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00:00:22.940i am here with katherine page harden page thanks for joining me thank you for having me it's been
00:00:29.480a while it's been six years i know which is like five minutes and in a lifetime yeah the last six
00:00:35.520years crazy well so i went uh as you know i sent you an email yesterday not wanting to ambush you
00:00:41.280with um my recent uh adventures in in um reviewing our previous podcast so we we spoke six years ago
00:00:49.180basically a full two years after this major controversy that i had with um having had
00:00:55.920Charles Murray on my podcast talking about race and IQ, that anodyne topic that provokes no
00:01:02.080controversy at all. Yeah, easy, light. And to remind people, my interest there was not in the
00:01:09.100topic, but in the fact that here's a guy who wrote a book on the topic and 25 years later, he's being
00:01:14.420physically assaulted on a college campus for talking about a different book. And it just
00:01:19.380seemed to typify where free speech and tolerance and moral panic was going at that moment. And
00:01:25.900And so I wanted to do a postmortem there and did and put this in the in the no good deed goes unpunished category.
00:01:33.340But, you know, for my troubles there, I got castigated as a racialist, pseudoscientist, you know, dupe of Charles Murray's in so many words.
00:01:42.740And part of that criticism came from you and your colleagues, Eric Terkheimer and Richard Nisbet in the pages of Vox.
00:01:51.120And Ezra Klein published that and then gave it lots of topspin with his own op eds.
00:01:55.380We got into a big fight by email that spilled out into public. He came on my podcast and, you know, paragon of wokeness that he was at the time, he had counted the black and brown faces of the people I had interviewed in my catalog up until that point and found the ratio wanting and emblematic of my own racism, however, unacknowledged.
00:02:14.240I don't know if you followed any of this, but he recommended that I read closely the work of Ibram X. Kendi at the time to perform an exorcism on my brain. Kendi, to my lights, who is a man who, if it wasn't obvious at the time, it is now as a kind of, you know, race hustler and academic imposter.
00:02:31.560But this is all to say that it was a very fraught time. And you came on my podcast two years later to just, we kind of processed it. And I thought we had a really good conversation. I did then. I went back and listened to it yesterday. And it was, I think it's still a good conversation. I invite people to go listen to it.
00:02:50.800It was a bit of a tightrope walk for me.
00:02:55.340I felt in listening to it again that you were kind of gaslighting me to the degree that you seemed oblivious as to how I could have wound up on the hate watch page of the Southern Poverty Law Center for the kinds of things that had been said about me in the aftermath of that podcast with Charles Murray and any contribution you made to it.
00:03:13.540and then I just happened to see in my email that Gideon Lewis Krause, who profiled you in The New
00:03:21.640Yorker, I think a year after that, had reached out to me for comment, and I had, I think, quite
00:03:27.500correctly declined to comment, but I just noticed in my exchange with him how pissed off I still was
00:03:33.220over the whole thing, and I wasn't pissed off when you and I spoke. I managed to, you know,
00:03:39.720repress that or transcend that or something. But I mean, just the kinds of questions he was
00:03:44.720asking me by email, the way it was still unprocessed. The truth is, I'm still pissed
00:03:49.240off about it. I'm still pissed off at Ezra Klein because I think what's happened is that the
00:03:53.200Overton window has moved. He's moved with it. He hasn't acknowledged any of the ways he was a
00:03:58.320woke enforcer and leftist knucklehead back in the day. And now he's acting like none of that ever
00:04:03.980happened. And so I think there is a kind of a reckoning to be had here because I blame all of
00:04:09.560this for many things, but, you know, chief among them that we have a, you know, a President Trump
00:04:15.380now and a highly weaponized and energized right wing now that is a backlash to wokeness and the
00:04:23.100kind of intolerance we were and, you know, moral panic, I think I was discovering there. But I
00:04:27.680bring this all up with you and revisit it. And this is not what we're mostly going to talk about,
00:04:32.180But because I've noticed that in the intervening years, you've written two books on behavioral genetics, and I experienced some amusement, if not schadenfreude, to see you incur some of the same wrath that was directed at me very much in the same terms.
00:04:49.900I mean, you were attacked, you've been attacked as, you know, effectively as a eugenicist, as a, you know, a handmaiden to the alt-right. I think someone somewhere, I think I have this from Gideon's profile on you, someone called you Charles Murray in a skirt, which was just so on the nose that I couldn't help but smile and I'm smiling even now.
00:05:08.740So I just wanted to ask you if you see any of that differently, given that you now have kind of lived on both sides of it to some degree.
