Original Sin

Sin

In which I consider the ancient question of whether our biological inheritance diminishes our human blameworthiness and struggle to find certainty

In the fall of 2021, I received a letter in my university mailbox from a man imprisoned in the J. Dale Wainwright Unit, formerly known as the Eastham Unit, one of the oldest prisons in Texas. The prison is isolated, rural, enormous—a “God-forsaken hole.” Clyde Barrow, of Bonnie and Clyde, was its most famous detainee. The land occupied by the prison complex was originally cleared by enslaved men and women. After the Civil War, the family after whom the prison was initially named, the Easthams, ran their farm by leasing convict labor from the state of Texas. Even today, the Wainwright Unit remains a large-scale agricultural operation, with cattle, hogs, laying hens, and hundreds of acres of crops, all powered by unfree labor. The man wrote in his letter that he had been in Wainwright since he was sixteen years old.

Several cartoons and illustrations were taped to the letter, and I couldn’t help but laugh at the dark wit that selected them. In one, a bearded caveman lies on a couch, talking to the psychoanalyst behind him: “Now that I have a prefrontal cortex I worry about everything.” In another, a white tiger on the psychoanalyst’s couch says, “They train me to perform, then when I try to show off what I really do best, everybody goes ballistic.” The third was an abstract graphic, a cubist-esque collage of facial features overlaid with dots and dashes and bar codes that suggested something about humanity being atomized, automatized, analyzed. It was from an article in Texas Monthly magazine about me.

The article described the research we conduct in the Developmental Behavior Genetics lab that I run as a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Texas. “Developmental”: We primarily study children and adolescents, who are still growing and changing. “Genetics”: We study people’s DNA sequences (their genomes), as well as chemical tags attached to their DNA that affect how their genomes work (their epigenomes). “Behavior”: As psychologists, we are interested in how people’s genes combine with their environments to affect their thoughts, feelings, and actions in the world. The article quoted critics who consider the study of behavioral genetics to be “dangerous nonsense,” but my correspondent’s interest in my area of research was undeterred. He wrote that he agreed with the premise of our work. He thought that genetics had insights about human behavior that many people chose to ignore. He had ten questions he hoped I could answer. One made me catch my breath:

Why would a young boy of 16 attack a total stranger, a female, at knife point in broad daylight at a busy intersection and make the female drive against her will to sexually assault her? What would drive a boy to do such a thing?

I looked him up online. My correspondent had been sentenced to thirty-five years in prison for aggravated kidnapping, aggravated robbery, and aggravated sexual assault.

His crime is unimaginable to me. As in, I literally cannot imagine committing such an atrocious, violent act. When I force myself to think about it, I can instead only feel hints of what his victim must have felt. I can readily sympathize with what it feels like to be hurt by male physical violence; I cannot readily imagine what it feels like to hurt someone like that.

His question, however, feels achingly familiar: Why? What would drive me to do such a thing? Who has not asked this very question about some action we have come to rue? The question “Why?” is not always a mere request for information. “Why?” can be a search for absolution, or at least for compassion. In a previous age, he might have posed his question to a priest in the confessional or saved it for his prayers to an unseen god. Only recently have scientists been expected to answer questions about why people do horrible things to each other.

That same fall, a few weeks before I received the letter, my colleagues and I published a paper in a scientific journal, Nature Neuroscience, that described results from a project we had been working on for nearly four years. Publishing any scientific paper is an ordeal that involves repeated caustic rejection, and this paper was no exception.

I had received news of one such early rejection the day before Travis and I left for West Texas. One of my co-authors sent a dejected email: “I’m seriously at a loss.” She had just gotten the anonymous critiques back from three people the journal had asked to be reviewers. They didn’t like it. One reviewer complained: “The main text goes through a seemingly endless list of prediction analyses . . . substance use/disorder, psychiatric illness, suicide, criminal convictions, diabetes, liver cirrhosis, condomless sex, and so on.”

What we were using to predict this “endless” list of behaviors and addictions and medical diseases and personal tragedies and criminal records was people’s DNA. We first pooled together data on the DNA of 1.5 million people, and then we analyzed it for patterns: which DNA sequences were more common in people who smoked pot or smoked cigarettes or abused alcohol or had a lot of sex or described themselves as more impulsive and risk-taking? We then took the patterns we had discovered, applied them to DNA collected from new samples of people, and tested whether their total genetic “score” could predict their life outcomes. And we found that it could: Less than 20 percent of people with a low genetic score were ever arrested for a crime, for example, compared to nearly 40 percent of people with a high genetic score. (All the people in the study had genetics most similar to people whose recent ancestors lived in Northern Europe, and all identified, socially, as white.)

Travis calls this my Minority Report paper, after the Philip K. Dick novella and the Steven Spielberg movie of the same name, in which three “precogs” see into the future and predict crimes before they happen. I admit he’s right that the project does seem like something from a science fiction dystopia: Here, spit into this tube, and a machine will read part of your DNA sequence from the cells in your saliva, and based on that DNA we will make a prediction about the odds of you being arrested for a crime, becoming addicted to alcohol, or using opiate drugs.

The precogs could peer into the future, but sometimes they disagreed about what was to come. Similarly, DNA cannot definitely say that you will commit a crime. We can say whether, based on your DNA, you are in a high-risk group, whose probability of being arrested for a crime is twice as high as that of people in the low-risk group—but that probability is still far from 100 percent. There’s a yawning gap between being able to say that genetics makes a difference for violent crime rates and being able to say that this person will commit a crime because of their genes. You could find that gap frustrating or relieving.

Our reviewer didn’t object to our paper on the grounds that it had Minority Report–esque dystopian elements. They were just frustrated at its “nonspecificity.” They couldn’t see the scarlet thread that connected the many behaviors that we analyzed in a single paper: crime and addiction and sex and suicide. What was the theory, they wanted to know, that connected these analyses?

The reviewer couldn’t see: We were studying the genetics of sin. Or, rather, we were studying the genetics of behavior that Christianity calls sinful. Rather than presenting an “endless” list of genetic prediction analyses, we could have simply enumerated the circles of Hell.

Not that the terms we use in a scientific paper would necessarily be recognizable to Dante. The language of modern scientific psychology studiously avoids any whiff of moralizing. We didn’t talk about “the vice of lechery”; we just presented statistics on how one’s DNA is related to the “number of self-reported sexual partners.” We didn’t name “those who by violence do injury to others”; we added up how many symptoms of conduct disorder a person has, according to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.

But every single analysis in our paper could be mapped to The Inferno. In the Second Circle, the sexually licentious and wanton are blown around endlessly by whirling vortex winds. In the Third Circle, the gluttonous, who ate too much and drank too much and who placed their addictions above all else, slosh around in a putrid stew, clawed by the three-headed dog Cerberus. In the first part of the Seventh Circle, a scalding river of blood torments those who were violent against others; the suicidal are in the second part of the Seventh Circle, transformed into gnarled trees whose limbs are broken off by tormenting Harpies.

And in the Eighth Circle, the fortune tellers, prophets, and diviners, such as myself, who try to predict the future from earthly signs and wonders—and what is genomics but an earthly wonder?—must walk through eternity with their heads fixed on backwards: “Because he aspired to see too far ahead / He looks behind and treads a backward path.”