Behave!

I just finished Robert Sapolsky’s Behave: The Biology of Humans at our Best and Worst, an incredibly ambitious book, 790 pages long, which has 16 fantastic chapters and one awful one. Naturally I want to talk about the awful one. But first I have to explain the good and ambitious parts. Sapolsky wants to explain what we know about what causes human behavior, with a special emphasis on its best and worst aspects: what makes someone shoot a defenseless person, what makes someone else run into a burning building to save a child. As he says, it’s complicated. He needs to explain about how neurons work, how neurotransmitters and hormones work. Then how genetics and evolution work. Then how memory develops, and how childhood experiences affect our minds. Then how animals behave and sometimes misbehave. Then how culture complicates everything. Sapolsky’s own field is neuroendocrinology, in particular the effect of stress on primate brains. For 25 years he spent his summers studying a troop…