in the, uh, uh, accuser box or the, the accused, the persecutor box in court, should the same thing not happen, but just in reverse? If we want to give a leg up to people who have a genetic profile which makes them less amenable to the-

    20. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:12:13

        Mm

    21. CWChris Williamson1:12:14

        ... current reward system that this society has offered people, does that not mean the same thing just holds true when they've misbehaved as opposed to-

    22. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:12:22

        Oh, I see what you're saying

    23. CWChris Williamson1:12:22

        ... when they can't behave well?

    24. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:12:24

        Yeah. So to some... Okay, God, I have so many different responses to this. Like, my mind is going in fi- five different places at once. Um, so to some extent, we already do this, and it's in the criminal sentencing phase of trials, which is the, quote-unquote, "mitigation phase." And this is where someone says-

    25. CWChris Williamson1:12:41

        Insanity r- plea.

    26. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:12:43

        No, not insanity.

    27. CWChris Williamson1:12:44

        Oh.

    28. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:12:44

        So insanity is, are you gonna be exempted from the normal, um, the normal criminal penalties entirely? So if you are, you know, actively psychotic at the time of the tri- at, at the time of the crime, and y- you could, you could not know that what you were doing is wrong, and you could not have stopped yourself, then that's not guilty by reason of insanity, which is rarely attempted, even less commonly successful. I think it's, like, one percent of defendants get off by not reason by guilty of insanity. Andrea Yates, um, drowned her five children in Texas, um, in the early 2000s. That's an example I talk about in my book of a not guilty by reason of insanity. What most people have is a, is a, um, are you guilty or not? Did you do it or not? And that's not focused on, do you deserve to be punished? That's focused on are, the facts of the crime.

    29. CWChris Williamson1:13:40

        Did you do the thing?

    30. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:13:41

        Did you do the thing? And then there's a separate phase, which is the sentencing phase for, es- at least for a capital crime, where it's, how much does this person deserve to be punished? And that is the point of the sentencing phase. And that's where people come in, and they, the, you have what are called mitigation specialists.And their job is to humanize this defendant and say they were born preterm, they were born addicted to drugs, they were deeply maltreated by their parents, they were a victim of sexual abuse. Here are the, um, things that have happened to them that might explain how they got to this place. What I find so interesting about that is there's this idea built into the system that some people have been negatively affected by luck, and then there's other people who haven't, right? Like, there's... Like, everyone, everyone got to the place where they were doing, if they're at this point in a criminal trial, they've all gotten to this place somehow.
14. 1:26:52 – 1:32:05

    Why Do We Crave Retribution?

    1. CWChris Williamson1:26:52

       What about-- What else has been experimentally tested around retribution? I'm pretty interested in the role that this has.

    2. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:27:03

       Yeah. So retribution is something... So retribution is, in, 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 Bloom and his colleagues showing that, you know, three-year-olds are not that retributive, but by the time you're five, um, five-year-olds will pay stickers, you know, their version of money, this prize that they really like, in order to see, um, someone who has been portrayed as taking away a ball clubbed by a, by a puppet. So it's like you-- Children will pay to see someone that they think is a ball taker, like physically hit.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:27:53

       What do you think that is? Before we even get into that, what's, what is the emotional drive for retribution?

    4. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:27:58

       I think it's a evolved cooperation enforcement mechanism.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:28:02

       Yep.

    6. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:28:02

       I think that, um, we experience dopamine really being released. We experience this kind of neurobiological mechanism of wanting, um, when we do things that historically have been good for human survival and fitness, right? Like we don't go walk around 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.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:28:52

       Has that been tested experimentally?

    8. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:28:53

       Yeah. Yes, you can see that in the scanner. So ordinarily, if you see someone be, be hurt, you have an empathic response. But if you-- 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, the same neurotransmitters as you see other, other basically rewarding processes is a clue that this is something that was necessary. That sense of at least outrage-

    9. CWChris Williamson1:29:31

       Mm.

    10. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:29:32

        ... and, um, willingness to endure some cost in order to enforce your cooperative norms against someone else.

    11. CWChris Williamson1:29:41

        Willingness to endure some cost?

    12. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:29:42

        So I, um, uh, one way that we can also s-see whether or not someone's, um, finds something rewarding is are they willing to pay for it? Like children will pay-

    13. CWChris Williamson1:29:52

        Stickers

    14. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:29:52

        ... stickers.

    15. CWChris Williamson1:29:53

        Right.

    16. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:29:53

        Adults will pay money. Um, and so that i- we-- there's these economic games where you see how much digital money will someone pay for the opportunity to punish a freeloader.

    17. CWChris Williamson1:30:06

        Right.

    18. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:30:06

        All of these are sort of-

    19. CWChris Williamson1:30:07

        But if it was somebody that hadn't been seen as a defector previously, they would be like, "Why am I gonna give my money to punish this person that didn't do anything wrong?"

    20. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:30:14

        Yeah.

    21. CWChris Williamson1:30:14

        And may even give you money to not punish the person that didn't do anything wrong. That would be pro-social.

    22. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:30:18

        Yeah, exactly.

    23. CWChris Williamson1:30:18

        And what it's got me thinking about, if, if we feel pleasure when somebody who is seen to have contravened some social contract is punished, this explains why Hitler called Jews vermin and rats-

    24. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:30:37

        Yes

    25. CWChris Williamson1:30:37

        ... to dehumanize them, because that then legitimates that-

    26. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:30:41

        And traitors, the globalist traitors are-

    27. CWChris Williamson1:30:43

        That is their transgression

    28. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:30:44

        ... yeah.

