480. Original Sin with Kathryn Paige Harden

Listen and Learn:Why genes, like environments, tilt the playing field without determining the outcome, and what a cloned Texas bull named Second Chance (who gored his owners, unlike the sweet original) teaches us about genetic determinismWhy "What if you'd had my childhood?" invites sympathy while "What if you'd had my genome?" feels like an identity threat, and how DNA has become our modern "essence placeholder"What the Lindsay Clancy and Andrea Yates cases reveal about the limits of our victim/perpetrator binary, and why our legal system and moral intuitions struggle when someone is bothHow punishment shows up across the natural world, from paper wasp queens who get deposed for eating too many of their sisters' eggs to fig trees that shrivel the fruit of lazy pollinatorsWhy our retributive drive is deeply "baked into the evolutionary sauce," and why simply understanding the free will problem won't make it disappearDurkheim's argument that a society without crime would be neither possible nor desirable, and how deviance drives moral innovationWhy accountability has become collapsed with punishment, in criminal justice and in modern parenting debates, and what a "third way" might look likeHow the Norwegian response to Anders Breivik reframes the question from "Does this person deserve punishment?" to "How do we treat someone who has done something terrible and is still one of us?"Why dehumanizing others degrades the punisher as well as the punished, and how service-based consequences might replace immiserationResources:Kathryn Paige Harden's website: https://www.kpharden.comOriginal Sin by Kathryn Paige HardenWhy Don't You Understand Me?: The Surprising Science Behind Connecting in a World of Missed Signals by Yael Schonbrun&nbsp;Form to get pre-order bonuses for Why Don't You Understand Me?&nbsp;Yael's favorite true crime podcasts:&nbsp;Beyond All RepairLove TrappedThe DropoutSerialDr. DeathOne of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway and Its Aftermath by Åsne SeierstadThe View From Nowhere by Thomas Nagel"What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" by Thomas NagelOutraged by Kurt GrayAbout Kathryn Paige HardenKathryn Paige Harden is a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, where she leads the Developmental Behavior Genetics Lab, studying how kids' and teens' DNA sequences and epigenomes interact with their environments to shape thought, feeling, and behavior. She earned her PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Virginia and trained clinically at McLean Hospital, Harvard Medical School. Her first book, The Genetic Lottery, argued that genetics matters for social equality and made her one of the most debated scientists writing for a general audience. Her new book, Original Sin, is part memoir, part behavioral genetics primer, and part philosophical reckoning with her own evangelical upbringing, arguing that the question of why people do terrible things cannot be answered by nature or nurture alone.Related Episodes:392. Outraged with Kurt Gray<a href="https://offtheclockpsych.c