Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

Front Cover
Penguin, May 2, 2017 - Science - 800 pages
Why do we do the things we do?

Over a decade in the making, this game-changing book is Robert Sapolsky's genre-shattering attempt to answer that question as fully as perhaps only he could, looking at it from every angle. Sapolsky's storytelling concept is delightful but it also has a powerful intrinsic logic: he starts by looking at the factors that bear on a person's reaction in the precise moment a behavior occurs, and then hops back in time from there, in stages, ultimately ending up at the deep history of our species and its genetic inheritance.

And so the first category of explanation is the neurobiological one. What goes on in a person's brain a second before the behavior happens? Then he pulls out to a slightly larger field of vision, a little earlier in time: What sight, sound, or smell triggers the nervous system to produce that behavior? And then, what hormones act hours to days earlier to change how responsive that individual is to the stimuli which trigger the nervous system? By now, he has increased our field of vision so that we are thinking about neurobiology and the sensory world of our environment and endocrinology in trying to explain what happened.

Sapolsky keeps going--next to what features of the environment affected that person's brain, and then back to the childhood of the individual, and then to their genetic makeup. Finally, he expands the view to encompass factors larger than that one individual. How culture has shaped that individual's group, what ecological factors helped shape that culture, and on and on, back to evolutionary factors thousands and even millions of years old.

The result is one of the most dazzling tours de horizon of the science of human behavior ever attempted, a majestic synthesis that harvests cutting-edge research across a range of disciplines to provide a subtle and nuanced perspective on why we ultimately do the things we do...for good and for ill. Sapolsky builds on this understanding to wrestle with some of our deepest and thorniest questions relating to tribalism and xenophobia, hierarchy and competition, morality and free will, and war and peace. Wise, humane, often very funny, Behave is a towering achievement, powerfully humanizing, and downright heroic in its own right.
 

Contents

INTRODUCTION
1
One THE BEHAVIOR
15
Two ONE SECOND BEFORE
21
Three SECONDS TO MINUTES BEFORE
81
Four HOURS TO DAYS BEFORE
99
Five DAYS TO MONTHS BEFORE
137
Six ADOLESCENCE OR DUDE WHERES
154
Seven BACK TO THE CRIB BACK TO THE WOMB
174
Twelve HIERARCHY OBEDIENCE AND RESISTANCE
425
Thirteen MORALITY AND DOING THE RIGHT THING
478
Fourteen FEELING SOMEONES PAIN UNDERSTANDING
521
Fifteen METAPHORS WE KILL BY
553
Sixteen BIOLOGY THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM
580
Seventeen WAR AND PEACE
614
EPILOGUE
671
Neuroscience 101
679

Eight BACK TO WHEN YOU WERE JUST
223
Nine CENTURIES TO MILLENNIA BEFORE
266
Ten THE EVOLUTION OF BEHAVIOR
328
Eleven US VERSUS THEM
387
The Basics of Endocrinology
707
Glossary of Abbreviations
718
Illustration Credits
774
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2017)

Robert M. Sapolsky is the author of several works of nonfiction, including A Primate's Memoir, The Trouble with Testosterone, and Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. He is a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation genius grant. He lives in San Francisco.

Bibliographic information