    29. CWChris Williamson1:30:44

        The, the othering thing makes sense. The, um, reason that we want to care so much about our reputation, uh, makes an awful lot of sense because somewhere in the back of our mind, we realize, "If I'm not careful, and if the optics of Chris, or if the optics of Paige are sufficiently poorly interpreted, that not only might other people not want to support me, but other people might want to punish me, and not only might they want to punish me, they might get pleasure from punishing me, and they might get pleasure from watching other people punish me, and they might even pay a cost in order to support it."

    30. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:31:19

        Yes.
15. 1:32:05 – 1:43:15

    Why Do We Take Pleasure From Scrutinising Other?

    1. CWChris Williamson1:32:05

       So we saw this two interesting things that... Well, obviously we're in the middle of the fucking Epstein furor at the moment.

    2. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:32:10

       Mm.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:32:10

       And, uh, a couple of things that I've noticed. First one was, um, a bunch of memes floating around about Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos that neither of them seem to appear in the Epstein emails, at least not yet. And, um, that was-They were sort of lauded as super chads of the internet because they hadn't-- Presumably they had the opportunity to go, but they didn't, something like that.

    4. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:32:36

       Mm-hmm.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:32:37

       Uh, and that made me think, oh, people see morality as zero sum, so that those two people, by doing nothing differently to what they'd done yesterday to today, because the total amount of morality in the other people was decreased-

    6. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:32:55

       Mm-hmm

    7. CWChris Williamson1:32:55

       ... the remaining people have sort of all been raised up by it. Like the fact that th-this owner of a fashion brand and this sheikh were in the emails, but other people who are peers of theirs weren't, they lost, so you gain. So there is this sort of, um, supply, this fixed supply of morality, and by some people losing it-

    8. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:33:19

       Like currency

    9. CWChris Williamson1:33:19

       ... others have been, have been raised. So it wasn't just you're not as bad as them, it's you're actively better than you were before.

    10. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:33:27

        Yeah, the standards have-

    11. CWChris Williamson1:33:29

        Yeah

    12. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:33:29

        ... shifted.

    13. CWChris Williamson1:33:29

        You have been increased by this. I thought that was really interesting.

    14. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:33:33

        I mean, I think if you, if you see any victim of violence, the process by which others then seize on what they might have ever done wrong in their life and transmit that, once you start noticing that pattern, it's really, really obvious.

    15. CWChris Williamson1:33:55

        Can you say that in a different way?

    16. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:33:57

        So someone is, um, uh, uh, victimized by the police, and there's a debate about whether or not, you know, the police were justified in hurting this person or whether the person was resisting arrest. And then you have this always, this outpouring of news about everything that this person has done in their life, and it's, "They were an honor student."

    17. CWChris Williamson1:34:26

        Right.

    18. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:34:26

        "They were-"

    19. CWChris Williamson1:34:27

        Yep.

    20. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:34:27

        "... you know, p- they loved to play the guitar." And then it was like, "No, they once shoplifted," or, "They once, like, kicked a tire five, five years ago."

    21. CWChris Williamson1:34:35

        Mm-hmm.

    22. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:34:36

        What is that? Like, why are, why are we having this, this, not just in the incident, but everything leading up to it, this moral reckoning with whether or not this person ever did a bad thing or was a g- did a, ever, ever did an admirable thing? And I think the process behind that is really complicated. It's not just one proc- not, not just one thing that's going into that kind of, um, digging through the person who's died life. But if you remember that if you're feeling empathy for someone suffering, you can tr- s- toggle it over to pleasure if you can convince yourself that they're bad and they deserved it. It is such a temptation.

    23. CWChris Williamson1:35:24

        It is so wild. The fact-

    24. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:35:26

        That's such a temptation that's out there.

    25. CWChris Williamson1:35:28

        But it's the freest-- It's some of the freest pleasure that you're ever going to get as well, right? It's, it's completely costless to you, and y- you would be familiar with the bless her heart effect from evolutionary psychology.

    26. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:35:41

        Yeah.

    27. CWChris Williamson1:35:42

        Um, it's one of the reasons that, uh, female intersexual competition has venting, whereas male intersexual competition tends not to in quite the same way. And it's, um, "Paige, I'm really worried about, uh, about Jenny. Like, she just keeps on sleeping with all of these guys, and I'm so worried about her."

    28. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:36:00

        Oh, it's like faux concern, yeah.

    29. CWChris Williamson1:36:02

        Yeah, yeah.

    30. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:36:02

        Yeah.
16. 1:43:15 – 1:51:49

    Does Incarceration Actually Work?

    1. CWChris Williamson1:43:15

       I was gonna try... I w-was about to say something before that my ability to flip empathy into pleasure at a defector's pain pathway is defunct. I always seem to err on the side of, "Oh, I'm so sorry for that person," e-

    2. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:43:35

       Yeah

    3. CWChris Williamson1:43:36

       ... you know, e- e- always, always, always. You've managed to find, uh, an example-

    4. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:43:42

       One

    5. CWChris Williamson1:43:42

       ... where, not just one, but-

    6. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:43:43

       Yeah

    7. CWChris Williamson1:43:43

       ... it, it tends to be-- my threshold for it tends to be a bit higher. So I'm thinking about this person that shot 60 kids. The residual amount of humanity in that person seems to be very low for me in how I would see them. T-That to me seems to be the kind of thing... Even if you were to say, what does this do for society outside of it? That is such a heinous crime that I'd say it, it, it is so far beyond even the normality of abnormal crime that that should be a you don't get to come out again, and that would be a pro-social, as far as I can see, that would be a pro-social thing to do. First off, as a, "Hey, we have a limit here in Sweden?"

