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Kathryn Paige Harden

lines on the record: 51
first: 2021-12-07
most recent: 2021-12-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Know there is an essay that I wrote for Ion earlier this year, it's called What Do We Do We Do We Do We Do We Do With the Science of Terrible Men? And it's a play on Nessbaum's column on what do we do with the art of terrible men? And it's struggling with, we know that genetics has this eugenic legacy. We know that statistics has this eugenic legacy. How can we reclaim those tools for more positive ends while still recognizing that deep moral limitations and ideological limitations of the inventors of these tools? So if you're not ready to commit to buying the book, you can just Google Page Harden, what do we do with the science of terrible men? And I think it's a good introduction to many of these issues.”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, it's not about abandoning anyone to their fate. It's about identifying what's working for whom, who's not being served, what do we need to try for them. Again, it's around having this kind of pluralistic opportunities to success rather than forcing everyone through the same bottleneck.”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, we're not crispering their genes, we're not selecting embryos, we're changing tax policy. But in so doing, we're changing the relationship between someone's genetic vulnerabilities and their outcomes. And then also I think it speaks to this research progresses. I say in the book in the last chapter, I give these kind of principles for anti-eugenic practice and policy. And one of them is can we think about genetics as a tool, not for classified people, but for understanding environments? And the tobacco tax one is a great one, which is we can see who has been helped by a policy regime and who has been left behind. What's different about the people who have been left behind? What do we need to try differently for people who aren't responding to the incentives of taxation in the way that most of the population does?”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think if we look at the history of many social movements in the US around reducing stigma around mental illness, or this has been quite prominent in gay rights, emphasizing that a biological component to a behavior or to a disposition has been a really important part of demoralizing it to making it a more morally neutral aspect of human difference rather than a thing to be evaluated as good or bad in some sort of moral or ethical sense. So I think that's one interesting year of it. I think another interesting layer of it is exactly what you just said, which is contrary to this kind of deterministic perspective on chains, we can look at examples in which people might have been at genetic risk for addiction, but now we tax cigarettes immensely and they smoke less, right? That's not a”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of times people are interested when people ask me that question, they're particularly interested in epigenetic inheritance, which is something about the way that my genome is expressed as influenced by my environment are those epigenetic signatures passed on to offspring. That's a very controversial field, particularly in humans that I don't personally do anything related to epigenetic inheritance. I'm really looking at over the course of someone's own life. their environmental exposures relate to these signatures of how genes might be being turned on or turned off in certain tissues at certain points in their life.”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One way of conceptualizing it. Yes, which, and it's absolutely necessary. So, like every cell in your body has the same genome, but your liver cells don't look or act like your brain cells. And why is that? Because of epigenetics. There are dynamic tissue-specific developmental, environmentally responsive changes to gene expression that are happening all of the time. My work tends to look at one epigenetic signature, which is called DNA methylation. So methyl groups can bond to parts of the genome and that affect its ability to be read and expressed in a certain tissue. And we're interested in DNA methylation because it is correlated with social inequality. So in Austin, children growing up in poverty show DNA methylation signatures that in adults are associated with earlier mortality and faster biological aging.”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So epigenetics is an interesting word. It's a little bit like eugenics in that it has a lot of different meanings for different people. So we can give me a concise”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Autism, they often have severe epilepsy as a comorbid condition in one of the treatments for epilepsy is a very particular diet. So you're changing what you're putting into your gut and that's changing your vulnerability to seizure activity. So obviously like, you know, our genes don't stop at the neck in either direction and what's happening in one part of our body can be affected by another part of our body. In my lab, we study not the gut microbiome, but we do study things like food security and insecurity. So to what extent does that variability in access to nutritious, fresh food relate to patterns of early puberty or DNA methylation patterns that are related to aging? So we're always looking for how can we integrate another level of information. About what's going on, particularly when we were talking about child development.”