00:05:18.180I mean, again, it's been a long six years, but also a short one.
00:05:35.400and i went back and i just reread everything i reread the piece that i wrote with eric and
00:05:42.740dick nesbitt originally in vox and then i read some of the replies to it and i read our response
00:05:48.840to it and i read azra's kind of separate piece that he wrote um a little bit after that and then
00:05:55.000i actually started to listen to y'all's podcast and i thought i yeah i don't know if i don't know
00:06:00.160I don't know if I can go that far down the rabbit hole. And, you know, if you would ask me in 2020,
00:06:07.360you probably did ask me in 2020, I think that my understanding of that situation was that
00:06:13.120I had a disagreement with Charles Murray on the scientific merits and that that was my primary
00:06:19.740concern and that that had somehow, and I'll come back to that somehow in a second, been wrapped up
00:06:26.440into, you know, a conflict or a disagreement that you were having with Ezra really about,
00:06:31.980you know, media and tactics and power and responsibility and ethics. And I really thought
00:06:36.960of those as more separate than you did and you experienced. And then when I went back and I
00:06:45.400reread my, or our, I will say it was an our original Vox piece, I was like, oh, Sam is all
00:06:52.980the way through this like my memory of it had been like this is us describing sort of scientific
00:06:58.720objections to murray's comments and i really had gone into it intending to focus on that
00:07:04.700and remembered it that way and was surprised unpleasantly surprised at just how much of the
00:07:11.500piece was not just i think murray is wrong on the scientific points but i think sam is wrong
00:07:18.620normatively wrong on platforming him having this conversation. And that was really, you know,
00:07:24.880it was one of those things where I was like, how did my memory of this so different? Like,
00:07:29.200you're not surprised to hear that, that you're in that piece. So, you know, why was it a surprise
00:07:33.240to me to reread that? And I think that gets at one of the lessons I've learned in the last nine
00:07:40.200years. We wrote that in 2017. And it was my first, it was the first thing I ever wrote,
00:07:46.460like for the public. Like it was my first like non-academic piece. So hopefully I've learned a
00:07:52.220few things in the last decade. And one of those lessons is that you have your intentions as an
00:07:57.860author, but once the piece is out there, like those intentions don't really matter that much.
00:08:06.080It's actually like what's in the text, like what did you actually say? And I think you can have a
00:08:11.940hard time actually seeing a piece of writing clearly when you know yourself and you've been
00:08:17.120so close to it. And also, it was just my first experience writing something at the pace that
00:08:21.440you write it, like not for an academic journal article. So anyways, I would say that if I could
00:08:26.880go back in time, I had no intention of wandering into a like Ezra Klein v. Sam Harris debate about
00:08:35.220wokeness and media ethics in that period of time. And I would have limited myself much more to
00:08:43.000what am I actually an expert in, which is not what are the ethics of being a large podcaster
00:08:49.040in a time of both racial tension and declining norms around free speech, but like what is the
00:08:57.680science around genetics and IQ? So that's the kind of first thing that I was thinking about.
00:09:03.740And the second thing is just like how different the political landscape is. You know, in 2017, I don't think I was alone in thinking that maybe if people like Murray were, you know, not so influential in terms of their views on science, that that might kind of stem the tide of a certain set of beliefs.
00:09:25.780And in retrospect, all of that seems just very quaint to me. Like, I think what we've seen in the last nine years since we first became acquainted with each other through, you know, this unfortunate conflict has shown that the maybe if we just like, you know, maybe if we could just are really, really policing who is talking to whom, that that's going to stem the rise of far right extremism.
00:09:55.780I would just say like, you know, I'm not a political scientist. This is also not my area
00:10:00.380of expertise, but like that hasn't really seemed to work so far. So I, you know, I feel like in
00:10:07.0602020, I was a little bit like, my beef was not really with you. It was with Charles, not really
00:10:12.820beef my disagreement. Like you are famous and successful. Like why does this matter to you so
00:10:18.480much? I feel like I was a little bit not hearing you when you were describing why you were so angry.
00:10:24.520And now looking back, I'm like, oh, no, I totally see why he was upset about this.
00:10:30.960And then the last thing I'll say is, you know, now I've been on the receiving end of that, as you know, and how I've been on the receiving end of how scientific criticism, which is like you make this claim.