    8. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:44:31

       Norway.

    9. CWChris Williamson1:44:32

       Norway. "Here in Norway, we have a limit. We may be very loving and a fun accent like a typewriter covered in foil kicked down stairs, but-"This person has gone beyond the limit, uh, therefore other people shouldn't. So I guess, um-

    10. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:44:49

        Yeah, and I think that's-

    11. CWChris Williamson1:44:50

        ... warning them, warning them off. But the other one being like the li- that is such an in, an e- extreme crime.

    12. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:44:57

        Yeah.

    13. CWChris Williamson1:44:57

        The likelihood of repo- e- even if, even if his desire to murder children drops by one per year over the next six decades, he still wants to murder a child. Like, the, I, that's, I'm aware that's not the way that like a fall off the murder desi-

    14. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:45:13

        [laughs] I was like-

    15. CWChris Williamson1:45:13

        ... murder desire works

    16. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:45:13

        ... I got this weird like, like line graph in my head.

    17. CWChris Williamson1:45:16

        Yeah, of course. But it's like a, it, it-

    18. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:45:17

        I wasn't sure that that's how it-

    19. CWChris Williamson1:45:18

        ... it's murder desire inertia or whatever the fuck.

    20. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:45:21

        Yeah.

    21. CWChris Williamson1:45:23

        But to me that seems weak, that seems wimpy, and I don't think, I don't think that that is a sufficient deterrent to others, and I also don't think it is a, a sufficient amount of time to basically quarantine this person.

    22. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:45:35

        So there's so many different threads in your argument, and I, I wanna pull them apart because I, I think they're each interesting. And, and in some ways it's like you just touched on what are... why do we incarcerate people?

    23. CWChris Williamson1:45:48

        Mm-hmm.

    24. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:45:48

        Like, why do we have a criminal legal system? Like, what is the purpose of it, right?

    25. CWChris Williamson1:45:51

        Mm-hmm.

    26. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:45:51

        And one is just containment, just protecting the r- other people from this person, right? Um, I do believe in Norway it's possible that at the end of the sentence, he's judged to still be a risk to others, then he could be... that sentence could be lengthened for the sake of other people.

    27. CWChris Williamson1:46:10

        Mm.

    28. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:46:11

        Um, one is, um, some sort of expression of retribution. Like, I don't care if you could be better in the future. I don't care if you kind of, you're gonna have a-

    29. CWChris Williamson1:46:22

        You lost that privilege

    30. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:46:23

        ... uh, you've lost the privilege.
17. 1:51:49 – 1:58:14

    Why We Need to Question Our Own Moral Instincts

    1. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:51:49

       to suffer.

    2. CWChris Williamson1:51:49

       Well, definitely the retribution for something like addiction or psychopathy feels very different to antisocial disorder retribution. But really that's only because the first two are more pathologized, and we have names for them.

    3. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:52:03

       Yeah.

    4. CWChris Williamson1:52:03

       But if we start to sort of take the behavioral genetics red pill, then we go, well-

    5. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:52:08

       [chuckles] Take the pill.

    6. CWChris Williamson1:52:09

       Yeah, yeah.

    7. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:52:09

       The behavioral genetics pill.

    8. CWChris Williamson1:52:11

       Well, you know, you, you, you start to think i- that person that's an addict might not have had that much of a predisposition toward it and might actually have some pretty strong genetic, uh, influences toward willpower, and they chose to do this thing, and they chose to... Or that psychopath who's acting in this way is sort of choosing to be callous. It's not so much outside of their-

    9. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:52:36

       Ah.

    10. CWChris Williamson1:52:36

        You know what I mean?

    11. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:52:37

        Yeah. I mean-

    12. CWChris Williamson1:52:37

        You can see where I'm talking here. Whereas the person whose antisocial disorder could've been fighting against all of the tides of their genetic predisposition, and their epigenetic impact, and the upbringing that they had, and so on and so forth. Um, we don't-- because we don't have this global perspective, I can't see through you and see sort of what contributes-

    13. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:52:55

        Yeah

    14. CWChris Williamson1:52:55

        ... what is left inside.

    15. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:52:58

        I mean, I think this is where the- there will always be a gap between science, which is about averages and trends and statistical patterns-

    16. CWChris Williamson1:53:07

        Mm

    17. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:53:08

        ... and biography, which is this is the individual person, and I know exactly how these combined in this individual person and, and I can see what could've gone differently. I began my new book... Well, the first real, first full chapter of the book, I began with this letter that I got from someone in prison in Texas, and he's been there for his whole adult life. He's been there since he was 16, and he, um, committed a sexually violent crime, um, kidnapping a woman at knifepoint, an awful thing. I think when he was 15, since he's been in prison since he was 16, and then he's been, you know, in an adult, um, kind of notorious prison in Texas since then. And he wrote me this letter, and he said, um, there was an article in Texas Monthly Magazine about my lab, and so he said, "I read about you in Texas Monthly, and I know some people f- you know, don't believe in behavioral genetics, but I do. I think the apple doesn't fall far from the tree."

    18. CWChris Williamson1:54:20

        The idea of not believing in behavioral genetics is hilarious, but please go on.

    19. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:54:24

        Um, and then he wrote me this series of questions, and one of them was: What do you think makes a child go bad, nature or nurture? And it was... I mean, it was such... One, like most of the mail, 99% of the mail I get at my university mailbox is like academic journals. So this is... This was very surprising to get this letter, and then I got it, and I opened it, and, um, he had cut out cartoons from other magazines and taped them to the letter, and one of them was this white tiger on a psychoanalyst couch. And the caption goes, "And they train me to perform, but when I do what I'm really good at, they go ballistic."