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think anything in turn, I don't tend to think of levels of information as nullifying each other, right? So the microbiome is part of the larger set of omics, right? We can think about the genome. We can think about the biome. We can think about the epigenome. We can think about the environmental layers of environmental context in which people are. I am a multi-level multilayer thinker and I am because I think human development is multi-layer and multi-level. So generally, I don't think we should be thinking about how does one thing nullify each other, but what can we learn from combining those sources of information? So for instance, you know, if you're, I think a really great example of the power of the gut biome is if you're looking at children with”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I agree with that. I think so often people say to me, you know, what are the risks of talking about this, this being genetics? And I always say it is not as if clinical psychologists doing genetics are over here, like turning the crank of the conversation about genetics in people's lives. Like this is a topic that people are talking about that they if you ask just lay people, do genetics make an influence on your life or your children's life, they say yes. So if psychologists and geneticists and sociologists who spend our lives thinking about human difference are not engaging, that doesn't make the conversation go away. It just creates this forbidden knowledge kind of aura around it. And I agree. You that I think that's a very dangerous place for it to be.”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reaching out to me privately. So the email versus the email response or the letter response versus Twitter, because my emails have been lovely, actually. They have been people saying, you've made me think differently about my own children. You've made me think differently about my own siblings. You've made me think differently about my own students. Or how can I help? Right. Like I am in this foundation or I'm developing this theater resource or I'm in this public policy institute. I think this is important. How can we connect it? And those responses for me outweigh any of the kind of social media chatter around it because I think it's a sign that there's more serious engagement with the idea.”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's something in there for everyone, yes. Which I think, you know, in some ways, on a good day, I think it's a good thing, right? I wrote the book in part to get a conversation started, and I did, I think, successfully do that to the extent that people are responding to it and thinking about, you know, which parts they agree with and disagree with. It's been really interesting because I feel like on social media, it's been probably equal parts far left and far right. You know, some people on the far left are really committed to the idea that linking human difference to genetics is bad, full stop. You know, even if you can identify some instrumentally good uses for it. And some people in the far right that are just, you know, anything that is like devoted towards equality per se is bad, you know, full stop. What I've been really struck by is the disconnects between the kind of social media chatter and people's”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Physical difference in some cases, but we're less able, I think, to imagine our social structures doing that sort of thing around psychological difference. So that's the kind of more radical reimagining I'm suggesting in this book.”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Psychological or physical functioning or even resources, what we're equalizing is being in relationships of dignity with one another. No one needs to be carried around the building. The ability to participate in the economy, the ability to participate in public life. That is the sort of equity that is often lost in our conversations about equality. So again, I'm less interested in equalizing everyone's likelihood of getting a PhD in clinical psychology, which is what my degree is. I'm interested in a society in which there aren't strong bottlenecks to the sort of lives that we feel like are reflective of human dignity. And people can get through lots of different ways. What are the social wheelchair ramps to add to our stairs that we have here? And we already do that in the realm of”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just have a staircase, you have to have a wheelchair ramp. That is an example in which the law explicitly says treating everyone exactly the same is not enough to ensure equality of participation. You cannot say, I have a business and everyone can use the same stairs because people are different and their ambulatory functioning and that exact sameness just reproduces differences in their access. What you have to equalize is there and the wording of the law, so interesting here, their enjoyment of an accommodation by that piece of business. And that's a really interesting to think to think about equalizing. We're not equalizing the exact conditions and let's say, well, everyone has the exact same treatment and that's enough, we can wash our hands of wearing about justice. But we're also not concerned with exactly equalizing”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is and it isn't. It is radical because I think that we, and you're absolutely right in an American context, there's a lot of support for the idea of equality of opportunity. We're going to treat everyone exactly the same, everyone's exactly equal under the law, but less support for worrying about inequalities of outcome. And in a world in which people are different, teaching treating everyone exactly the same will necessarily reproduce those differences. It's not radical in one respect, which is that there are occasions in which we already do it. A piece of legislation that I can find continually fascinating is the Americans with disabilities act, which was passed by the first Bush in 1990. And it is our anti-discrimination act that requires buildings, for instance, to accommodate people with disabilities, right?”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like little Tommy has this genetic score, so he's going to get this reading material. That is not my suggestion at all. My suggestion is that if we want to change the world, we need to understand it better. And researchers who take into account genetic differences between kids have a better chance of understanding the world of human development, of child development better. That is the entry for genetics, and that's where we should be starting.”