Natural Election

WILLIAM BATESON, a foundational figure in the science of genetics at the turn of the last century, once recounted the response of a Scottish soldier to one of his public lectures: “Sir, what ye’re telling us is nothing but Scientific Calvinism.” In other words, the notion that life was genetically preordained resembled the doctrine of predestination: God created every soul as inevitably damned or saved. Moreover, the privilege of “the Elect” was mirrored in the inequality of these genetic predispositions. Earthly riches and wretchedness were the necessary and just outcomes of innate superiority and inferiority, whether genetic or providential. We could call the science we have inherited from Bateson that of “Natural Election.”

Kathryn Paige Harden, a psychologist researching human behavioral genetics, renounced the Evangelicalism in which she was brought up only to embrace this scientific doctrine of predestination. Her new book, Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness, explores the paradoxes of free will as they manifest in both Genesis and genetics: Can an almighty God or genome...