    20. CWChris Williamson1:55:12

        Oh, that's great.

    21. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:55:13

        Which is funny and dark and also like, oh, this is coming from someone who's in jail for a sexually violent crime. Like, that is a new-

    22. CWChris Williamson1:55:21

        Awful guy

    23. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:55:22

        ... shimmer on that-

    24. CWChris Williamson1:55:23

        Yeah

    25. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:55:23

        ... that cartoon. And, you know, he's asking... He was asking me the same question that you're asking me, which I think we- we're... Which I don't think has an answer because I think it is part of the tension of being a modern human. Um, why did I do this thing? Why do you as a scientist think I did this thing? And when I was reflecting on it, it's like, well, I can give you a scientific answer. Like, on average, people who are, um, exposed to lead, and abused as children, and had labor and delivery complications, and had a certain set of genetic variants-

    26. CWChris Williamson1:56:01

        Mm

    27. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:56:01

        ... these things combine to make you more likely to commit a violent crime. Um, but is that really why he's writing me? Like, is, does he want a science lesson, or is he... Like, I think when people ask why, they're really asking, was it all my fault?

    28. CWChris Williamson1:56:20

        Yep. Yep. Am I o-

    29. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:56:21

        Do I have hope for change?

    30. CWChris Williamson1:56:22

        Am I okay? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
18. 1:58:14 – 2:04:50

    Why is Epigenetic Inheritance So Controversial?

    1. CWChris Williamson1:58:14

       What, what have you learned about the epigenetic inheritance stuff?

    2. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:58:21

       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 sa- 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 he- 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 s- sperm cells do is they strip out, you know, most of the epigenetic marks so that they aren't inherited.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:59:31

       Mm.

    4. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:59:32

       There is some animal models in mice that suggest this might be true.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:59:34

       Did we not just see one about exercise?

    6. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:59:37

       Probably in mice maybe.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:59:39

       The exerci- the, the, the children of mice that had exercised more were-

    8. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:59:43

       Yes.

    9. CWChris Williamson1:59:44

       Yeah.

    10. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden1:59:44

        So in humans, research on epigenetic inheritance is really hard to do. You need 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.

    11. CWChris Williamson2:00:05

        Okay.

    12. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:00:06

        Right? So, like, how does your environment-

    13. CWChris Williamson2:00:08

        What's, what's real and what's bullshit about epigenetics?

    14. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:00:11

        Oh, gosh. I mean, I think there's these cultural memes about, like, um, 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 g- vast oversimplifications. Um, 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-

    15. CWChris Williamson2:00:53

        What did they say?

    16. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:00:54

        ... with humans. They had no answer to that question.

    17. CWChris Williamson2:00:57

        Great statement.

    18. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:00:58

        [laughs] Um, so I mean, I'm fascinated. I, the sort of epigenetics that I study is called DNA methylation. Um, 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, um, DNA is expressed. And I'm really interested in the, 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 gonna affect your, you know, your aging 60 years later-

    19. CWChris Williamson2:01:45

        Mm-hmm

    20. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:01:45

        ... 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-olds are healthy. Like, four-year-olds all look healthy.

    21. CWChris Williamson2:02:07

        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... You know, like, if you just never went to the gym-

    22. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:02:31

        Yeah

    23. CWChris Williamson2:02:31

        ... that, 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.

    24. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:02:36

        Yeah. I mean, I... So that's... You're right that, like, there's the 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.

    25. CWChris Williamson2:02:55

        Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

    26. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:02:56

        And although it's controversial whether or not epigenetic marks can be-Transmitted from parent to child, we know that they're, they are propagated across cell division. So part of how your epigenome works now is because your epigenome was changed when you were five, and those epigenetic marks, even though you're, you have different cells now because they've been replicating this whole time, those same epigenetic processes have been carried over-

    27. CWChris Williamson2:03:25

        Yeah, I've heard-

    28. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:03:26

        ... throughout all that cell division

    29. CWChris Williamson2:03:27

        ... I've heard something about that this is probably getting into the realm of what one of your students tried to ask you last week.

    30. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:03:32

        Yeah.
19. 2:04:50 – 2:10:11

    Does Environment During Pregnancy Shape a Child’s Genes?

    1. CWChris Williamson2:04:50

       some of the interesting studies around, uh, in utero epigenetic changes? Because, you know, we do have some periods where, for a brief amount of time, every girl that is watching was inside of their grandmother.

    2. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:05:04

       Yes. Isn't that fascinating?

    3. CWChris Williamson2:05:06

       So cool.

    4. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:05:07

       And the, you know, the canonical studies on this are ones where you've had like a, in humans at least, are where you've had a very serious, um, insult or deprivation at a particular point in pregnancy. So for instance, when the Nazis blockaded Holland, there was this very serious famine in Holland. Um, but it affected different regions of the country differently, and also people just happened to be pregnant for different parts of their pregnancies during the worst-

    5. CWChris Williamson2:05:40

       So you had a little split test

    6. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:05:40

       ... part of the famine. What?

    7. CWChris Williamson2:05:41

       You had a little split test. Some were first trimester-

    8. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:05:43

       Yes

    9. CWChris Williamson2:05:43

       ... some were second, some were third.