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At you know, reading when they start school? Or is it that those two things are correlated, but it's not that moms actually doing it? It's just that's the behavior of moms, that's influenced by her temperament and the child is inheriting the genes. That problem of being unable to control for genetic differences is absolutely rampant in all of developmental psychology, educational psychology, sociology. And so we are often, very often trying interventions and policies on the basis of a bad model of what's called what and child development. And then most of the things those things don't work, which has a huge opportunity cost and an actual cost, like educational interventions are expensive. So a lot of times when people hear about genetic research linking education, their minds jump to, you know, a teacher is going to do some sort of personalizing in the classroom.”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, this is a little bit counterintuitive, but the best way for genetics to improve policy is actually by improving the research on which policy is based. So if we think about what we're trying in education, let's try this new curriculum, let's teach teachers about mindsets, let's try to retroactively sort of like reverse engineer the characteristics of successful teachers, successful schools, successful school districts, successful parents, success in this way. I'm saying features of people that are correlated with children doing well in school. That research is easier to do if we have good controls for the fact that children are genetically different from one another. The central problem of most of social science is that kids don't end up in their environments at random. And so is it something that mom is doing that's making the child better?”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it is. It's actually a gene that's associated. And I think this is less polygenic. I think this is actually maybe monogenic, which is rare for almost anything we're going to talk about. Intelligence or schizophrenia height, all influenced by thousands upon thousands of genes, each small effect. But I'm pretty sure Cilantro is one genome of relatively large effect. And it affects how you taste it. So for some people, it tastes like soap and they spit it out. They pick it off their tacos, whereas other people, it just, you know,”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's so interesting. I think every piece of information about yourself is going to have pros and cons. I think the con of it would be if you misunderstand it as destiny as something that's insurmountable or something that stigmatizing at the same time people like knowing about themselves. There's a reason why ancestry.com and 23andMe are multimillion dollar businesses. You can get genetic information about your likelihood of liking cilantro and like being bald as a baby. So I think there's always going to be that push pull between people like to know about themselves. Tell me quick.”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Portrayed as it is a really reliable measure of one domain of human cognitive functioning that's predictive of lots of things given the outsized role that formal education plays in modern American and British society, but it is not intelligence or reason capital R as the kind of end of human reasoning or human talent.”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, that, you know, some people talk about that as if it's like talent rich writ large or skill writ large, that it is the marker of all the useful things that humans can do with their rotty or brain. And that's also obviously not true. I mean, I think there's been increasingly pushback even against the language and economics, you know, often economists talk about skilled versus unskilled labor, skilled being labor that requires a college degree. But if you look at unskilled labor, whether that's being a plumber or being a waitress or being a firm worker, those are skills. Those are skills that are valuable. They're just not skills that are necessarily inculcated at university. They often require a lot of training and expertise. So I think we can think of it as both more useful but more limited than its advocates or its critics often.”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What is intelligence? What is G is, you know, I think a topic that will be in thisly fascinating to psychologist and philosophers of the mind, whatever it's getting at, it's getting at a suite of abilities that are broadly useful in educational systems and high-income countries, in labor markets, and in navigating an environment such that you have access to more sort of health promoting services. And the mechanisms of that are unclear, but I think the predictive value of IQ tests is pretty incontrovertible. At the same time, it's not the end-all, be-all of human skill, right? So the other extreme view is to talk about intelligence or G or IQ as if general. General intelligence, yes.”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But there are Yeah. So there's really two very common extreme views on IQ, and they're both wrong. So one extreme view is that there's nothing to it, that IQ just measures how good you are. IQ tests that it has no purpose other than sort of entrenching racist or classist bias. And that's not true because we can see that performance on intelligence test scores predicts things that we care about in life. And it's, you know, I think one of the most compelling research studies on this was done in Scotland, the Lothian birth cohort study, where, you know, following up on Scottish school children who were all tested on their acute age 11, and you see that those age 11 test scores predict things like how long people live, even above measures of their early social class. So, you know.”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That we've given to the descendants of slaves. And I just think calling enslave people black and then treating that as a genetically homogenous group, it's scientifically ridiculous and it doesn't advance the science. It doesn't advance either for the conversation or the science in any real meaningful way.”