Book Review: How Genetics Shapes Our Ideas About Vice and Blame
Once upon a time, Kathryn Paige Harden was an evangelical teenager steeped in the doctrine of original sin. She learned almost from birth that humans are inherently flawed — and also doomed to pass their flaws on to their descendants, as Adam and Eve did after eating forbidden fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Now a behavioral geneticist at the University of Texas at Austin, Harden has renounced both the letter and the spirit of her upbringing. Yet her research, which explores genetic differences linked to behaviors like abuse and violence, returns her over and over to the questions she wrestled with growing up. Are we, in fact, born with tendencies that incline us toward acts of vice and crime? And if we are, how much responsibility do we bear for those acts?
BOOK REVIEW — “Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness,” by Kathryn Paige Harden (Random House, 320 pages).
Harden’s second book, “Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness,” is a thoughtful, lyrical attempt to address these questions — and as an ex-Evangelical, she approaches the project in a spirit of deconstruction. We often think of morality in black-or-white terms: People are either innocent or guilty, saved or damned, good or flawed. But not only is this either-or thinking false, Harden argues, it keeps us from judging others fairly and compassionately. “By deconstructing some of the binaries that encage our stories about human behavior,” she writes, “we can grow more elastic, more creative in our thinking about how each of us deserves to be treated.”
Harden ranges across centuries and disciplines to uncover the troubled roots of our ideas about sin and vice. She notes that it wasn’t until the fourth century, long after Christianity’s founding, that the cleric Augustine — whose sexual misadventures led him to interpret life as a struggle against his own tainted flesh — developed the doctrine of original sin. Harden sums up what she sees as the contradictions in Augustine’s view: “There is nothing you can do, or could have done, about being born with a sinful nature,” she writes, “but you are still blameworthy.”
Few scientists understand the error of this view better than Harden, who has spent more than two decades studying how genes influence human behavior. She nimbly unpacks the complex nature of genetic programming, explaining that while no one is trapped by their heritage or to blame for it, there are nonetheless genes that put people at higher risk of engaging in antisocial, even sinful, behavior. “We are moral agents embedded in an animal biology,” she writes. “We are not just the product of nurture but have natures, too.”
We often think of morality in black-or-white terms: People are either innocent or guilty, saved or damned, good or flawed.
This underscores the case Harden made in her first book, “The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality” — that some people are dealt a bad genetic hand and deserve tailored interventions to help them thrive. She raises important caveats, however: Most genes influence their bearers’ actions — whether for good or ill — only in combination with other genes, defying our human desire to isolate specific causes of sin. Surrounding environments also magnify existing genetic effects in surprising ways. If a child is born with genes that incline her toward aggression, her parents may respond to her childhood outbursts with harsh punishment that provokes even more aggressive behavior.
As we become more aware of the biological roots of behavior, this knowledge sometimes nudges us toward tolerance, Harden observes. In studies where people learn about the genetic origins of sexual orientation, they report feeling more positive about gay and lesbian people, perhaps because they understand that these orientations are hardwired, not chosen. But this tolerance is not consistent across the board. When we learn that a violent person’s criminal bent is inherited, this knowledge does not inspire us to forgive them; some studies show that it actually induces us to punish them more. In such cases, people are seemingly driven to view someone’s genetic heritage as proof of their inherent badness, interpreting modern science through the prism of ancient religious ideas.
For Harden, all of this is intensely personal territory, and her regular excursions into memoir give the book novelistic resonance. When she gives birth to a child with webbed toes, a feature genetic studies have linked to aggressive behavior, her old conviction that she is inherently flawed comes roaring back. “Throughout my pregnancy, I feared that, like Eve, I would give birth to a Cain,” she writes, a fear that seemed to be coming true in real time.
Though the narrative makes some jarring hairpin turns — it is not clear, for instance, why a chapter on corporal punishment follows a chapter on eugenics — much of Harden’s prose is dazzling on the sentence level, in the vein of neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi’s posthumously published “When Breath Becomes Air.” “I was raised to believe,” Harden writes, “that behavior was always a reflection of an innately wicked nature, that fragile virtue was best secured by remembering that a belt awaited me in this life and a lake of fire in the next.”
Harden’s personal vantage point allows her to draw striking parallels between original sin and genetic determinism, doctrines both interpreted to mean our fate is sealed for reasons beyond our control. But what the book largely glosses over — and what, to be fair, many Christians also miss — is that Augustine didn’t intend original sin as a doctrine of hopelessness. He saw it as illustrating our ingrained tendency to turn away from our basic goodness, a tendency that can itself be overcome.
In this sense, Harden is actually on the same page as Augustine. Some of the book’s most moving sections describe people’s desire and potential to improve despite the supposed verdict their inheritance confers on them. The final chapter is an extended dialogue between Harden and a man in prison for kidnapping and assaulting a woman. In response to his question about what makes a child go bad, Harden explains, “No one is either lamb or goat, wheat or tare, saved or damned,” she writes, adding later: “I believe, by faith and not by sight, that you do have hope. I believe everyone does.”
Harden calls for “not the abolition of punishment, but punishment with forgiveness.”
However dire your current outlook — due to accidents of birth, genetic legacies, or past misdeeds — Harden contends it can be altered in the face of long odds. There’s something pluckily American about this stance, reminiscent of Atticus’s pronouncement from “To Kill a Mockingbird” about real courage: “It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.”
In this spirit, Harden urges a renewed focus on rehabilitating wrongdoers rather than inflicting vengeance. She calls for “not the abolition of punishment, but punishment with forgiveness,” holding perpetrators responsible while acknowledging seeds of good that might still sprout whatever the genetic substrate. In a culture pushing us toward ever more inflexible binaries, political, moral and biological, “Original Sin” makes a powerful case for nuanced navigation — and, in the end, for absolution.