Nature or nurture: can genes make us behave ‘badly’?

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Välis on universit ja teksistus, jossa universit on maailmissa, että se on koko koko valmiin kolmissa, ja universit ja teksistus. Ja niin se on jääntää muuta, että se ei ole koko. Katrin Page Harden, ei ole hienoa jännöistä. Se on koko koko jännöistä, että se on jääntää, ja se on jääntää. Se on jääntää hienoa olemassa, mutta se on jääntää, partidoiniin. Viivintaminen eikä kertoo Hastajan k migrantopion plan maintai começar 00, järjestelmät on tullut hienoa. He kertoo hienoa tullut. Haluat kertoo hienoa tullut. Tämä on tullut, joten on kertoo hienoa tullut. Se on tullut, että hienoa tullut. Se on tullut hienoa tullut, että hienoa tullut hienoa tullut. Tried t bestämme mitä datten boleh t기로 asofi非 että jos planettoita mahdollisimme nähdä vastaan liodemmin saada sy Glennkkiin, tätä r outi donnerών byjässä? Gette 라고a että sitä helpist gestku läpi 15 beberbers per Allāh"? applauding identan tim, minkä se tuota alkainen scruboga мин 새myärräksästeen limpäin? UNA-kempłihuat olivat varupo Paanys.) Maailma rauhtaa reseidina kun intuitive sådan paasti stunned. MietЕН Lanasi, salkon ovat kääminen tekstit crawl into user omettajien oppa love- idols par ruinjaisesti, tai kun solone주면 kerää olisi visa ny Highnessa spikeentoista, sosia我的 Liangо, historici - litterandia eri myös ik〒yaan ratedotaan, joku mä bakkaa perinteinen luottamisen ke�hova, kun ol شي meillä näe�agi teilweise, se oli hieman työskiesik Durham ja enemmän huurossa. So what we were looking at is could we identify specific DNA sequences, differences in the DNA letters between people that are correlated with being more likely to engage, and not just one form of externalizing, but all of them. So these are genes that make it more likely for you to smoke, and also to drink, and also to have sex with more people and also potentially to address against another person. And for some people listening, you might think, "Well, having sex with lots of people, and aggressing against someone, those are totally different behaviors. One is not necessarily harmful in any way." And that's absolutely true, but what all of these behaviors have in common is that, at least someone in society says you shouldn't do them, and you do them anyway. And so what we see is that there's genes that are in common across all of these things. And there's an idea in there, then, that people can be genetically predisposed or more at risk of criminality. And that's soapsy controversial, and it's unsettling in some ways. But you make the case in the book that, you know, there are many other things that we use to put down to sort of nurture environment that I actually have turned out to have these genetic components, and it thinks like obesity, it thinks like religiosity, even autism, people put that down to environmental factors, not too many decades ago. Yeah, so there's this idea that we can kind of pre-intuit or pre-know, which behaviors are going to be influenced by genes and which aren't. But then if we look in our history, we can see obvious examples where we were wrong in the past, and our intuitions have shifted in response to science. So schizophrenia used to be thought to be the result of a schizophrenic mother, and we now know that it is very strongly heritable. We used to think of obesity in terms of sloth and gluttony, and now, especially in the age of osempic, we can see that it's profoundly biological and can be manipulated by injecting a peptide in your body. So we can see over time that societies always kind of have a carve out where we think, "Well, this behavior is somehow floating free of our body, but that's almost never the case. All of our behavior is being produced by a body, by a brain, and that brain's going to be shaped by the genes we happen to inherit." How much difference does like each actual gene variant make? So ordinarily, for the vast majority of people, and for the vast majority of genetic variants, a difference between us and our genes makes only the tiniest bit of difference to our probability of showing a behavior. I think the best analogy for helping people understand this is to think about height. So there's a few people who inherit genes for gigantism that make them very tall, or genes for dwarfism that make them very short. But most of the reasons why people are taller or shorter is because there's thousands of genes scattered throughout the genome that might make you a millimeter taller or a millimeter shorter. But even though each one of those genes only has a tiny effect, you could have many, many, many height increasing genes, and then you're going to end up on the tails. And it's the same sort of thing for behavior. So we're looking at things that are what are called massively polygenic, so poly-meaning many, genetic meaning obviously genes. So there's many, many genes involved. Each one of them is just like adding a little tiny hair to the scale. But we have a large DNA sequence, and we have a lot of genetic variants. And so they can add up so that it makes a large difference at the tails of the distribution. And you talk about these polygenic scores, which look at the contributions of lots of genes and how they correlate with like risky antisocial behaviors. But even when you look at sort of groups of genes where these effects may add up, is it possible to attribute causation at like an individual level? Or are there other factors you have to consider and obviously the things that come to mind are cycles of deprivation, abuse, racism, these other factors that are going to be non-genetic? So I think you've just said the most controversial word of the podcast, and that's the word cause, which is a word that not even philosophers of science agree on and not even different branches of science agree on. So I'm trained as a psychologist, as a social scientist. So we tend to think of causes as probabilistic difference makers. So if you inherited something, it makes a difference to the probability of showing a behavior. And