    10. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:05:45

        Yes. And then some were just across the border, but they were getting food from somewhere else, and so they were just like the village next door, but they were not nearly as affected by the Nazi blockade, and so they never had so much famine. Um, and you see that, um, uh, the children, and then I think the grandchildren of those moms who were starved when they were pregnant, have worse health outcomes. They have higher body weight. They have higher rates of antisocial behavior. Um, and we're seeing that in our research too, that the second trimester in particular is like a very sensitive period of time, potentially for the development of, of, um, for brain development, for the development of lots of behavioral risks.

    11. CWChris Williamson2:06:28

        Same thing goes, is it mothers that go into poverty? I've seen... Is it Joyce Benenson? I feel like she did something to do with this.

    12. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:06:34

        I think it is, yes. Um, so we're working now, um, I'm not allowed to talk about the res-results yet, but I'm pretty excited about them. Um, we're look- we're working with a group that has, is doing a cash transfer un-unconditional cash transfer, so essentially cash gifts to low-income moms. Um, so some moms get thirty extra dollars a month, and some moms get three hundred dollars extra per month. And then the kids have been followed, they're, they're now six, and so we are looking at did cash to moms change-

    13. CWChris Williamson2:07:06

        Wow

    14. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:07:06

        ... children epigenetics.

    15. CWChris Williamson2:07:08

        And w- the mechanism that that would move through would be moms had an alleviation of stress, less cortisol, better nutrition.

    16. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:07:15

        Uh, there, so there seems to be... Moms who get money don't report that many, much lower levels of stress. They do report more be- being better able to breastfeed as long as they wanted to. Um, and they delayed the start of childcare, so if they wanted to stay home with the baby for longer, they could.

    17. CWChris Williamson2:07:35

        This feels less epigenetic.

    18. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:07:36

        And, and they also, um, uh, it improves the nutrition of the child. So they're spending the extra money on-

    19. CWChris Williamson2:07:45

        So I, I get it. This to me doesn't feel that epigenetic, though. This is just... It-- Look at attachment theory. If the kid gets ripped away from mom, what is that, uh, imbuing into their nervous system? What, what is the learned-

    20. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:08:00

        Yeah

    21. CWChris Williamson2:08:00

        ... nervous system behavior?

    22. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:08:01

        So it's interesting that you say that that doesn't feel epigenetic to you, because in some ways, every, every behavioral change is going to be somewhat epigenetic. Because it, again, you have the same genotype your whole life. So if you're changing, something is cha- And, and that change is-

    23. CWChris Williamson2:08:21

        There's a little record-

    24. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:08:22

        ... coming from your body

    25. CWChris Williamson2:08:22

        ... that's being made. Okay. That's interesting. I, I mean, I, I-- this is one of the reasons I was excited to speak to you about epigenetics, because I haven't done... I need to ask you who the best person to talk about, like who's the, the spicy world expert? Who's the Plomin of epigenetics?

    26. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:08:36

        Probably Steve Horvath.

    27. CWChris Williamson2:08:38

        I've been in touch with him.

    28. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:08:39

        Yeah?

    29. CWChris Williamson2:08:39

        I should, I should, I should bring him on.

    30. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:08:40

        Yeah, he did an epigenetic age.
20. 2:10:11 – 2:13:46

    How Much of Motherhood is Just Luck?

    1. CWChris Williamson2:10:11

       okay. What did you learn about the role of luck through motherhood?

    2. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:10:15

       Oh, gosh. I mean, I think that becoming a parent is the riskiest thing you could do. In some ways, it's the most optimistic gamble you could ever make. And I, i- in my new book... I should say the name. My new book is called Original Sin. I feel like my publisher would want me to say the na- the title of it. Um, in my new book, I quote the writer Andrew Solomon, who wrote this fabulous book called Far From the Tree, which is all about parents and children who are very different from each other, so deaf children of hearing parents, or nor- like, normally functioning parents who have, um, uh, savants, chess or music prodigies as children. And in the introduction to his book, he writes, um, "No... Reproduction is a myth. No children are reproduced. Children are produced."

    3. CWChris Williamson2:11:13

       Hmm.

    4. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:11:14

       And as a behavioral geneticist, I think that's a perfect description of, I have my genes, my partner's. I, I have children with two... well, with my first husband and my second husband, so that's why I'm say- saying partners. I'm not in a throuple. My children's dads, they have their genes, and we have recombined them in ways that are unpredictable with every single one of our children.

    5. CWChris Williamson2:11:39

       Hmm.

    6. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:11:39

       Um, I, I think there's something like 70 trillion possible combinations that each set of partners could have with all their potential kids. And if you think about that, about how different those children could be and how much their characteristics are gonna shape your life just as much as you shape your kid's life, you really are opening yourself up to fortune, I think, every time you produce a child. And I mean, p- so many parents describe this phenomenon where they have a kid and they're like, "I'm a really good dad. I'm a really good mom."

    7. CWChris Williamson2:12:17

       Yeah.

    8. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:12:17

       "I'm doing everything perfectly," if you have your easy baby first.

    9. CWChris Williamson2:12:19

       Hmm.

    10. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:12:20

        And then you have your second kid, and you're like, "This is... This person is totally different. Same mom, same dad, but they don't sleep at the same time. They don't eat at the same time. Their temperament is different. How they respond to how I parent them is different." So my children didn't ask to be here. They were thrown into consciousness and then brought home from the hospital with this genetic package that no one had control over and a family environment that they don't have any control over. And, you know, they're so different from one another. They're so different from one another. And I really feel like my role as a mom is to, "Who did I get?" Like, who am I getting to know, um, while they get a grip on what it means to be on this planet? Um, so I have a picture in their room, um, and it's a print from an artist I like, Haley Bateman, and it says, "It's a miracle we ever met." And that's really how I feel about them.

