Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future
of Forgiveness by Kathryn Paige Harden; Random House, 320 pp., $30
Behavioral genetics offered Kathryn Paige Harden a flight from orthodoxy—that of her own uncompromising evangelical Christianity.
Harden is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and head of its Developmental Behavior Genetics Lab, and her research is focused on “the genetics of vice,” which she presents from her perspective as an ex-Christian. She wants to better understand the relationship between control and blame, taking into account both the science of heredity and the traditional views of sin and free will. In her new book, Original Sin, Harden tells of growing up in a world of stark binaries—virtue and vice, heaven and hell—then trading it in for a science-informed one of multiplicities and contradictions.
This makes for an engaging read, even if Harden’s scientific insights feel less than earthshaking. If you were already inclined to suspect that genetic heritage, experience, and personal choices interact in complex ways to influence behavior, this book will not alter your views much. “Nature and nurture collapse into each other,” Harden declares, and “correlations between genes and behavior … are just big enough to be unignorable but not nearly so large as to be deterministic.” But if DNA alone cannot reliably predict criminality, Harden contends that a multitude of small genetic differences may combine to produce larger ones and, especially if aggravated by traumatic experience, may predispose some individuals to addiction or crime.
Here, though, her purpose is not so much to prosecute the case as to explore its implications, namely that “all of our choices are structured by much we didn’t choose.” If this is so, she asks, what justifies blame and punishment? For answers, she turns to her own story of childbearing, divorce, remarriage, and loss of faith. We get glimpses of a father who read Bible verses before whipping his children with a belt, albeit halfheartedly; Harden’s early preoccupation with damnation; and finally, her growing conviction that early Christianity’s concept of original sin has bred our culture’s punitive tendency.
Harden’s most powerful passages describe her experiences of bearing and rearing her children. Especially memorable are her description of labor and her nuanced account of a miscarriage followed by another pregnancy. On these topics, she combines biology, personal reminiscence, and social commentary to resounding effect. “Reproduction involves ruthless trade-offs,” she writes. “Having one baby requires not having had the other one.”
But elsewhere, Harden’s approach falls short. Because she inserts ideas about genetics into debates on equality, critics have accused her of peddling dangerous and discredited theories, such as eugenics. The controversy led to a profile in Texas Monthly, and Harden has used the attention to plug her work while also disavowing biological determinism, being careful to attack eugenics, and debunking crude racial views that ascribe negative inherited traits to whole groups.
Yet she never directly addresses the real dimensions of race and crime in this country—a glaring omission, given that Black men are disproportionately involved in homicidal crime (as both victims and perpetrators) in the United States, for reasons that have nothing to do with biology or genetic heritage. Beyond citing trite and inadequate “root cause” correlations, Harden does not even engage with this racial disparity, nor does she confront the questions it raises.
Her error is a common one: She assumes homicide is a “vice.” It’s not. Homicide is a very specific political and legal phenomenon that reliably surges in conditions of civil war, state failure, or weak, brutal, corrupt policing, and it’s often accompanied by public outrage toward authorities and disillusionment with legal institutions. Any peaceful population has the capacity to turn violent overnight without shifting a single gene.
The conditions of contemporary Black America—shaped by historical discrimination, civil war, segregation, and policing controversies combined with perennially low solve rates for violent crime—merely exemplify those that predict disproportionate criminal violence anytime, anywhere. Fourteenth-century Londoners, for example, died from homicide at the same frequency as have the 21st-century residents of Compton, California. (Must have been that English DNA.)
Harden’s deeper problem is that neither genetics nor psychology is especially germane to criminal violence at all. What good are twin studies or lab tests on mice when the law is like a blanket that does not cover everybody? In America, if you are confined to the lawless gaps, as many urban Black men are, you stand to be conscripted into the lowest and most dangerous jobs in organized crime, a business that is always hiring. And even if you aren’t, you still can’t afford to ignore the street codes. “Vice” pools up in such conditions less because people choose crime than because crime chooses them.
In other words, Harden is eager to take on Dante’s hell, but she skirts our real-world one. More than 100,000 American homicides occurred during the five-year pandemic period this book roughly spans. Yet Harden leans on a few outliers, mostly ripped from the headlines, to make her point: Anders Breivik, the 2011 Norwegian mass killer; Andrea Yates, the 2001 child killer; Derek Chauvin, convicted of murdering George Floyd in 2020.
Rather than delve into the complexities of crime and enforcement, she opts for progressive poses as empty as any on the political right. She calls the American criminal justice system discriminatory and abhorrent. She calls prison conditions “torture porn,” but her opinion appears informed mostly by news stories, polemics, and surface-level research—all clouded by her partisan lens and not accounting for the real-world difficulties of prison alternatives. She speculates how an assault victim might feel but never asks one. Who needs direct knowledge when certainty comes so easily? Incarceration is bad, Harden believes. Punishment—even if asserting equality of worth means offenders must be held responsible sometimes, somehow—is a bestial urge informed by Christian prejudice. Revenge, she insists, is mere animal lust, which activates pleasure centers in the brain.
This is not reasoned analysis; it is religion. Harden seems never to consider that depth, ambiguity, and contradiction might exist in the criminal justice domain just as they do in biology and psychology, and that they might involve phenomena every bit as dynamic and multifaceted as the mind-body systems she studies.
The nation’s prison population has been reduced by about 20 percent in the past decade (a fact that Harden does not acknowledge). As California empties its cells, I’ve gotten calls from sobbing mothers of homicide victims about whom I’ve written. They have just learned that their sons’ killers will not serve full sentences. They are also all Black, poor, and lifelong Democrats who feel betrayed by criminal justice progressives.
My point is that stark moral binaries have no place here. Crime is conflict. Law, not science, must resolve it. The state’s efforts to balance punishment, rehabilitation, deterrence, and incapacitation are necessarily ongoing; no reform can answer all claims. But having escaped one orthodoxy, Harden has just embraced another.