our best evidence that these genes are actually causal is that we see that they make a difference even within families. So if the genes are associated with behavior, even when comparing between siblings or even when controlling for your parents' genes, that's pretty good evidence that those genes are operating causally. But everything we're talking about with human behavior doesn't have just one cause. So it's not nature or nurture, genes or environment. It's always genes and the prenatal environment and the social structures that you're being raised in and your access to material resources and poverty and let exposure. The idea that we're going to find the smoking gun, that is the cause of behavior, just isn't realistic. There's something we're going to ask a bit more about, because in the book you say there's no way to meaningfully distinguish between nature and nurture that our genes and our environment combine in ways that just impossible to pick apart. But I wonder if you could unpack that. because clearly you're saying and sometimes drawing on these twin studies, you're saying that, you know, you can isolate genetic components and you can say that genes do affect the chances of someone doing something. So you can measure different factors and you can loosely categorize them as I'm measuring your DNA so I'm measuring your genes or I'm measuring the amount of income that your family makes and so I'm measuring your environment. But as soon as we shift our attention from measuring how people differ to trying to understand why those differences matter, we inevitably end up in the world of gene environment interaction. So we know that poverty gets under the skin to change how your genes are expressed. We know that children with genetic differences experience different environments because adults respond to them differently. That line between nature and nurture gets real fuzzy, real fast. So the importance of these gene variants in the average person is still nowhere near like deterministic. We are not we're getting away from the idea of genes being deterministic, thank goodness. So if that's the case, so what is the value of the kinds of polygenic schools that you're interested in? If they're not going to say yes, this person is destined to be a wrong one. What is the value of those schools? I'm going to use the word wrong and I'm going to try to to put that in my southern accent and take that from here. So I think it's helpful to think about how we use other variables that are not deterministic but do make a difference. So we know for example that children who are raised in poverty are more likely to develop substance use problems. That's not deterministic. If you're raised in poverty, you're not destined to have an addiction, but it just raise your vulnerability for that. So how do we use that information? One way we that use that information is just it's another variable to control for when we're trying to develop these models of development. We wouldn't compare a kid from a rich family and a kid from a poor family without taking that variable into account. The other thing is that it serves to humanize people when we're confronted with their bad behavior. I don't know how it is here but in the American criminal legal system, it's very common in the sentencing phase for the defendant's representation to talk about well how has his or her life been shaped by these environmental factors? And again, it's not that if you were maltreated or you raised in a poor home, you were destined to commit a crime. But it does help the jurors and the judge perhaps understand how might he have come to this place in their life. So I think genetic information is very similar. It's another variable that's probabilistically related and it can serve to be a control for research. That's kind of the least sexy application, but the one that scientists were most interested in. It can serve to humanize people to remind us that no one chose the body and the brain that they have by the time they're an adult from a legal perspective and it can help us see who's being left behind. Coming up from the lab to the fertility clinic, the troubling real world applications of polygenic scores. 33 days, 33 episodes, no off switch from the goals and the glories, the politics and the problems of the World Cup. If you want football analysis from a podcast that's been overanalyzing the game for more than 20 years, this is it. Join me, Max Rushden and our expert team of football journeys every day of the tournament. Can England end 60 years of hurt? Probably not. Or will this be another year of falling just short? Probably. World Cup daily, listen wherever you get your podcasts, or watch the full episodes on YouTube. It is likely to increase the risk of eating at least 20% of the product. If the product is already in the most difficult situation, the product can be set to a maximum of 30% of the product. We were talking about how some of this work can feel unsettling and we know that fertility clinics are already offering embryo selection using polygenic scores and they are selling selection for lowering risk of certain cancers but even IQ whatever they mean by IQ and psychoanalysis could be used in the past. I think that's why we're talking about the pediatric conditions like bipolar and schizophrenia which leads you to the question of whether the kind of work that you're doing will make people wonder, oh well, does this open the door to selecting for well-behaved people which obviously starts getting into, you know, we get into the realm of eugenics. It has to come up. I think we're already in the realm of eugenics. There was ads in the New York City subway a few months ago saying have your best baby and it was an ad for a direct consumer polygenic testing company for embryos and this technology raises really urgent questions about our values and the tensions between those values. I think what's important for people to understand is not only are these genes not deterministic but genes don't have a one-to-one relationship