    11. CWChris Williamson2:13:24

        Hmm.

    12. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:13:24

        That I met these people who are so different from me and so different from each other, um, based on the luck of the draw, and, and now we have to ride out this relationship with each other. You know, we have to figure out how to-

    13. CWChris Williamson2:13:41

        Hmm

    14. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:13:41

        ... to, to attach, um, and gr- and while they grow up.

21. 2:13:46 – 2:29:37

    Kathryn’s Stance on Embryo Selection

    1. CWChris Williamson2:13:46

       What's your perspective on embryo selection?

    2. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:13:48

       Oh, I have a very complicated feelings about embryo selection. Okay, so the first thing I wanna 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, I, I think reproductive autonomy is really, really important.

    3. CWChris Williamson2:14:24

       Good disclaimer.

    4. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:14:25

       I, I think that's, I think that's very, very important. Um, 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 wanna mitigate, even by a few percentage points, the risk of that-

    5. CWChris Williamson2:14:47

       Hmm

    6. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:14:47

       ... and that's what's gonna 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. So those are the pros. The things I worry about is, one, you said s- yourself that no one understands genetics. Like, it's... Polygenic scores and, 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?

    7. CWChris Williamson2:15:32

       As far as I can, as far as I can see, the only company that's even remotely close is Heracite. 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-

    8. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:15:45

       They're... And, uh, I mean, and they, to their credit, um, have been very transparent about their statistical models and their reasoning, which not all companies have done. Um-

    9. CWChris Williamson2:15:57

       I think they're trying to do it right.

    10. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:16:00

        I think there's also the larger question. I wrote about this on my Substack recently, which is how do, how does something becoming a choice, particularly around the body, change everyone else's experience even if they don't make that choice? So, um, if you, if, if... We've kind of already seen this a little bit with Down syndrome in that, um, in some countries, screening for Down syndrome amongst embryos is near universal.

    11. CWChris Williamson2:16:35

        Mm-hmm.

    12. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:16:35

        And-

    13. CWChris Williamson2:16:36

        Iceland, I think.

    14. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:16:37

        I think Ice- Iceland is in there. Denmark is in there. And nearly all of those pregnancies are terminated or never implanted. And that has changed the perception of a Down's birth from this is something that happens, and it's part of our social solidarity to support this child growing up to you chose to have this kid because you could have avoided it. And those are in countries that have really strong, um, sort of traditions, cultural, legal, social, financial, of social solidarity.

    15. CWChris Williamson2:17:11

        Right.

    16. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:17:11

        They have public medicine systems. Um, in America, we already have such a fractured sense of solidarity with each other around our bodies. And how will, how might that... What's gonna happen when that system, when everyone's responsible for themselves and no one's responsible to each other, um, is further pressured by and now if you have a kid who's sick or you have a kid who has a condition, we perceive it as you chose that because you could have prevented it by doing embryo selection. Um, so how, how does this new technology, which makes something that for all of human history has been an, uh, something of a chance event, turning it into a choice. How does that change all of our relationships with reproduction? I don't think we know the answer to that question, but that's just... that's what I'm thinking about right now.

    17. CWChris Williamson2:18:11

        That's interesting. Net net, if you had the choice between, uh, a parent having to have a kid that's sick so that other kids that are also sick don't feel uncomfortable or strange because no one is using this new technology or them stepping in. Because, uh, the, the most compelling thing, weirdly enough, I've been thinking about this a lot. The most compelling thing that I've seen is I, I didn't realize when you do IVF, the doctor already comes over and eyeballs the embryos.

    18. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:18:44

        Oh, yes. They're already choosing. Yes. I mean, I think if you're-

    19. CWChris Williamson2:18:47

        Which you would want to do.

    20. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:18:49

        If you're-

    21. CWChris Williamson2:18:49

        Like you would want to do that. You wouldn't say, "Hey, we're gonna use IVF." Maybe one of us is a little bit older. Maybe it's gonna be a geriatric pregnancy. Uh, maybe, um, we've had some fertility complications. Um, maybe, yeah, fertility comp- we've been struggling to just get it to take, so we're gonna get a big harvest, do the embryo thing, and then implant. The doctor is already looking through the microscope to look-

    22. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:19:16

        And they're already selecting usually for aneuploidies-

    23. CWChris Williamson2:19:18

        Yes

    24. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:19:19

        ... for Down or things like that.

    25. CWChris Williamson2:19:19

        Correct. And so they're already-

    26. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:19:20

        And they're like, "Is this one blo- Is this blobby one symmetrical or not?"

    27. CWChris Williamson2:19:23

        Yeah. Is this the most circular one? I think that, I think number three-

    28. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:19:26

        Yeah

    29. CWChris Williamson2:19:26

        ... is the most circular one. So as soon as you accept that that is the way that IVF is done at the moment, having a dashboard that explains it, to me, makes very little difference.

    30. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:19:37

        I think the bigger jump is, uh, medically unnecessary IVF. Like, w- if someone is already-
22. 2:29:37 – 2:36:45

    Will Embryo Selection Save Us From a Crumbling Genome?

    1. CWChris Williamson2:29:37

       think about embryo selection as a counter to the crumbling genome, Tooby's thing?

    2. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:29:42

       I don't know about this.

    3. CWChris Williamson2:29:44

       Uh, okay. So ancestrally, there are selection pressures that mean people who have got genetic mutations that are suboptimal would've been selected out. Uh, myopia is a good one, right? Both you and me.

