Kathryn Paige Harden

So, if you've ever done something you regret, and wondered whether science can help you understand why, or been hurt by someone, and wondered why no explanation seems to take the hurt away, I hope you consider thinking alongside me in this book

This book took me 4+ years to write, because ideas about sin, guilt, inheritance, choice, & forgiveness are not just abstractions. These ideas shape our relationships & our identities, and writing about them required me to be more vulnerable on the page than I've ever been before

Original Sin: The Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame and the Future of Forgiveness Buy Original Sin: The Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame and the Future of Forgiveness by Harden, Kathryn Paige (ISBN: 9781399604338) from Amazon's Book Store. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders.

If you are in the UK, that edition has a different cover that will look very cool on your bookshelf: www.amazon.co.uk/Original-Sin...

Original Sin by Kathryn Paige Harden: 9780593447628 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books An intellectually daring and deeply intimate exploration of how genetics complicates our ideas about blame, punishment and moral responsibility—from acclaimed psychologist and author of The Genetic....

I wrote another book & I'm very excited (& nervous) for it to be released into the world: www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/714593...

Admit It: You People Want To See How Far This Goes, Don’t You? The latest polls are out, and just as I predicted, I’m leading the Republican presidential race by a wide margin. You might be wondering how that could be. After all, it’s hardly been a month since I ...

Happy 10th anniversary to this piece from @theonion.com which was horribly prescient:

"I’m going to keep riding this fascination, this little fixation you have with me as far as you’ll take me."

theonion.com/admit-it-you...

I got page proofs for my new book today— it’s surreal and exciting to see this page

went to my very first city council meeting last night — to give a public comment in opposition to some asshat who wants to build private tennis courts in the floodplain — and wow wow did it feel amazing to do something local in person with my neighbors rather than just be mad on the internet

We have been finalizing cover designs for the US and UK editions of my new book, and I cannot wait to show everyone

michel, you know you want to make a playlist & send it around with your next Substack post....

"What is the essence of knowledge?" is an actual question we just received from reviewer #4.

Sir, this is a GWAS

can't decide which i love more: that someone picked wannabe by spice girls or that someone picked smack my bitch up

I'm giving a talk at an upcoming conference, and the organizers just requested my "walk-up song to be played as you take the stage." My modest proposal is that we make this a standard part of all academic conferences, like baseball players coming up to bat -- I want to see what y'all would pick!

Thick and Thin Causation In the course of ordinary social science and medicine, we are quite comfortable calling something a cause, even when (a) we don’t understand the mechanisms by which the cause exerts its effects, (b) the cause is probabilistically but not deterministically associated with effects, and (c) the cause is of uncertain portability across time and space. “All” that is required to assert that you have identified a cause is to demonstrate evidence that the average outcome for a group of people would have been different if they had experienced X instead of Not-X. And the most convincing evidence that you know what might have been is to assign people randomly to X or Not-X. (The word “all” is in scare quotes here, because as any scientist of human behavior and society knows, actually isolating the variable of interest from the web of potential confounds, so that one can make an inference about causation, turns out to be an incredibly difficult and delicate operation.) I’m going to call this a “thin” model of causation.22 We can contrast the “thin” model of causation with the type of “thick” causation we see in monogenic genetic disorders or chromosomal abnormalities. Take Down’s syndrome, for instance. Down’s syndrome is defined by a single, deterministic, portable cause. To have three copies of chromosome 21, instead of two, is the necessary, sufficient, and sole cause of Down’s syndrome. The causal relationship between having three copies of chromosome 21 and Down’s is one-to-one, with the result that forward and reverse inferences work equally well. The cause of Down’s is chromosome 21 trisomy; the effect of chromosome 21 trisomy is Down’s. Having three copies of chromosome 21 doesn’t raise your probability of having Down’s; it is deterministic of the condition. And this causal relationship operates as a “law of nature,” in the sense that we expect the trisomy-Down’s relationship to operate more or less in the same way, regardless of the social mili…

It's a distinction from @kph3k.bsky.social's Genetic Lottery. I used it before even without talking about genetics; it catches a lot of the misconceptions that student have about what it means to call something a cause. Those misconceptions also led to a blog post: www.the100.ci/2024/06/26/s...

Immensely proud of @laraffington.bsky.social!

Y’all, I wrote a book!

www.amazon.com/Science-Seco...

I highly recommend retiring from arguing about heritability on the internet. 10/10 for preserving your peace.

Extremely excited to share the first effort of the Revived Genomics of Personality Consortium: A highly-powered, comprehensive GWAS of the Big Five personality traits in 1.14 million participants from 46 cohorts. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New paper with @paulhufe.net Astrid Sandsør and Nicolai Borgen 📝
Causal evidence for gene-environment interaction based on:
🧬 Exogenous within-family genetic differences
🏫 Exogenous variation in school value added

first day of summer vacation, and my 10 year old invited her best neighborhood friend over. found them silently reading their books, side-by-side in the kitchen, with snacks, and I’m glad she’s discovered the ideal relationship so early in life

This is VERY big genetics & health news, Regeneron (Pharmaceutical company with v strong genetics in medicine arm) is going to buy 23andme. investor.regeneron.com/news-release...

The Genetic Lottery A provocative and timely case for how the science of genetics can help create a more just and equal society

a book related to this topic that may be of interest press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

Why I’m Resigning from the NSF and Library of Congress I cannot participate in systems that require dishonesty as the price of belonging.

"For me, the answer now lies in refusal, the withdrawal of participation from systems that require dishonesty as the price of belonging."

Today I am resigning from the National Science Board and the Library of Congress Scholars Council.

I wrote about my decision in TIME.

time.com/7285045/resi...

Rümeysa Öztürk spoke briefly at a press conference held when she arrived at Logan Airport tonight.

"My dear professor and lab mates are here today. I just want to highlight that. ... My advisor sent my dissertation proposal to the prison. My lab mates have been reading me books on the phone."

I was never Catholic, am no longer Christian, but I find myself unexpectedly excited to have a new Pope whose life can be described as “ministering to the dispossessed and marginalized.” WOKE MARXIST POPE!

Jan/Feb: Grid Failure
Mar/Apr: Hail and tornadoes
May/June: Mosquitoes
July-Sept: Literal Fire
October: Giant skeletons in everyone's yard
Nov/Dec: Fall

this administration can't break something without a grandiose title asserting how much better the broken thing is

grants.nih.gov/news-events/...

My new book, “Sex Is a Spectrum: The Biological Limits of the Binary” publishes today from @princetonupress.bsky.social My goal in writing this book is to facilitate a better conversation. A short thread…

Why human biology is far more expansive than the simple categories of female and male.

Sex Is a Spectrum from @anthrofuentes.bsky.social is out now!

Order your copy of this fascinating book: press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

My brilliant friend Laura Field (@lkatfield.bsky.social) has written THE book to explain our current, terrifying moment. Today’s a great day to support an indie bookstore & pre-order it

bookshop.org/p/books/furi...

we are all one catastrophe away from being migrants