Yves here. I am not at all comfortable with depicting vice in particular, clearly a religious/societal construct, with genetics. As much as the Japanese fetishize their belief in racial distinctiveness, being a non-Judeo-Christian society gives them a different view of suicide and even some sexual norms, and in particular, no belief in original sin. I was brought up in an undeclared atheist household (we did very erratically go to Unitarian churches). My father was brought up a Congregationalist and my mother theoretically a Lutheran (her family was non-practicing; for some years as a child, she would go on her own to what she called the Holy Roller church down the street, where she and the congregation regarded each other with mutual curiosity). How can you attribute genetics to my not identifying even remotely with the idea of original sin? I view this plane of existence as a Disney E-ticket ride where the machinery has gone off kilter. Why we signed up for this is the open question. Eternity is boring and extremes are engaging (see Game of Thrones as proof).
Having said that, as we regularly point out, social animals exhibit both cheating and cooperative behaviors, as well as notions of fairness and regular practice of altruistic punishment (incurring costs for no individual benefit to harm those who behave badly).
And I am not at all comfortable with the discussion recapped below about parents needing to engage in extra training of children who have “genes” that pre-dispose them to aggression. This is just a prettied-up version of the societal prejudice that black men are violent. Michael Moore’s documentary Bowling for Columbine had an extended section on that.
By Elizabeth Svoboda, a science writer whose upcoming book, “The Art of Pacing,” is about setting a sustaining pace in a speed-obsessed world. Originally published at Undark
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?
Harden’s second book, “Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, andtheFuture 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.”
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.”
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.
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Long before Augustine there was Eve, Adam, the serpent and the apple.
There is no genetic basis for, as broad and seemingly concrete a concept as race, but there is for merely an idea such as “sin”?
To clear the head of (some) sin confusion, Michael Hudson’s …and forgive them their debts Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption From Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year is a good direction to travel. David Graeber made his own contribution to this sin business.
Kathryn Paige Harden is a gift that keeps on giving. The Genetic Lottery could have been written a hundred years ago, albeit without the molecular genetics offered as “proof.” It was superficially persuasive but as tiresome as Charles Murray. Naturally, it was reviewed in the New York Review of Books. The inevitable post-review exchange of views is here.
Alas, there is no oaken stake or silver bullet that can kill eugenics.
Thanks for posting links. I was looking in this review for some discussion of human genetics and the author’s methodology to justify giving this any attention. Now I see she’s a psychologist—ugg.
Poor Augustine. He seems to get the blame for anything people don’t like about Christianity. Augustine did not invent the doctrine of original sin. Paul doesn’t use the phrase “original sin,” but he sure talks at length about his doctrine that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Romans 3:23. He continues the discussion in Romans 5, where he writes:
Romans 5:18 (NRSVU)
Here’s a list of pre-Augustine church fathers who taught original sin from a Roman Catholic apologetics site.
Augustine, in the course of his debates with Pelagius, did develop the concept of original sin beyond what the earlier church fathers taught, but his teaching on the topic was in accord with what Paul and those early church fathers taught.
Harden may also be confusing civil and spiritual righteousness as taught in orthodox Christianity. “Original sin” speaks nothing about civil righteousness. Luther, who was an Augustinian monk and certainly believed in original sin, especially his own, regarded the Turks as superior in “civil righteousness” to Christians. “Original sin,” in Luther’s understanding, did not prevent one from acting as a good ruler, a law-abiding citizen or a loving parent. It did mean that one was born alienated from God and ineligible for heaven, a shortcoming that was remedied by Baptism.
Finally, Harden’s tendency toward eugenics may result from a failure to understand that some human behaviors with a genetic component that may have been beneficial in small bands of hunter-gatherers become harmful in larger groups. The problem is not “bad genes,” but complex, hierarchical societies that flip useful traits to harmful ones. I highly recommend Nate Hagens’s cogent explanation of what happens to humans when they cross the Dunbar number.
Before the 11th century there were no “Roman Catholics.” Augustinian views of (original) sin were embraced by western Christianity, especially Protestant Reformers. Their embace of the notion was is some measure a critique of the Roman Catholic notion that posed the possibility of relief from sin by purchasing passes, aka, indulgences.
A British monk and contemporary of Augustine, Pelagius, posed an alternative to the Augustinian notion total depravity, but was beaten back by refutations led by no less than Augustine himself.
A completely different spin on “original sin”, from the point of view of someone who accepts the concept of reincarnation, lies first in defining what we mean by “sin”. If we accept that “sin” is that which separates us from “God” (however we define that), then believing we are the body and not the soul, is a reasonable definition of “original sin”, because that identification with the body is close to unavoidable.
