Are We Helping People Who Are Most at Risk for Hard Attacks?

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i think we can have a better tool for seeing who is being served by which of our policies and interventions. Just knowing that, i think, would be useul formation. For me personally, it's helped me clarify some of my intuitions about what makes a social structure or society good. I don't think the science commits any one to a certain set of moral or political beliefs or m you know, people can take that information, observation about the world, that people are born different in ways that matter for their am, and run with out in lots of different directions.

It's pretty clear that our genes affect, though they don't completely determine, who we grow up to be; children’s physical and mental characteristics are not completely unrelated to those of their parents. But this relationship has been widely abused throughout history to underwrite racist and sexist ideas. So there has been a counter-reaction in the direction of removing any consideration of genetic heritage from how we understand people. Kathryn Paige Harden argues in favor of a more nuanced view: DNA does matter, we can clearly measure some of its effects, and understanding those effects is a crucial tool in fighting discrimination and making the world a more equitable place.

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Kathryn Paige Harden received her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Virginia. She is currently a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the leader of the Developmental Behavior Genetics Lab and co-director of the Texas Twin Project. She was the recipient of the Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology from the American Psychological Association. Her new book is The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality.

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