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is the part of the race IQ conversation where there's interesting science and there's more light than heat, right? Whereas I think the kind of Hernstein Murray, let's speculate wildly in the absence of evidence about, you know, genetic differences between socially constructed racial groups. I just find really dissatisfactory from a scientific perspective even just the idea of talking about black people in the US as this monolithic entity, when we look at African ancestor groups, there are such incredible genetic diversity there. Two people from Africa can be as genetically different from each other as you are from someone from East Asia. And we collapsed all the genetic diversity into this late.”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think the most interesting conversation about race and IQ that I have heard recently is by Harriet Washington who wrote a terrible thing to waste. She is a scholar of color who has pushed back against kind of an American tradition of rejecting IQ justice valuable and is saying they are valuable. They're valuable because they are sensitive to neurobiological insult and to the toxicity that we see from say exposure to lead. And she's suggesting we can look at IQ tests and use them as a really valuable tool for documenting the effects of environmental racism that children of color in the US are much more exposed to things we know are harmful for the development of intelligence, such as lead in”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your jeans, we are putting on an environmental intervention, and there's several examples in my book of genes that cause something about an individual's interaction with their environment. And it's that environment that we can intervene on to change that genetic relationship. So I think it's really important given how large the bell curve loomed in the American imagination, in particular the strong claims it made around racialized genetic differences. I felt in order for us to have a conversation about what the science does say, I need to be really clear up front about where my points of disagreement were, because if to the extent that people have thought about this topic before, very often their exposure is Marie and her sins the Velcurve.”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Version of the poor will always be with us because of their genes, was the kind of ultimate conclusion of the bell curve. Whereas my book describes two things that I think are really important. And one is that race is not a genetic concept and that we don't really have any evidence that the sort of genetic differences that we observe within people who are homogeneously of European genetic ancestry explain these kind of racialized health and education disparities that we see across groups. And two, I talk about why genetically caused differences can absolutely be ameliorated or addressed using environments, using social policies. The classic example here, which was presented in the 1970s, is eyeglasses, right? Your genes might have caused you to have poor eyesight, but we are not crispy.”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, the bell curve sold, I think, like 400. And it had several key arguments that there were genetic differences between people that influenced the development of traits such as intelligence, that intelligence test scores predicted something about class structure in American life, occupational outcomes, participation in the labor market more generally, income and the acquisition of wealth. And those parts of the bell curve are very similar to the evidence that I present in my book. What was controversial about the bell curve and the parts that I disagree with are points three and four. And so which was that the differences between racial groups, particularly between whites and blacks in America, could be best described in terms of genetics, at least partially in terms of genetics, and that the social inequalities that result from genetics are immutable or inexorable, unable to be addressed through social policy that some sort of”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, order and green space. Do we actually care about everyone having an equal likelihood of having a STEM bachelor's degree? Or is it just that we've piled up so many other things on top of being university educated in terms of access to a life without precarity, in terms of access to power? And those are the things we're actually interested in equalizing. Not everyone's mathematics ability at a certain level. All of that to say, I agree with you in that we can't have a conversation about just equality. I think we have to be very specific about equality of what? And are we interested in equality as a means to another end or as an end to itself? And I think those conversations are often alighted in many of our conversations about education.”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think it does get dodged or it gets shunted into a quality of education and even that is kind of a dodge because what level of education are we talking about for whom? In the US, and I think this is also the case in the UK, there's a lot of emphasis on getting more people to university or equalizing university participation across groups, which I think is a good thing. I mean, I think university education for many people is a good in and of itself. But too often I think that conversation distracts from are we actually trying to equalize university participation or are we trying to equalize access to jobs that are secure and well paying? Are we trying to equalize the sorts of neighborhoods that people live in in terms of their freedom from environmental toxins and level of”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Them to maximize performance amongst very few versus raise the floor to a certain level. But often people don't even have to commit to like, well, what is their vision of what this educational intervention or what this educational policy will do for inequality? Who is it intending to serve? We act as if things that work work for everyone and work for everyone the same way. And that's just not empirically true. So this is an example in which the neglecting the science allows people to kind of sweep under the rug some things that I think would be important policy conversations about what are people's values in terms of who they want to serve the most at different points in their educational trajectory.”