Are Human Genetics An Unfair Lottery? - Paige Harden | Modern Wisdom Podcast 387

Homelessness is a problem that's in many ways just like puberty, right, which is that, like, you know

Homelessness is just like puberty. You heard it here first.

... you know, feeling so ... In the sense that there's genetic effects on people's biology, and then there's how our social and legal environment responds to that. In the US, a serious mental illness is the one of the biggest risk factors for being homeless.

It seems like you've had a spicy few years of controversy.

(laughs)

Do you think that's fair to say?

Um, I don't think I've ever heard the word spicy before to describe it, but I do think that it's fair to say that there's been a couple years of controversy, yes.

I'm pretty fascinated by your positioning because doing behavioral genetics, which for good or for ill has kind of been adopted by some people on the right, um, but your political leanings are toward the left. So, you occupy this sort of very difficult space in between.

(sniffs)

Why, why do you think it is that you consistently find yourself in the eye of the storm of these debates?

Y- Uh, that is a very good question that I have asked myself, um, on a number of occasions recently. You know, I, I think there are people that walk into things sort of deliberately courting controversy, sort of seeing, "Okay, what can I say that's gonna be provocative?" And that genuinely has not been kind of my approach or experience. It really has kind of felt bew- this kind of bewildering, dislocating experience in which I say things that seem just true to me, and then it is only by saying them out loud that I realize that they are controversial. And, and in fact almost never controversial when each statement is taken on its own. It's something about the combination of them, like, the package of them that seems to provoke strong feelings. Um, but, you know, like, I'm a professor. I'm an academic. I feel like y- I have this great privilege of getting to think about things that I think are important and thinking out loud about them with my students and in my research papers and then more recently with kind of more public-facing work. And my goal in all of this has just been to really articulate, like, what do I think is true. Like, what do I think is true from a scientific perspective, and what do I think is true in terms of, um, expressing my own personal, like, political and moral convictions? And it just turns out that if you repeatedly say true things, um, in this space, that seems to rile up, um, pretty strong feelings, I, I think on both sides of the political spectrum, which is interesting.

Why do you think people are so uncomfortable with behavioral genetics generally?

Oh. You know, there's this really great paper by a legal scholar, Dov Fox, where he talks about genetics and to a lesser extent neuroscience as subversive science. And I love that phrase, subversive science. And he's, what he's arguing is that it can subvert really basic intuitions that we have about, um, agency or equality. I don't actually think it has to be subversive in quite those ways. I think sometimes the perceived subversiveness of behavioral genetics rests on misunderstandings of it. Like, if properly understood, many of the fears of the ways that genetics will subvert our values of equality or agency or identity, um, you know, turn out to not be true. But we live in a secular age in which people often don't believe in souls anymore, and so they've substituted genes as kind of their essence placeholders is the way that some people talk about it. And so when you start talking about genetics, I think ultimately you're talking about people's selves. They're, you are ta- you're talking about things about themselves that they, they value or cherish or fear, um, or things they see in their children. So, uh, you know, to some extent, I don't think that you can talk about genetics and humans without there being some emotion attached to it, and that's probably a good thing, that we want to preserve our sense of something, um, something sacred about our humanness even in a secular age.