If the body is mortal and the soul is enduring, which one are we really? It’s easy to identify primarily with the body, it certainly demands more daily attention than does the soul.
There are mentions of a forgotten teaching, the “Law of Seven”, in a book “In Search of the Miraculous”, by P.D. Ouspensky, a student and collaborator with Gurdjieff.
It posits what we think of as “God” is the highest possible vibration in the universe, that descends from there in octaves and intervals, until it gets down to the vibration level we live in and perceive.
Isn’t everything vibration of some sort or another?
Plants have consciousness, there are few among us with the sensitivity to communicate with plants, trees and animals. If you’re a skeptic, watch an Anna Breytenbach video, “From Diablo to Spirit”, it may change how you view reality. That one is an 11 minute clip from a longer video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6r7q9_akX4&t=3s
I was also raised as a Unitarian. I have some literature I found in my mom’s stash, saying that Unitarians were being burned alive at the stake in the 14th(?) century, for asking “If God is One, how can He be Three?” It’s been demonstrated by Biblical scholars that the concept of “The Holy Trinity”, was made up out of whole cloth, rather late in the game, IIRC around 800 AD.
No, the Trinity was around well before 800 CE. Paul uses a Trinitarian blessing at the end of 2 Corinithians:
2 Corinthians 13:14 (NIV)
The issue was certainly decided at Nicaea in 325 CE when Athanasius won out over Arius, a fight still being waged by Jehovah’s Witnesses. (There is no such name as “Jehovah” in the Hebrew bible. The misnomer arises by wrongly combining the consonants YHWH with the Masoretic pointing for “Adonai,” the word for “lord.” The Masoretes pointed it that way so that those reading the Torah in synagogue would not say the divine name aloud.)
I’m a physicist. Vibrations are basic concepts for us. And we often have our ideas about what everything is made of. But I’m at a loss about what “Isn’t everything vibration of some sort or another?” can possibly mean.
If it’s a metaphor I’m missing it. If I take it more literally, well, I suppose energy has to do with everything, and quantum mechanically, energy is basically the same thing as frequency, which you might link to vibrations. Nothing about this has anything to do with talk of “higher vibration levels” and the sort, which (to a physicist) strangely acquires psychological or even moral coloration.
Not genetic, but there seems to be a significant relationship between the prevalence of lethal venereal diseases and sexual morality. Just look at American sexual mores in 1975 versus 1985 when AIDS was raging. Purity, sexual and other forms, is very much connected to disgust-reactions, hygiene and disease. To the extent there is a genetic component, it probably relates to strength of disgust reactions.
I am mostly but not quite completely convinced by arguments of Robert Sapolsky and others against the existence of what we call free will. Who among us chose the cosmic, organic, and social circumstances into which we were born?
I reject the notion that good and evil have objective or so-called “god given” existence. What we have instead are preferences, which individuals and groups promulgate and contend, at times violently. Whether one picks one’s preferences or not, I cannot with certainty say. In any event, I stand by preferences as others do theirs.
I do believe that some individuals are for whatever reason driven to and derive pleasure from harming others: serial killers and sexually driven serial offenders being extreme examples. They are an affront to my own widely shared preferences while, at the same time, I believe they have little choice as regard their own behavioral preferences. My preference is that they need to be rendered harmless by being quarantined along with certain persons and groups currently in high places of wealth, power, and authority.
I am completely unconvinced by arguments of Robert Sapolsky and others against the existence of free will. I believe that morality is based on something along the lines of natural law. Isn’t it interesting that with respect to the pragmatic problem of dealing with sociopaths, we more or less concur? Does that say something about the significance of these metaphysical questions? As an aside, we need to take seriously the assertion that the wages of sin is death.
“I believe that morality is based on something along the lines of natural law.”
I wouldn’t disagree. Things like the tit for tat strategy with the possibility of forgiveness have deep evolutionary roots, and are much discussed by Sapolsky.
I recently came across a poem from Rumi that I found most appealing: a kind of evolutionary directional sign post.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
Doesn’t make any sense.
This is old but relevant to this discussion I think. Apparently sexual predators are also prone to committing crimes of theft, fraud, etc. as though they see themselves as entitled to others’ property and sexual assault is just another way of taking something to which they feel entitled. The Al Capone Theory of sexual assault:
https://hypatia.ca/2017/07/18/the-al-capone-theory-of-sexual-harassment/
The gaining widespread use of assigning things to ‘genes’ / ‘genetics’ has me thinking they’re used as camouflage / stand-ins for ignorance… They are certainly very flexible words… If, as a US court has decided machines cause a users addiction to using them, then we’re doomed !!
It’s nurture not nature, as the life story of our fearless leader “Mister Id” has conclusively proven. Read his niece Mary’s book.