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a problem that we can turn a blind eye to if we're ignoring genetic heterogeneity between students because we know that there's these gaps between kids and how well they're going to do. Some part of that as we send their genotype. But most educators, most policymakers, most educational interventionists are not including genetic information at all in their studies. So who are our intervention serving? Are they all having these kind of Matthew effects where they're changing the mean but exacerbating inequality? The short answer is we don't really have a good answer to that question. And that lack of information allows people, this is circling back to answer your question, allows people to not be transparent about, well, what are your goals? What are your values in terms of designing this educational system? People can have very different goals about whether or not it's more important for”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is there was an effort to expose more low income children to literacy and numeracy even before they started school? Because low income children start kindergarten already behind high income children in terms of their early school readiness skills. So Sesame Street works in the sense that children who watch Sesame Street read earlier, they read better, you know, schooling works. If you teach four-year-olds their letters and numbers, they learn them. It doesn't do what it was originally designed to do, which is to close income gaps. Because even though it helps low income children, it helps middle and high income children more. So this is what a lot of people call a Matthew effect where the rich get richer, the more, you know, to whom already has gets even more. This is a pervasive problem in education.”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, the example that I'm talking about there is, you know, when we look at many of the programs that we try in education, there's kind of two problems about them. And this is true in both the US context and a UK context, which is that most of the things we try and education don't work. They don't make a difference on average for students. If they do work, they those effects fade out often or are very difficult to scale or replicate. And then even among the things that do work, Even when they raise the average, they often also exacerbate the very inequalities that people talk about as their locus of concern. A classic example in the U.S. context is Sesame Street. So Sesame Street is, you know, Big Bird is on the TV and is talking about, you know, the word of the day or the letter of the day. And there's the count that introduces numbers. And the reason why we have this on public access television in the U.S.”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“thinking about equality and fairness. And that's a really difficult question that I'm not giving a comprehensive answer to the book. I'm more bringing in the results of genetics to encourage people to think about those really difficult questions about Justin.”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, my point in the book is not that no one can take credit for anything in their lives. I think it would be kind of impossible as a human to go through our life without trying to think about this is the part I'm responsible for. This is what I need to try harder on. This is the thing that I can feel proud of accomplishing. But it does suggest that any efforts to arrange a social order to knead out rewards according to what people deserve. It's going to rapidly run up into a point of near impossibility from an empirical standpoint. You know, this is, again, a Ralseian idea where he says none of the precepts of justice tend towards desert, right? Tend towards rewarding desert because it's impossible at a certain point. So if we're going to give up on the idea of separating things into what people deserve versus don't deserve, then what we do, then how do we go about that?”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the thing about genetics, and I think this is part of why it causes so much controversy, is that it really confounds those intuitions. Because if we're tracing out genetic influences on personality, for instance, your genes are something that you can't take credit for, like in terms of I'm very proud that I have this DNA sequence, right? That's like being very proud that I have green eyes. But if those genes shape our biology in such a way that we are more likely to be persistent or are more likely to delay gratification or are less likely to have addiction problems or ADHD, then that line between agency and credit and dessert, what we deserve and luck and there but for the grace of God go, I starts to get muddled to the point of disappearing.”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's really challenging because we're used to being able, we're used to the illusion that we're going to be able to kind of neatly carve up our lives into this part was luck and this is the part that I can take credit for.”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Seriously. And then you also considered what type of social structures if you didn't know what your genotype was going to be or you didn't know what your kid's genotype was going to be, how might that give you new imaginings about what you consider if it's society? Those are the questions I'm inviting the readers to consider.”