Andnce on Once upon a time, Kathryn Paige Harden was an evangelical teenager steeped in the doctrine of original sin. He learned almost from birth that humans are inherently flawed — and doomed to pass their flaws on to their descendants, as Adam and Eve did after eating the 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 left both the letter and the spirit of her upbringing. Yet her research, which explores genetic differences related to behaviors like abuse and violence, returns her again and again to questions she wrestled with growing up. In fact, are we born with tendencies that make us prone to bad deeds and crimes? And if we are, how responsible are we for those actions?
Harden’s second book, “Original Sin: The Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Guilt, and the Future of Forgiveness“A thoughtful, lyrical attempt to address these questions — and as a former evangelical, he 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 that — or preventing others from thinking fairly and treating others fairly. With compassion. “By shedding some of the binaries that bind our stories about human behavior,” he writes, “we can be more resilient, more creative about how we should treat each other.”
Rigorous range across centuries and disciplines to uncover the problematic roots of our understanding of sin and sin. He notes that long after the founding of Christianity, it was not until the fourth century that the theologian Augustine—whose sexual affliction led him to interpret life as a struggle against his own tainted flesh—developed the doctrine of original sin. Harden summarizes what he sees as a contradiction in Augustine’s view: “There is nothing you can do or could have done about being born with a sinful nature,” he writes, “but you are still guilty.”
Few scientists understand the flaw in this view better than Harden, who has spent more than two decades studying how genes influence human behavior. He deftly unpacks the complex nature of genetic programming, explaining that although no one is trapped by or responsible for their heritage, there are genes that put people at risk of engaging in antisocial, even sinful, behavior. “We are moral agents embedded in an animal biology,” he wrote. “We are not only products of nurture, but also of our nature.”
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 his first book, “The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality“—that some people are dealt a bad genetic hand and deserve appropriate interventions to help them improve. But he raises important caveats: Most genes effect The actions of their carriers – for better or worse – only in combination with other genes, negates our human will to isolate Certain causes of sin. The surrounding environment also magnifies existing genetic influences in surprising ways. If a child is born with genes that predispose him to aggression, his parents may respond to his childhood outbursts by punishing him harshly, which provokes even more aggressive behavior.
As we become more aware of the biological roots of behavior, this knowledge sometimes pushes us toward tolerance, Harden observes. In studies where people learn about the genetic origins of sexual orientation, they report more positive feelings about gays and lesbians, perhaps because they understand that these orientations are hard, not chosen. But this tolerance is not consistent across the board. When we learn that a violent person’s criminal tendencies are inherited, this knowledge does not motivate us to forgive them; Some research shows that it actually makes us want to punish them more. In such cases, people are seemingly driven to see one’s genetic heritage as evidence of their inherent badness, interpreting modern science through the prism of ancient religious ideas.
For Harden, all of this is intensely personal territory, and his frequent forays into memoir give the book its novelistic resonance. When she gives birth to a child with webbed toes, a trait 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 seems to be coming true in real time.
Although the narrative takes some disturbing hairpin turns—it’s not clear, for example, why a chapter on corporal punishment follows a chapter on eugenics—much of Harden’s prose is intriguing on a sentence level, in the vein of neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi’s posthumous “When breath becomes air“I was raised to believe,” Harden writes, “that behavior was always a reflection of an inherently evil nature, a fragile quality best guarded by remembering that a belt in this life and a lake of fire awaited me in the next.”
Harden’s personal vantage point allows him to draw interesting parallels between the original sin and Genetic determinismBoth doctrines imply that our fate is sealed for reasons beyond our control. But what the book really glosses over—and what, to be fair, many Christians also miss—is that Augustine did not intend original sin as a doctrine of despair. He illustrated our inherent tendency to turn away from it Our basic welfareA tendency that can overcome itself.
In this sense, Harden is actually on the same page as Augustine. Some of the most moving parts of the book describe their desire and potential to thrive despite the supposed judgments their legacies have passed on them. The final chapter is an extended conversation between Harden and a man in prison for kidnapping and torturing a woman. In response to her question about what makes a child bad, Harden explains, “No one is sheep or goats, wheat or chaff, saved or damned,” he writes, later adding: “I believe, by faith and not by sight, you have hope. I believe everyone does.”
Harden called for “punishment, not abolition with Forgiveness.”
However dire your current outlook is — due to accident of birth, genetic inheritance or past misdeeds — Harden contends that it can be changed in the face of prolonged adversity. There’s something American about this position, reminiscent of Atticus’ quote from “To Kill a Mockingbird” about true courage: “It’s when you know you’re licked before you start but you start anyway and you see it anyway.”
In this spirit, Harden called for a renewed focus on rehabilitating wrongdoers rather than retribution. He called for “punishment, not abolition”. with Forgiveness,” blames criminals and acknowledges the seeds of good that can still germinate regardless of the genetic substrate. In a culture that pushes us toward more malleable binaries, political, moral, and biological, “Original Sin” makes a powerful case for delicate navigation — and, ultimately, salvation.
This article was originally published the darkness. read on Main article.
