Antisocial behavior in children, especially when combined with 'callous unemotional traits' (a lack of guilt or remorse), can have a heritability estimate as high as 80%. This places its genetic influence on par with highly heritable disorders like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
Author Sally Rooney’s concept of a public 'doppelgänger' describes how a public figure's name and face can be co-opted to represent arguments they fundamentally oppose. This creates a disorienting feeling that a false version of oneself is misleading the public.
The idea that we have free will, even if 'literally false' from a determinist perspective, is 'functionally true.' Acting as if you have agency prevents outsourcing responsibility and leads to a better life, making it a useful cognitive tool regardless of its philosophical accuracy.
Persistently antisocial children often have a biological inability to learn from negative consequences, making them punishment-insensitive but reward-sensitive. Harsh punishment is ineffective and counterproductive, as it destroys the potential for connection, which is the only real leverage for behavioral change.
Among men from upper-income families, a history of minor teenage delinquency—like arrests or graffiti—is a strong predictor of becoming a successful entrepreneur. This suggests that a rule-breaking, risk-taking disposition is a key ingredient for entrepreneurial ventures, even alongside social advantages.
Humans experience pleasure, mediated by dopamine, when witnessing someone perceived as a wrongdoer being punished. This suggests retribution is not just a cultural construct but a deeply ingrained, evolutionarily adaptive mechanism to enforce cooperation within a group, making it feel intrinsically rewarding.
Modern society increasingly selects for traits like low aggression and risk-taking, which are less common on average in men. This requires men to exert a greater degree of effortful 'emotional containment' to adhere to social norms, representing a cognitive and emotional cost that is rarely acknowledged.
The AA model, which requires admitting powerlessness over addiction while simultaneously taking responsibility for one's actions, is a practical philosophical framework. It beautifully balances the tension between deterministic forces (biology, addiction) and the human capacity for agency and change, a feat academic philosophy struggles with.
As embryo selection becomes common, genetic conditions may shift from being seen as a chance misfortune deserving of collective support to a 'parental choice.' In individualistic societies, this could lead to blaming parents for having children with preventable conditions, fracturing the social solidarity needed to support them.
Genetic variants associated with schizophrenia are more common in people in creative professions like art, music, and engineering, even if they don't have the disorder. This suggests that genes considered 'bad' or for 'disease' can have positive effects, which helps them persist in the human gene pool.
Psychedelics disrupt normal brain patterns, which can be powerful for breaking out of neurobiological ruts in middle age. However, using them during the already chaotic and plastic period of brain development in one's 20s may be unnecessarily risky before the brain is 'fully cooked.'
Counterintuitively, jurors recommend longer prison sentences when a violent crime is attributed to genetic causes versus environmental ones like childhood abuse. While environmental factors are seen as mitigating, genetic explanations trigger a 'bad seed' essentialism, leading to a greater desire for punishment to contain a perceived permanent threat.
People interpret genetic causes in two ways: determinism (my genes made me do it) which can be mitigating, or essentialism (my genes are my true self). When people view genes as the 'essence' of a person, a genetic link to bad behavior implies the person is inherently and unchangeably bad, increasing blame rather than sympathy.