    4. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:29:55

       Mm-hmm.

    5. CWChris Williamson2:29:55

       Uh, you chose to go glasses.

    6. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:29:56

       [laughs]

    7. CWChris Williamson2:29:56

       I chose to go LASIK. Um, we have to assume that if you roll the dice sufficient times, uh, both of us would be more dead than somebody who had perfect eyesight.

    8. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:30:06

       Yeah.

    9. CWChris Williamson2:30:07

       And when we are able to alleviate those selection pressures by glasses and LASIK, it means that we are able to pass on our-

    10. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:30:16

        Oh

    11. CWChris Williamson2:30:16

        ... suboptimal.

    12. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:30:17

        Yeah.

    13. CWChris Williamson2:30:18

        So because the selection pressures have been relieved largely through healthcare and support and modern medicine and stuff like that-

    14. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:30:23

        Mm-hmm

    15. CWChris Williamson2:30:23

        ... you do end up with a civilization that accumulates genetic mutations that are non-optimal at a greater rate than would've done previously, because again, this lid has been released. And the argument is, this is Tooby's argument, um, you have a crumbling genome, that it moves toward increasing accumulation of genetic mutations, ones that we would not want, but we're able to continue to support and buttress this with, uh, technological progress. And the argument is that embryo selection is able to step in and reverse some of this entropy.

    16. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:31:03

        [sighs] I mean, I, I think this idea that what humans are doing with post-industrial healthcare in terms of buffering the negative effects of genes is somehow novel to humanity or novel to evolution. I don't really buy that. Like, if you look at other species, you see multiple examples in which their ability to build niches for themselves reduces selection pressure on some genes and increases selection pre-pressure on other genes which are involved in niche-making.

    17. CWChris Williamson2:31:45

        But we would in, at least as far as I can see with humans, there would be no increased selection pressure. It would just be we will continue to compensate over and over again.

    18. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:31:56

        I think this idea that there's no selection... There's always a selection.

    19. CWChris Williamson2:31:59

        But there's fewer selection pressures.

    20. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:32:01

        There's... I think there's fewer selection pressures around the things that were historically associated with mortality, and now we have new ones. It's a very, it's a very common idea that you see recur, you know, essentially since Galton, this idea that, like, you know, some-something about modernity is making us soft.

    21. CWChris Williamson2:32:20

        Yep.

    22. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:32:21

        And that's going to corrode or degrade our genome. This was, um, uh, Pearson's argument against universal public education for kids. We can't be educating all of the children because then, you know, they'll be able to, like, support themselves and reproduce, and then we won't be, we won't be winnowing out the, the feeble-mindedness genes. And that sounds kind of awful and shocking to us in retrospect, but it made perfect sense to them, you know, with their logic at the time.

    23. CWChris Williamson2:32:54

        There's a different kind of lock-in from educating or not educating someone versus allowing a much harder, uh, inheritance of genetic mutation to keep on moving down. So anyway, you... I think it's, I think it's interesting, and that Tooby thing, that's a, that's about as spicy of a theory basically that we should either use embryo selection to step in or we should limit healthcare in an attempt... And this isn't his proposal at all.

    24. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:33:19

        Yeah. Yeah.

    25. CWChris Williamson2:33:19

        Um, but that's, that's, like, really on the fucking cusp. That's why I wait two and a half hours-

    26. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:33:23

        Yeah. [laughs]

    27. CWChris Williamson2:33:24

        ... to, to bring up crumbling genome.

    28. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:33:26

        I mean, that's not a completely-

    29. CWChris Williamson2:33:26

        But it's a fascinating-

    30. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:33:27

        Yeah
23. 2:36:45 – 2:49:25

    Is Dissuading Men From Their Genetic Behaviour Unfair?

    1. CWChris Williamson2:36:45

       that you said before about, [clears throat] um, sort of more and less appropriate behaviors, uh, especially given sort of the modern world and the domestification-

    2. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:36:56

       Yeah

    3. CWChris Williamson2:36:56

       ... domestication, the, the puppification. Do you think it means... Or could there be an argument made that the current push by the mainstream to sort of dissuade men from aggression and dominance and impulsivity is more unfair genetically-

    4. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:37:13

       Oh, that's interesting

    5. CWChris Williamson2:37:14

       ... than if, if men are, on average, less domesticated and appropriate-

    6. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:37:19

       Yeah

    7. CWChris Williamson2:37:19

       ... for a gentle modern world, and does our behavior needs to be curtailed more than women's does? Is that unfair?

    8. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:37:28

       Gosh. Um, [sighs] is unfair the word that I would use to that? I... So to... At that-

    9. CWChris Williamson2:37:34

       Well, we're being, we're being, we're being asked to modify-

    10. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:37:36

        Yeah

    11. CWChris Williamson2:37:36

        ... our behavior in a manner that women aren't simply because of what modern society-

    12. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:37:40

        Well, I mean, this has been Richard Reeves' argument. Um, I don't know if you're familiar. He wrote a book-

    13. CWChris Williamson2:37:45

        It's been cited in that chapter.

    14. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:37:46

        Oh, really? So, you know, like, if we're not gonna change schools, then we should red shirt all the boys and give them an extra year is the only... Because, because asking a five-year-old boy to do developmentally the exact same thing as a five-year-old girl is an unfair in his, in his comparison.

    15. CWChris Williamson2:38:03

        You've spent a lot of time talking about dominance and aggression.

