Review of Katherine Paige Harden's, "Original Sin".
Paige Harden’s latest book, “Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, The Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness,” is an examination of the assumption that “vice,” a term she uses to group various “phenotypes,” (addictions, criminality, violence, promiscuity, etc.), involves a significant genetic component, which creates moral dilemmas regarding the extent to which individuals are responsible for their own behavior, as opposed to it being dictated by our genetics and thus, to some extent, is at least partly out of our control. The book might be looked at as an extension of her first book, “The Genetic Lottery,” which made the case that “educational attainment” or intelligence, have genetic underpinnings (my review of that book can be found here. In that book, she attempted to make her case from a more academic, traditional approach, presenting and interpreting studies to drive home her thesis. This book largely skips that approach, effectively starting with the assumption that the premise of a strong genetic component for “vice” is a given. This puts me in the position of criticizing what isn’t in the book.
Before I do so, though, it’s fair to point out some positives. This book demonstrates a clear improvement in her writing style and depth in comparison to her first book. This is especially true for the earlier part of the book, which weaves religion, science and emotional content in a compelling way, while sharing personal anecdotes that might give pause to many. I commend her for her courage in doing so. She even describes her own use of LSD, which I will only half-facetiously suggest has contributed to a greater depth in her writing and I would argue that her characterization of her influence under it as, “… a clearly chemical being,” oversimplifies the experience. She also raises some good points about the nature of crime and punishment and questions of individual and collective responsibility.
As the book progressed, though, the prose dries up a bit, which I think is largely a function of the subject. Perhaps what holds her writing from fully blossoming is her marriage to the subject of genetic determinism, a simplistic subject that diminishes the human condition to a series of DNA strands acting in some unspecified manner. As with her first book, she attempts to soften the premise and set herself apart from the more nefarious types who inhabit this world and operate under more blatant racist and classist underpinnings. Unfortunately, I think such softening only bridges legitimacy for people who don’t need the help.
Harden devotes a lot of writing to religious themes, in particular St. Augustine’s idea of “original sin,” which she effectively equates with genetic determinism. This, I think, shows a lack of breadth in her knowledge of philosophy and religion, providing a facile subjugation of the idea of the soul or consciousness. Moreover, despite her described disillusionment and rejection of her fundamentalist Christian upbringing, her understanding of “vice” appears to be heavily influenced by it and guides the nature vs. nurture dichotomy of the book, while ignoring many other philosophical and religious understandings of human nature and how they might influence the idea of vice in one form or another.
As noted, she devotes little time to making a scientific case for a genetic underpinning for vice, only briefly indirectly referencing a few studies. At one point she summarizes the results of a study as follows:
“We can say whether, based on your DNA, you are in a high-risk group, whose probability of being arrested for a crime is twice as high as that of people in the low-risk group.”
I found myself smiling at this for a whole number of reasons related to what a paltry finding it is, but feel the need to address it for those who are perhaps not as familiar with the subject. For starters, Harden herself admits in the book that she had LSD illegally sent to her and then illegally used it and even acknowledges that others might be at greater risk of arrest than her for doing something like this. This speaks to what is called population stratification, wherein someone who comes from a (white), more privileged background and geographic location, would no doubt be far less likely to be arrested for the same actions as someone non-white in a poorer neighborhood. Such population stratification is a (perhaps fatal) weakness of behavioral genetics, wherein, Instead of saying that Black people and poor people are more likely to be arrested for ostensibly the same crime, one could pedantically say that people with certain genes are more likely to be arrested in the same way that we can say that people with certain genetics are more likely to eat with chopsticks. In that case, the genes in question are little more than the kinds of genetic variation that is flagged by 23 and Me to identify Asian heritage. To claim that “vice” has a genetic component, one would need to get past these benign genetic markers or we could just make all sorts of claims, like people with Italian genes are more likely to enjoy spaghetti, or people in the Southern United States are more likely to eat grits, since in both cases, due to genetic drift and other issues, one could correlate these preferences to specific genetic markers that likely have nothing to do with taste buds. The fact of the matter is that there is no reason other than ideology to believe that the genetic markers used to identify “vice” or the likelihood of being arrested have any actual function. You can’t just call anything you can conjure from a questionnaire a phenotype by identifying genetic correlations.
Instead of caution in making such claims, Harden extends it beyond just vice, describing, for example, how her newborn son’s genetics would, “...help shape the sort of person he is, his boldness or inhibition, cruelty or kindness, narcissism or humility, callowness or empathy.” There is simply no good science for these claims and a whole lot of failed science suggesting that they are doubtful. Harden, in fact, acknowledges that decades of genetic claims in the past, in the form of “candidate gene studies,” were eventually refuted, but writes it off by saying, “The major problem, which was clear only in retrospect, was simple: The studies did not include enough people to be trustworthy.” This is a rather narrow view of a whole host of problems that were retrospectively considered.
Moreover, if this were the explanation, then you could now simply increase the number of people in these studies. No one is doing that, because they already know that there aren’t single genetic variants of sufficient power to influence a trait to any degree. I would suggest, in fact, that the “major problem” was the ideology of those doing these studies clouding their judgment of the positive results. It’s also worth noting that some of her own twin and genetic studies involve only hundreds, or a few thousand individuals. In any case, the field has moved onto genome-wide association studies, which search for tiny correlations for a trait using hundreds of thousands of participants in the studies. Harden embraces these studies without considering that they are likely awaiting their own retrospection, as they fail to find significant genetic influences for traits.
In fact, GWAS have not confirmed genetic deterministic claims, and have in fact refuted the bloated claims of twin studies, often knocking their heritability claims from 60 or 70 percent, down to 2 or 3 percent or even less. This has also not led to much introspection from Harden or most other behavioral geneticists as to the validity of their field. They seem to view this problem as a minor flesh wound until they eventually discover the “missing heritability,” as if there is some long-buried treasure soon to be unearthed.
Harden also employs a common rationale used to justify the validity of behavioral genetics, which is to give the example of a specific deleterious genetic mutation to suggest more subtle genetic influences in the population at large. In this case, she uses the example of Brunner Syndrome, an X-linked recessive genetic mutation, where afflicted individuals are more impulsive and prone to violence. Individuals with this syndrome generally also have intellectual disabilities and a host of other associated difficulties, that cloud the understanding of their behavior separate from the disorder. Thus, it does not add credence to an entirely different premise that is really the cornerstone of behavioral genetics: that a collection of non-pathological genetic variants in some kind of summation, contribute to a complex trait like vice in such a way that even individuals with a particular cumulative genotype, scored by a polygenic score, might not even have the trait in question even if their PGS is quite high (or might have it even if the PGS is low). This leaves an amazing amount of wiggle room for explaining away contradictions, reminiscent of astrological predictions.
We now see that the human genome only contains about 20,000 genes. Most of these are identical from one individual to another, and probably most of them are for physical traits, and basic embryonic development. What is left over to explain human character would be in the tens or hundreds. The math for “behavioral genetics,” even with appeals to pleiotropy, rare variants and other Hail Mary’s, simply isn’t there to begin with and the studies do not bolster their claims. Harden can continue to write books highlighting a different “phenotype” for each and probably have a receptive audience, despite having little or nothing to back up her claims, but I hope that one day she will come to terms with the fact that this is a house of cards and will write the definitive mea culpa.