with behavior. Genes do lots of things in our body because what they do is they code for proteins and their proteins are involved in lots of different processes. So for instance genes that are associated with an elevated risk for schizophrenia are also associated with higher chances of going to college. Is that a good gene or a bad gene? It's neither and the core of eugenics is projecting our normative judgments about good and bad down into the genome. When it comes to the specific genes that we're looking at in relation to aggression and anti-social behavior, we also see that they're associated with positive risk taking. We also see that the people who are most likely to be entrepreneurs by the time they're 30 or 35 have a history of delinquency and adolescence. So is risk taking always a bad thing is lack of conformity to society's norms, always a bad thing, absolutely not. I think America is a real wild west right now in terms of lack of regulation but also just lack of democratic participation and debate about how do we want to use this technology and how do we not want to use this technology. And I don't think it should be one person or one company's vision for how this technology is deployed. It's interesting again how you go through it in the book where risk taking can have different outcomes depending on the environment that that risk taking person is born into. So if you're risk taking and you happen to be born into an extremely wealthy family on the west coast and you get into the tech world, then maybe your trajectory is one that's praised by society. But maybe if you are born into a different family under different circumstances that risk taking might end up with you just stealing loads of cars and being aggressive and any up in prison. I was having this conversation with a friend of mine and she said, well, wouldn't everyone if they had the chance select their child to be the least likely to be addicted to drugs, the least likely to have ADHD. And I said to her, didn't you have a child with a fighter pilot? Like you made it with someone whose entire job depends on taking risks and the ability to manage those sensations even at the real negative physical consequences of crashing this plane into the ocean. So I think we have this idea that you know, less was taking is always good, but our behaviors often belive that statement. And we probably do want that variation in society. Exactly. There's no evolution without mutation and there's no dynamism in a society without deviation from those norms. I mean, I've loved being in London this week. In part because you walked on the street and you see such variety and variety really is necessary to human flourishing. And coming back to the premise of the book, this question of whether we might feel differently about someone's crimes if we knew there was a genetic element to them. What do you feel the evidence shows at the moment? I think that evidence shows that our intuitions are wildly all over the place, depending on the person, depending on the person that's being judged and depending on the crime. So sometimes genes tend to have a humanizing effect or a mitigating effect and that happens when there's this idea that there's a person and then the genes are constraining that person's agency in some way. My genes made me do it. I couldn't have done otherwise. That's a more determined story about genes, but it's very easy to slip into a more essentialist framing of genes, which really sees the genes as a reflection of who a person really is. They're bad to the bone, they're a bad seed. And that tends to make us more punitive or at least less likely to trust that there's hope for rehabilitation and change in the future. Genetics is a very, very new science. And our ideas about heredity and sinfulness and can we inherit something that makes us blameworthy are much, much, much older. And so the new science is kind of being grafted onto these much older generations. debates that we have. And so finally, Catherine, I want to know where you come down on all of this. Or maybe you're, maybe you're, you know, delaying coming down on one side. But how do you think that the knowledge you and others are gaining should inform our approach to accountability to punishment? So I won't say how I think everyone should approach this, but I will tell you how I have ended up approaching it. As someone who has spent most of her adult life thinking about how her genes connected to the bad things or the things that are called bad that people do. And I would say that it has made me much less punitive. And I live in one of the most punitive states in one of the most punitive countries in the world. Because I see how my life could have gone differently. Not just if I had been born into a different family or different environmental circumstances, but if there had been a different combination of DNA letters when, you know, the egg or the sperm that made me happen. I don't think of people as inherently bad or inherently good. I'm just continually reminded of our common, fallible humanity when I think about genetics. I'm sure you've got more letters that will be coming into your mailbox page. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Thanks again to Catherine Page Harden. To support the Guardian, you can order the book Original Sin via Guardian Bookshop.com. And that's all from us. The sound design was by Ross Burns and the executive producer was Ellie Burry. We'll be back on Thursday. See you then. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] Former politics reporter Jane Kostin is now hosting "Quick Ed Media's Daily News Podcast, What a Day, 5 Days a Week." With stories constantly flooding your "for you" page, it's hard to separate what matters from all the noise. That's why every weekday, Jane and the Water Day team scour the biggest headlines and bring you the stories that matter most to your life all in just 20 minutes. Listen to Water Day, wherever you get your podcast, or subscribe to Water Day on YouTube for the video version.