    16. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:38:06

        Yeah. I wanna, I wanna 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, the political philosopher John Rawls, and his thought experiment, which is, if you didn't know what hand you were gonna be dealt in the natural lottery and in the, 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 gonna be a man or a woman, would I set school up the way that school is set up now?

    17. CWChris Williamson2:38:56

        Mm.

    18. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:38:56

        And I can't... I, 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, 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 schoolAnd I, 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 twelve and thirteen-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 twenty-five-year-old woman in charge of them." Like-

    19. CWChris Williamson2:40:09

        And we should get them to learn stuff that they won't be able to remember a decade later.

    20. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:40:12

        Like I, I-- whereas he does these once a month, um, like go play in the woods for the whole day.

    21. CWChris Williamson2:40:22

        Yep.

    22. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:40:22

        And there's no screens, and there's a bunch of young men, and it's like we're gonna build a fire, and we're gonna carve things out of wood, and we're gonna like catch turtles, and we're gonna fish, and we're going to hide in the brushes. And while we're there, we're gonna talk about math, and we're gonna talk about the stars.

    23. CWChris Williamson2:40:39

        Mm.

    24. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:40:40

        And, and you can read stuff to prepare for your Earth Native Day.

    25. CWChris Williamson2:40:44

        Well, okay. Maybe, maybe-

    26. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:40:45

        I love it. Like, yeah

    27. CWChris Williamson2:40:46

        ... maybe I put it in a different way to unfair.

    28. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:40:48

        Yeah.

    29. CWChris Williamson2:40:49

        Uh, should the additional level of discipline that males, specifically men-

    30. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:40:56

        Yeah
24. 2:49:25 – 2:59:55

    Is Looksmaxxing Actually Damaging Our Genetics?

    1. CWChris Williamson2:49:25

       What do you think of the looksmaxxing movement as a geneticist?

    2. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:49:28

       [laughs] I mean, I know very little about this. Um, at the end of the day, like, I'm a middle-aged 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 gonna looksmaxx and take a bunch of testosterone and ruin my ability to, like, procreate feels [laughs] really deeply ironic.

    3. CWChris Williamson2:50:06

       Like genetic seppuku.

    4. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:50:07

       It's... Yes, exactly. And also, my friend Paul Eastwick, who I think you talked to-

    5. CWChris Williamson2:50:11

       I did a couple of weeks ago

    6. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:50:12

       ... you did. Um, 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 mate value? Like, I don't believe you that that doesn't exist."

    7. CWChris Williamson2:50:25

       Mm-hmm.

    8. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:50:25

       And now I'm like, "Oh, mate value exists amongst strangers and acquaintances, and then it declines as people get to know each other." That actually makes total sense to me. Um, but I am very convinced by his, 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 out-compete strangers for some, like, signals vaguely related to genetic fitness.

    9. CWChris Williamson2:50:59

       So what do you think it says that that's what's being optimized for now by young men?

    10. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:51:03

        Oh. What do you-- I mean, you're, you, you are a younger and a man. So what do you, like, what do you think? I d- I actually don't... It feels very nihilistic. It feels like if we were, 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, um, aren't introduc- in- interested in reproducing, but are interested in extreme body modification."

    11. CWChris Williamson2:51:42

        To give the signals that typically would be attractive by the other sex, but not in order to get the other sex.

    12. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:51:48

        Yeah.

    13. CWChris Williamson2:51:48

        So-The looksmaxxing 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 wanna get laid. They wanna get laid, so they're gonna be tall, or they wanna go to the, the gym to get jacked. I did, I did looksmaxxing, right? It was called going to the gym.

    14. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:52:05

        Yeah.

    15. CWChris Williamson2:52:06

        Um, so w- a couple of interesting things. This is def- this is kind of an inevitable endpoint or one of the points along the journey of, uh, understanding behavioral genetics, understanding some mate preferences from women, at least aesthetically for men. Um, because when you combine those two things together, you... There are certain things that are gonna 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 be-- to get in front of women in a way that seems warm and welcomed, uh, if you're in a post-Me Too world where approaching women in public is something that, uh, 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, uh, you end up with an ever-increasing group of high-performing women and an ever-decreasing group of ultra-high-performing men. If you do that and you keep on pushing, um, 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 Clavicula, 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 formidability as, as good if not a better predictor of sexual success than looks 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-

    16. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:54:21

        [laughs]

    17. CWChris Williamson2:54:21

        ... heavy cheeks, like, strong jawline.

    18. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:54:24

        I just, I-

    19. CWChris Williamson2:54:25

        Being tall

    20. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:54:25

        ... I feel like maybe this is just me being extremely out of touch.

    21. CWChris Williamson2:54:33

        Mm-hmm.

    22. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:54:34

        But I'm a woman. I've been married twice. I've 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.

    23. CWChris Williamson2:54:52

        Mm.

    24. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:54:53

        And every time I read this description of what women or especially, like, educated or high income or, like, com- you know, w- women who have some social status want-

    25. CWChris Williamson2:55:06

        Mm

    26. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:55:07

        ... what they're looking for in a partner or how they pick partners, who they choose to have sex with, I... It always surprises me because it bears so little relationship to how I have ended up in sexually satisfying, romantically satisfying relationships. And I think with, 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's the exact same 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, 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 in terms of-

    27. CWChris Williamson2:55:56

        Socioeconomically, yeah.

    28. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:55:57

        And I'm like, "But my husband is extremely competent." Like, he can-

    29. CWChris Williamson2:56:01

        But you know what? You know what? Competence is a predictor for future-

    30. KHDr. Kathryn Paige Harden2:56:04

        [laughs]

Episode duration: 3:00:54