G'day, humans.

Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.

Here's a dangerous question for you.

How much are you a product of your genes, and how much are you a product of your experiences?

And how much are you neither?

But a free agent who chooses better behaviours,

even when your biology and your environment want to steer you astray.

The more that science learns about genetics, the more we notice patterns between certain genes

and certain behaviours like addiction and appetite and sex and violence.

Today's guests, Professor Catherine Page Hardin, is a psychologist and a behaviour geneticist

who runs the Development Behavior Genetics Lab at the University of Texas, Austin,

and she found herself unintentionally at the University of Texas, Austin. And she found herself unintentionally at the center of a bit of a cancel culture

firestorm back in 2021.

After she published her first book, which was called The Genetic Lottery, Why DNA Matters,

for Social Equality.

You can imagine how that landed into the peak fever swamp of wokeness at the time.

She was basically arguing that people have different genetic predispositions to succeeding in society and at school, specifically,

and that progressives shouldn't be afraid of studying this and of saying

so in order to create a fairer society. But the very idea that any genetic basis to success

might be relevant was so anathema to many lefties in that moment of peak wokeness that many of her colleagues,

including William Darrity, who was a professor of public policy at Duke and maybe America's

leading scholar on the economics of racial inequality and should probably have known better,

...