00:10:44.560I don't think you have the evidence for it, can, as it echoes through popular culture,
00:10:50.880really become a license for some people to just caricature your work in the most unflattering
00:10:58.940ways. And now I've seen that happen, you know, as you know, for me too. And so it's just given me
00:11:05.280a lot more empathy for how it can be very, just empathy for that situation, which I'm sure was
00:11:14.460no fun for you and i didn't when we talked i don't think i ever said like i'm sorry that that
00:11:20.120situation was something that was so uncomfortable for you and i will say it was never it was never
00:11:25.340my intention um for whatever intentions matter which we can talk about for the scientific
00:11:31.400criticism of murray to kind of mushroom out into this kind of impugning of your character and work
00:11:39.540in its totality that was never my that was never my intention yeah yeah well so i i just invite
00:11:46.160people to go back and listen to that first conversation because i think it was i thought
00:11:49.520it was surprisingly good given given the constraints on it and it it walks through
00:11:53.760some of the scientific differences which still in retrospect seem quite minor to me i mean i feel
00:12:00.180like they were given they were magnified by the sense of the political importance yes of highlighting
00:12:07.460them, right? So, and I think, and again, I don't know, I know that Turkheimer was your advisor or
00:12:14.040mentor and may still be a mentor. And I don't know, I don't know either Eric or Dickness,
00:12:20.200but personally, I get the sense from having read them that they are a little bit in the mold of
00:12:26.840people like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, who in, you know, paleontology in the
00:12:34.380first case and behavioral genetics in the second seem to me, to my eye, again, there'll be differences
00:12:40.740of opinion about this, but they seem to not just not clearly police the boundary between politics
00:12:46.800and science, but consider it a kind of scientific virtue to ignore that boundary, right? I mean,
00:12:53.380they were very, these guys were really pushing a progressive agenda in the way they were
00:13:01.400advocating for certain scientific ideas and castigating others. I mean, this is probably
00:13:05.760the ultimate case of this is Stephen Jay Gould's book, The Mismeasure of Man, which, you know,
00:13:11.840again, this is not my area, but as far as I can tell, is not a credible document on the intelligence
00:13:19.280literature. But there are just certain topics, you know, IQ and certainly racial differences in IQ
00:13:24.520being one, that are so polarizing and for obvious reasons that, you know, unless you
00:13:31.560are going to be really scrupulous in like standing behind some kind of Rawlsian veil
00:13:38.220of ignorance to talk about these things, you are, you know, you're going to be tempted
00:13:42.960to not play fair with your scientific opponents and detect bad motives everywhere when there's
00:13:50.700when there are differences of scientific interpretation. And that's what happens.
00:13:54.260And that's, frankly, what I see happening to you. I mean, I haven't noticed it so much with
00:13:58.320respect to the book we're going to talk about, your newest one, Original Sin, but your last one,
00:14:02.240The Genetic Lottery, I saw that piece in the New York Review of Books written by two, you know,
00:14:08.440one guy was a biologist. I forgot the names of both these people. Sorry, but perhaps it's good
00:14:11.980that I forgot their names. But both Stanford professors both, you know, have PhDs seemingly
00:14:16.880adequate to equip them for the task of reading your book, understanding it, and criticizing it.
00:14:22.160And yet, I could see in the moral charge of what they were writing there, the same kind of,
00:14:29.140I mean, you know, again, the allegation is these are dangerous ideas. It's irresponsible to traffic
00:14:34.980in these ideas. You're putting communities at risk by speculating in this area. And there's
00:14:41.900an ugly history that all of this conversation about genes and determinism and heritability
00:14:46.820and, you know, the mechanics of, you know, that produces human difference, all of this0.90
00:14:51.380is a top stuff that really should worry us, you know, in your case, eugenics being, you
00:14:57.080know, perhaps the primary offender.0.65
00:14:58.920And so it's just, anyway, it's worth looking back at our original conversation to see how
00:15:05.400And I don't really have more to say about it, but I just want to thank you for coming
00:15:09.360on the podcast and talking about this. And I just want to dive into your newest book, which I loved,
00:15:15.020which is Original Sin on the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness.
00:15:20.380These are all topics that are super important. And also polarizing for obvious reasons,
00:15:25.980because here you're talking about concepts that relate to not just human difference, but
00:15:31.580the differences that really matter. I mean, we're talking about violence, we're talking about
00:15:35.720impulse control, differential success in life, the people who wind up in prison or addicted and
00:15:42.120homeless and the people who, you know, wind up running major institutions and having beautiful
00:15:49.020lives. I guess, but before we jump into the book itself and those specific topics, maybe you can
00:15:56.840explain why behavioral genetics as a field is still so controversial. I mean, the one thing I
00:16:04.060read in that kind of weird New York Review of Books review of your last book was almost a
00:16:09.660suspicion on the part of the authors that, you know, it was too much to say that we know the
00:16:14.940genes are doing anything, you know, are likely to be doing anything. So just give me the big picture
00:16:20.560view of the field before we get into your book. Yeah. I mean, so behavioral genetics is how do
00:16:26.300the genes we inherit influence in combination with other factors, the way that we behave. And
00:16:33.120And in some ways, behavioral genetics has so kind of infiltrated our way of talking and thinking about behavior.
00:16:43.140And also, in some ways, we don't even need behavioral genetics to see that inheritance matters, that children resemble their parents in particular ways.
00:16:52.620Like, I think most lay people have an understanding that children are born different from day one in ways that matter for their likelihood of turning out certain ways.
00:17:04.060And there's this great study I like where they ask people to estimate, I talk about this in my first book, they ask people to estimate, you know, how much do you think genes make a difference for a variety of human characteristics?
00:17:14.480And they compare the average rating to like the, you know, the meta-analytic estimate from twin studies.
00:17:20.400And they find that, you know, people are generally not blank slaters. Like the average American says that genes make a difference for not just your height and your blood type, but also your personality and your performance in school and your likelihood of developing a severe mental illness and your depression.
00:17:38.020and that the most accurate people are parents of more than one child.
00:17:43.620And, you know, I think that's a finding that makes intuitive sense to parents
00:17:47.260because you have children and you can see how they differ.
00:17:51.040So on the one hand, it's not that controversial of a science
00:17:54.020if you're looking at what is public opinion
00:17:56.380because most people already can see and they can recognize
00:17:59.820that people are different in ways that aren't easily explainable
00:18:05.800At the same time, it is perennially controversial, especially within the academy. And I think one of those reasons is the historical reasons that you've already gestured at. You know, there is a history of eugenics here in the United States that did justify, you know, forced sterilizations of people.
00:18:23.820there we do have an ascendant far right that does appeal to kind of innate racialized biological
00:18:32.500differences so of course a science that connects what you inherit to how you behave is going to be
00:18:38.640controversial given that political background but I also think it's something even older and deeper
00:18:44.960than that which is you know we experience ourselves as as you've written about in your
00:18:51.640own writing as agents, as people who are deciding how to behave, who people who have control over
00:18:58.220the people that we are becoming. And behavioral genetics is a science that's taking the sorts of
00:19:06.700things that we consider our, you know, usually feel ourselves to be the subject of and making
00:19:12.160that an object of scientific study and pointing out the ways that it is influenced, rarely
00:19:17.360determined but influenced by, you know, versions of the molecules we happen to inherit. And so I
00:19:23.900just think that tension between ourselves as we are obviously part of nature and we experience
00:19:30.380ourselves as the subjects of our own lives is a tension that really lives right at, you know,
00:19:36.960behavioral genetics exists right at that tension. And so I think even if there was no, you know,
00:19:41.840we lived in kind of a more utopian place with no eugenic history in the U.S. and no, you know,
00:19:48.080a very different political and racial climate. I still think it might be controversial because
00:19:52.380it raises these questions about what, you know, who are we? Who are we as humans? What is this
00:19:57.200dilemma of being human? Well, I think we'll talk about just how far out from under the shadow of
00:20:01.980eugenics we can get because I want to talk about IVF and selecting embryos and, you know, whether0.97
00:20:07.480that and whether we can fully avoid the Gattaca fate that science might be urging upon us. But0.99
00:20:14.100before we get there, I think maybe we should clarify this concept of heritability and the
00:20:21.000divide or lack of a divide between nature and nurture, because it seems to me there's some
00:20:26.360confusion that creeps in there. This is a confusion that really does contaminate that other topic,
00:20:32.320which again, we're not going to get into or into much, you know, intelligence differences.
00:20:36.580Yeah, we do. Yeah. Not to say we won't touch various third rails here.
00:20:40.640Members can hear the full conversation by subscribing at SamHarris.org.
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00:20:48.880I think we have this increase in technology and the vision to look ahead.
00:20:53.700But we also live in a in a country in which Alabama tried to ban IVFs.
00:20:58.080And like Texas, you know, has essentially banned legal abortion instead of hashing that
00:21:04.360out at the level of policy the way that other countries have, we have, you know, just the
00:21:10.440emergence of really, again, different moral communities around reproduction right now.