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“didn't want to just say, well, this is what the science says, and here are my opinions on these other issues. I wanted to say, well, there's a whole philosophical literature that considers what do we do with luck in our conversations of equality. And then there's a whole new emerging genetic science about how the luck of the genetic draw effects our lives. How can we be more deliberate about linking these two areas of scholarship to one another? And Roles was a great fit for that because one of his most enduring contributions to the philosophical literature is this idea of the veil of ignorance. If you had no idea what your position was going to be, either in the outcome of the social lottery or what he called the natural lottery, how would you want society arranged? And so that's what I'm encouraging many of the readers to think about. If we take the science of genetics,”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because you So I was reading a lot of political philosophy of science, and that work was supported by actually a really interesting grant from the John Timbleton Foundation that brought together half of the fundees were behavioral scientists or genetic scientists, and the other half of the fundees were philosophers of science or scientists whose work touched on distributive or retributive justice in some way. And there's actually so few opportunities as a scientist to spend time not just reading but being in conversation, writing papers with, presenting their work to people in the humanities who have training around the philosophy of science and these disciplines. So that experience was really foundational to writing the book. So often of the conversations around genetics are not really around genetics. They're around fairness. They're around equality. They're around justice.”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That kind of insight, however valuable, doesn't necessarily generalize to then making sweeping social recommendations that infringe on the rights of others. So the lesson for me in that is not just being humble about the limits of your science, but also being humble about how expertise in one domain. I think often when people, particularly men, are good in one domain, other people sort of rush into make them authorities on many things. And I think there's a lesson in the dangers of that too here.”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think they can convince themselves of their good ideas, but I think they can also convince themselves that being really good at one thing generalizes to expertise in a lot of domains. You know, I think Galton is a great example of that. He was a brilliant mind in some areas. When we think about his illustrations of the normal distribution and how it could arise from a series of binary events, that is a real insight.”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is so contentious and acrimonious. There's also that history, we're talking about the history of eugenics in the US, we're talking about involuntary sterilization. We're talking about women being deprived of very basic reproductive rights. So thinking about that history was important both in terms of trying to articulate why that work is not necessary, why the research is not necessarily going to lead to these pernicious ends, but also challenging me to think about what is it for if it's not going to be co-opted by the most pernicious forces, if we're not thinking about connecting genes to intelligence for the purposes of this dystopian control of people's reproduction, what can we use it for? What is the good of it? So thinking about the lessons of the past and how we can carry those forward is a theme that runs throughout.”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, that tradition loomed really large in my mind in writing the book, but I think more generally in doing the science, a big part of responsible science communication isn't just talking about what is the science saying, but also what is the science not saying, not just how should it be used, but how should it not be used? And particularly when we're talking about genetics in relation to education or intelligence, that history to anyone who's even had like, you know, a passing knowledge of the early 20th century in the UK and Germany and the US immediately is aware of the potential dangers. Is this knowledge going to be misused? Are we going to animate or reanimate these ugly ideas about inferiority and superiority? And I think in particularly in an American context where the reproductive rights debate more generally”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is told in terms of one story that it naturalizes inequality, that genetics is sort of an enemy of equality. And I personally don't see it that way. I am approaching this topic not just as a scientist, but as someone who is personally morally and politically committed to egalitarianism, to political equality between people. And there didn't really seem to be any space in the conversation around genetics that had paid attention to that. How can we think about equality in a world of difference in particular in genetic difference? And so I thought it was important to describe how I, as someone who's committed to equality and but also has spent a lot of time thinking about the science and its limitations, think of these things going together.”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She's done what But what There's two things that need to be. One is that the DNA revolution is here, that science is accelerating by leaps and bounds. And I think that that advancing technology is going to really influence people's lives, sort of regardless of what they do, you know, the DNA revolution is here to say. So I think it's important for people to understand what are scientists doing with that information. How do we link genetics, not just to things like height or disease, but to things like intelligence or personality or how far children go in school? So part of the goal in writing this book was to explain the science and clear up a lot of myths and misunderstandings around the science. And then my second goal in writing the book is so often that research of linking genetics to differences between people that we care about”
2021-12-07 · Intelligence Squared · The Genetic Lottery: DNA demystified with Kathryn Paige Harden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT