The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

The first few chapters were interesting but after a while it became apparent that this was a 350-page book that was stretched to 700 pages by means of jargon, lack of focus, and way too much detail. I can understand that many people who work in this field might give it 5 stars. But for everyone else, it is definitely not a five star book and was not worthy of all the praise it received by certain book reviews, such as Kirkus. I remember reading an interview with a writer who said it was hard to write a book that was 500-pages long, but ten-times harder to do it with 400 pages. I think most readers appreciate it (and would gladly pay more) when a writer and editor make the effort to deliver a crisp book. That certainly did not happen here.

The first and last time I will pre-order a book. Although, with all the glowing reviews, I may well have purchased it anyway. Besides the hundreds of endnotes, almost every page has one or more footnotes. One of the most cumbersome reads I have attempted recently. Although a rare occurrence, when my reading hobby turns into an extended chore, another reference book is added to my collection. Perhaps if the latter non-biology chapters had been dropped, the length of the book would have been reduced by about 40%. Still, all the damn footnotes do not make for smooth reading.

I started writing this in reply to another review made here, and decided it’d probably be better to have on its own:

I would imagine being a biologist or neurologist would make you actually like the book even less. It’s more or less a hodgepodge collection of heuristics and theories that all vaguely have to do with people, all of which are explained and applied better elsewhere, both in simpler terms, and with greater depth, depending on what you’re after. The sum of the whole unfortunately manages to be less than its parts.

Despite starting off well, I’m not sure who this book is written for, or that the author entirely knew, either. The way he delves into specific brain regions and pathways in neuroscience adds nothing to the explanations he gives or the application of theories derived from it, nor are they sophisticated enough to engage with the field itself. It all feels heavily inflated to meet an already large page quota, quickly resorting to things the author finds interesting to fill up space, such as dogs possibly lowering their tails to cover their butts when they get scared to mask the scent their anal glands release when they’re afraid. If you were to cut all of that out and digressions into things that seem intended to dazzle the reader into thinking this is a more intelligent book than it is, I imagine it would have been 20-50k words, and much better off for it.

As a more minor criticism of the book, and an example of material that could have easily been cut, the author frequently seems to take jabs at conservatives in ways that actually make him look silly to anyone that’s paying attention. He makes repeated mention of studies and data showing liberals are smarter than conservatives, then eventually says most of it is based on things that appear in political science journals which aren’t peer reviewed, aren’t strictly science, and/or can’t be reproduced. If that’s the case, I can’t see any other reason it was included other than to take pot shots at political views the author doesn’t like. For reference, I live in Berkeley, so you can take your best guess at how I feel about most political issues.

Overall, the book is an admirable and muddled effort to collect a wide variety of heuristics and theories on human behavior that manages to be many orders of magnitude longer than it needed to be, and offers nothing that hasn’t been better written elsewhere, both in popular nonfiction and more tightly targeted academic work.

All of the accolades for Sapolsky’s excellent writing style, insightfulness, humor, etc., are warranted. “Behave” would have gotten a higher grade from me if not for chapter 16 on the criminal justice system and free will, which seemed to go off the rails by his wanting to scrap the system and by his minimizing the free will factor of offenders. The author urges that the future will damn the present justice system just as we condemn the medieval practice of killing epileptics as witches. Surely he could have found less extreme parallels. In minimizing free will, I feel he warrants some of Stephen Morse’s criticism of neuroscientists with a “brain overclaim syndrome”.
I also disagree with his citing a study finding (p. 480) that humans search harder for causality and come up with more false attributions for malevolent than for benevolent events. In the two scenarios, a worker tells the boss his project will (a) harm the environment, and (b) help the environment, respectively. Each time the boss tells his worker, “I don’t care about the environment. Just do it.” 85 percent felt the boss harmed the environment in order to increase profits in scenario (a), but only 23 percent felt the boss helped the environment in order to increase profits in scenario (b). Sapolsky concludes humans are not perfect reasoning machines.
Well, neuroscientists certainly aren’t, and neither were the minority of respondents in the two scenarios. The majority of humans recognize the boss intentionally violated a known taboo to profit in scenario (a) (malfeasance), but simply ignored ecological benefit in scenario (b) (harmless nonfeasance). The majority of respondents were not poor reasoners – the neuroscientists were. The book is still a worthwhile investment.

Prof. Sapolsky's 790 page tome primarily addresses aggressive behavior and, ironically, says little about the consequences of chronic stress. Severe chronic stress is the cause of nearly all human "diseases of civilization", which are highly correlated with chronic elevation of the stress hormone cortisol. The good professor is known for his earlier work with Baboons in East Africa, particularly demonstrating the higher cortisol and lower testosterone levels in lower ranking animals. There is an ever increasing literature strongly suggestive of cortisol's primary role in the development of obesity, diabetes, atherosclerosis, heart disease, heart attack, stroke, high blood pressure (along with elevated aldosterone, etc.), peptic ulcers, kidney disease, serious infections and sepsis (cortisol suppresses the immune response), anxiety, depression (the neurotropin hypothesis), addiction, and suicide. Furthermore, there is an extensive medical-anthropological literature comparing the near absence of the diseases of civilization among hunter-gatherer clan-living peoples, some of whom he addresses but only so far as their violent behaviors, and us Western urbanites. For instance, in 1932 British physicians surveyed 283,851 rural Kenyans (hunter-gatherers and pastoralists) and, to their amazement, could not find a single case of heart disease, whereas it's our number one killer! It's a good book on violent behavior, but little else in 790 pages.

Illuminating, but beware of his left wing politics, which can be quite irritating.

note how Sapolsky can so blithely assert that liberals are smarter and morally superior than conservatives (like himself) while treading carefully around the matter of intelligence and race, which is much better documented.

This is a fascinating (and humorous) read for anyone interested in human behavior — the short answer is “it’s complicated”. We are driven by various forces: genetics, epigenetics, hormones, childhood trauma, culture, group dynamics, … etc. There is no silver bullet that explains behavior and there is so much we still do not know.

I especially enjoyed the chapter on adolescence — characterized by the delayed maturation of the prefrontal cortex, which results in novelty seeking/risk taking, a feeling of immortality (“it can't happen to me”) of being hopelessly bored by one's parents, and highly affiliated with peers.

Other topics I found interesting:
* Some depressing research on race: put people in MRIs, and even toddlers’ brains respond negatively to difference races. We are innately wired to perceive “Us vs Them”. Though this doesn’t mean the situation is hopeless or that we cannot overcome our biases.
* Even though “Free will” doesn’t exist, humanity probably needs to believe in free will in order for society to function.
* Related to (the above), the criminal justice system needs to be overhauled — notably the notion of punishment as justice.
* Biological underpinnings of left vs. right stances...In short: right-leaning folks have lower tolerance for disgust (as measured by amygdala activation and the insular cortex)

Thank you Dr Sapolsky for taking a break from studying baboons in East Africa in order to publish this masterpiece.

So... wow. Where to begin? I was fascinated from beginning to end. Behave is one of the few books I'll probably read over at least once. Maybe twice.

This book is absolutely not pop-science. It's not a book you'll breeze through, which is probably evident by the page count. This is an in-depth exploration of neurobiology, our brains, how we think, why we behave the way we do, and what makes us who we are. It's a massive undertaking, yet somehow Robert Sapolsky managed to wrap it up nice and neat in a complex but fully comprehensible book.

Sapolsky's writing style is what makes this book work for nonacademic readers. In someone else's hands, the content could easily be a complicated tangle of dull, scientific jargon. But Sapolsky lays it out all for us in a manner that is both interesting and easy to understand. His personality shines through with dashes of humor and insight.

I read a lot of nonfiction on similar topics pertaining to the science and psychology of behavior, and this is, without question, one of the best I've ever come across.

I want to mention one issue I had with the ebook format. This book contains a whole lot of footnotes. Because of the structure of ebooks, with pages expanding depending on your font size choice, footnotes don't sit at the bottom of a specified page the way they do in print. Instead they float further along, sometimes several pages beyond the point with the marked content. This can cause a bit of confusion, as you've already moved past the issue referenced. My copy is a Kindle ARC, though I'm not sure the final proof will be any different as footnotes can be problematic in ebook format. Because of that, I'd recommend the print version over the ebook.

*I received an advance ebook copy from the publisher, via NetGalley, in exchange for my honest review.*

4.5 stars. Sapolsky brings a truly epic amount of scientific research to bear in the entertaining, humane, and illuminating book. This book acts as a synethesis of a wide array of research into human behavior, incorporating work in evolutionary development, neurology, psychology, sociology, and the like. Sapolsky has looked at the various factors that influence human behavior, guiding the reader from the immediate influences that trigger a behavior in the preceding seconds, to the factors that lead to any given behavior in preceding days and weeks, to those that shaped us in the years before and in the womb, all the way back to the evolutionary factors that gave rise to homo sapiens. He manages to patiently lay out complex webs of influence, never giving in to oversimiplification and often finding ways to inject wit and humor into the text. He repeatedly offers up commonly held beliefs, pat explanations, and historical certainties and then explains why we now have evidence showing that we were wrong. And he does this not only with obsolete conclusions from yesteryear, but with some overly enthusiastic interpretations of recent data (often falling into the category of people overstating findings and failing to see nuance). The book discusses the full range of human behavior as promised in the subtitle - our behavior at its best and its worst. Having finished the book, a reader should walk away with mind broadened and an understanding that our behavior is not as simple as a gene or an environement or an event, but a complex tapestry of all those things interacting. This knowledge should both frighten and engender hope.

Behaviour is complicated. "Behave" explains it to the extent never attempted in popular books until now.

Most books on our behaviour, including those by path-breaking behavioural theorists, psychologists, sociologists and similar, shade a lot of light on our behavioural quirks. Through laboratory experiments and studies/examples of other kinds, they create numerous aha moments while revealing the not-so-obvious. However, such books rarely explore biophysical or biochemical phenomena that give rise to our actions.

"Behave" excels in exactly this. And that is also where many readers will fail the author! The underlying factors of our behaviour are not only environment or history dependent (as the book explains hundreds of times) but enormously complicated even if one simply tries to understand the scientific components and their interplays. Our brain's tens of biologically classified parts and neurones, hormones, neurotransmitters, proteins, cells, genes etc supporting interactions between them and other body parts are difficult to follow for anyone but experts. The author must be commended for making most things understandable while one is ploughing through. That said, few readers are likely to be able to summarise any of the newly learned concepts from the book a few days, if not minutes or hours, down the line.

Effectively, one needs a lot of training and years of subject mastery to truly understand the topics covered here. Learning how brain works through books like these is more difficult than learning quantum physics in a similar fashion. Unlike the esoteric science of the small, brain matters do not involve crazy mathematical equations. Yet, the science of words is more complicated because of the complexity of each of the hundreds of its most basic terms.

Yet, this is a tour de force. Anyone who soldiers on despite whatever is not understood at any stage will still find nuggets of wisdom, highly relevant in real life, all through. What one fails to understand is simply because of the underlying complexity. Whatever one is made to understand is this book's sheer force.

This is one of the most ambitious and important scientific books I have ever read. My wife probably got annoyed with me mentioning it in conversation so often as I read it. But it is so pertinent to everything human that is was hard not to see the connections. In this short explanation, I will mention just a few things the book taught me.

1 - Separating US and THEM is a deeply ingrained trait of animals that has been brought to incredible sophistication in the human animal. Humans use metaphors to create this separation. And it is almost completely irrational. My differences with my European-American neighbor are often far greater than my differences with someone from the other side of the earth. For example skin color is not significantly connected with other inherited traits.

2 - Some scientists have argued that humans have become less violent. Their evidence is not conclusive. However, there is strong evidence that under the right conditions violence can be lessened.

3 - Genes do not make you who you are. Our individual genetic make-up makes us more or less likely to have certain traits. Genes + prenatal environment + childhood environment get us closer to understanding why a person behaves as she does, but still there is more to it. We are getting closer, but we will likely never fully understand.

4 - Early childhood or prenatal trauma is a significant and powerful negative impact on us which is very difficult to counteract. This has to do with how hormones affect the way our brains develop.

5 - Male hormones do not lead to violence and sexual aggression, but they can. Female hormones do not make you more loving, but they can. All hormones have different affects in different people and circumstances.

6 - Empathy is not inherently good and does not lead us to help others. Feeling someone elses pain does not lead you to be more generous toward others. Our emotions are not what motivates us to be kind and generous. Kindness and generosity are habits.

6 - Poor people in rich countries are less healthy, even when they get nearly the same health care. Being poor while surrounded by wealth has a stunning negative impact on the quality of life. Poor people in poor countries are happier and relatively healthier. Why the difference? It has to do with how we feel about ourselves.

7 - Judges who are hungry sentence defendants to significantly worse penalties. Sitting on an uncomfortable chair makes us less friendly. Our behavior and decisions are not as logical as we think.

I could go on and on. This is an incredibly powerful book which has changed my opinions on several important things. Probably the most important of these is my increased willingness to forgive and forget. What I learned is that many of our quick actions are reflexive and completely irrational. I will forgive you. And I hope you will forgive me!

I do not recommend this book to everyone. There were long passages that flew over my head. The science is pretty dense. A science book meant for a general audience has a fine line to navigate. What is the right amount of technical detail to help the reader understand. Listening to a book such as this has the advantage that I was forced to "read" every word. I could not choose to skip technical sections. And every now and then I surprised myself by comprehending the science. But what is most important is that I understood how Sapolsky came to his conclusions. And what is clear from these scientific explications of controversial issues is the author's rigor in presenting multiple points of view, even those he does not agree with.

What causes human behavior? Well, everything does. Or, in Sapolsky's words: "It is impossible to conclude that a behavior is caused by a gene, a hormone, a childhood trauma, because the second you invoke one type of explanation, you are de facto invoking them all." (p. 8).

Sapolsky's wrote an impossible book: a readable synthesis of behavioral sciences, focused on human aggression, for people who don't know anything about biology, psychology, chemistry, endocrinology or neuroscience. Behave sets a foundation for behavioral sciences by interweaving genetics, endocrinology, the nervous system, psychology, culture and more - producing a deep frame for understanding human behavior and misbehavior. The almost 800 page tome presents very complex material in a wonderfully clear and engaging way, leaving the nuts and bolts of neuroscience or endocrinology to digestible appendixes for Behave's differentiated audience: those merely interested and those knowledgeable.

The complexity of human action is explained as a function of logarithmic time: that is, determined simultaneously by stuff that happened seconds, or milliseconds, in someone's brain before the action was triggered, years before during childhood development, and the millennia of evolution before that created the moving parts that made action possible in the first place. Behavior X occurred because, seconds before, something happened in the sympathetic nervous system. And this happened because, days before, hormone fluctuations affected the disposition to take a risk, and years before during a period of childhood adversity the amygdala became hyperreactive. And this happened because decades before, in the womb, prenatal testosterone exposure was such and such. And this happened because a long time ago the gene for tryptophan hydroxylasem which produces serotonin… That is the narrative arc of the book.

There is way too much to learn in the book to summarize in a review. This is not a book you read: it's a book you study.

Behave has one big problem: it echoes lots of debunked research. Chapter 2 is entirely based on psychological research that has been found consistently unreliable, including Carney & Cuddy's power posing (which Carney herself disavowed after multiple replication failures), John Bargh's priming and Roy Baumeister's ego depletion, which have all fallen under the guillotine of the replication crisis in psychology. A science book published in 2017 cannot turn a blind eye on the unreliability crisis in social and medical sciences just to maintain the consistency of its narrative arc, no matter how awesome it is, and Sapolsky misbehaves (sorry, couldn't help myself) by including weak research to keep the story neatly woven.

In spite of this, the book is almost inconceivably well-written, without shying away from nuance and complexity in the subjects covered. Sapolsky is a unique science communicator, and Behave is in a class of its own in terms of scope, clarity and depth. Ignore the pop psychology and have a lot of fun learning the rest.

I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, Robert Sapolsky is an excellent writer. Throughout the book he is clever, witty and informative, all at the same time. You can open this book on any page and find information about interesting studies and their implications. And, as you might have guessed from the number of pages this book has, it covers a lot of ground.

The book’s common theme is what determines our behavior. As a little side note here, like myself Robert Sapolsky does not believe we have free will. This means that, when we believe we are acting according to our own free, it is really just the sum of our past experiences, upbringing, genes etc, acting on our brain and causing the illusion of free will…

The question of what determines our behavior has many different viable answers. I moved my arm because my muscles contracted. My arm moved because neurons in my brain ordered the muscles to contract. I moved my arm to catch the ball flying towards me. I moved my arm because it hurts if it hits my head. I moved my arm because I have an evolved instinct to avoid harmful stimuli. And so on. All these answers are correct and they differ mainly in how long before the arm movement they acted they were involved in forming our behavior. The book is organized in the same manner. Sapolsky first explains the immediate causes of a behaviour (neurons and muscles), and then moves further and further back in time. Which stimuli in the environment caused your brain to react in the way that it did? Which factors in your upbringing and in your evolutionary past formed your brain so that you reacted to the stimuli in the way you did.

The book, as mentioned covers a lot of ground, and it feels almost like an encyclopaedia rather than a popular science book. Indeed, on one of the first pages of the book, the author apologizes for the length of the book, explaining that all the content is important if you want to properly understand behavior. I agree with this and you don't usually get the feeling that he is using unnecessarily many words. However, it does result in a lack of focus.

Should you buy the book? Yes, if you want a comprehensive book that covers a wealth of interesting neuroscience and psychology. There is no doubt that you will learn a lot if you read this book. Just be prepared for a very long book with not so clear connections between the dots.

I wouldn't want to listen to/read this book ever again. I've read it twice, attentively, because I believe you should also listen closely to people with whom you disagree, because maybe they are right on some or all points and you are wrong. The subject of the book is too important to be wrong about, so I really gave it a second chance, because it went against much of what I believe to be true about humans and human nature. Or rather Sapolsky doesn't go against it, he acknowledges, discusses much of it, yet he always twists the insights, questions them or turns them in a direction, reasons against them in ways that doesn't really seem convincing, but seems - again and again - guided by a biased reasoning. The reason for this biased and self deceptive reasoning seem to be his strong leftist leaning and maybe also an upbringing in a quaker family, and maybe also a very empathic mindset, that sometimes gets carried away in sentimental accolades of people he finds admirable.
I will not discuss or comment on his chapters on what the function of different brain regions are, nor on what the synapses do etc. It may be all true or wrong. I don't know. It is all very interesting, yet it also seems as a science in its infancy, where results are incomplete, provisional and might be revised in the future - but maybe I'm doing that part injustice and I just don't get the clear picture, all though the picture was there in the book.
Sapolsky's preferred adjective for books or writers with whom he - and the left, one thinks - disagrees is 'controversial'.
One such book is Judith Harris' The Nuture Assumption, that he terms 'controversial'. I think a better word would be 'classic'. After having read his book twice, I do wonder, if there isn't a tacit admission to Judith Harris' main point, that parenting matters little or nothing in shaping our behaviour outside the home, by the fact that he himself doesn't come with any examples on the importance of parenting. There is only one place, where he speaks about heroism - 'heroism feels and never reasons' is a nice quote from Emerson in that chapter - because he seems to suggest, that this heroism is not something with which you are innately born or have a propensity towards, no he seems to believe that people act heroic because this heroism was inculcated in them through their upbringing.
He also has a discussion of Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of our Nature, that he does call monumental, but in some way he seems to be more hinting at its physical size, as to the content and argument of the book. I must say, that I by far prefer Steven Pinker's book where he convincingly paints a picture of a past that was extremely violent, and he also has some clearly stated ideas about why our world has become less violent, and how it might become even less violent. Sapolsky, though, has a longer discussion about, and refers to newer studies, that seems to show that Pinker, and some other author, whom I haven't had the pleasure of reading, have cherry picked their data, so that hunter-gather-societies seem a lot more aggressive than they really were. He also seems to redefine some of the hunter-gathers in the data - maybe also the Yanomamö, whom Chagnon studied in the sixties and seventies and whose book about them had the title The Yanomamö - the fierce people - a book that seems to have inspired Steven Pinker - so that he says that they were not real hunter gathers. Somehow you are left with the impression, that they have been corrupted by modernity, outsiders, so that the question about whether indigenous people were living in a Hobbesian world, where aggressive males might have done better than others in the game of reproduction or in a Rousseaunian paradise of nobel savages, there it probably was the latter, according to Sapolsky. I'm not convinced - his argumentation seems so clouded by his leftist leaning. I think of Robert Thrivers book about selfdeception, and think that he is doing this full time here.
Chagnon is also called 'controversial', but when you read his book, then it has the ring of truth to it. The hunter-gathers in his book are not theoretical constructs or test persons (usually psychology students themselves) in psychology studies, but real people, real human beings.
In his discussion about terms like herited and heritability, he does try to do the subject justice, and he even talks about Thomas Bouchard's twin studies as 'most wonderful', and he does say that they are more or less accurate, the correlation numbers for heritability of traits. Yet - he comes up with an example, where he talks about women wearing earrings in the fifties, and that these twin studies would show a perfect correlation between genes and trait, because only girls would be wearing earrings at that time, but earrings are not due to genetics, they have everything to do with culture, environment, context. I found it a manipulative and deceptive example. He doesn't say, that the twin studies are wrong, yet he leaves you, with this example with the impression, that maybe this thing about heritability is a bit quirky. One agenda of his book seems to be to give as little influence to genes and genomes as possible, and as much influence to context. That is his credo: context, context, context. Genes always work in a context, actually my impression is almost that he thinks that context shapes the expression of the genes, do I dare to say determines the expression of the genes. There is one example, that I just can't get my head around: He states that when a woman begins to lactate, it is not due to her genes/genome, it's due to the context, the present of a baby. I don't understand how he can say that! Being a man, I could sit with a baby for ever, and I would not begin to produce milk. Becoming a father, seeing my children grow in the womb of my wife, her giving birth etc. is really the time, where I felt, that her and my behaviour were shaped and guided by our nature, you almost felt like a bystander, you were looking at a nature that could not be stopped.
The project of his book seems to be to give as much influence to context, environment that he possibly can. I do actually like his phrase about genes in a context, but where he seems to suggest that we can 'freely' shape our context, the context might just be way beyond our control, or the context might just be the result of our own genes or those of others. His hope seems to be that we through controlling our mind - eg. us-them dichotomies - can make the world, our societies better. His list of suggestions for bypassing and controlling your us-them dichotomies are worth memorizing, but I do have quarrels about them. One is that stereotypes about others are not necessarily wrong - we make categorisations about ducks, and if it quacks like duck, and it walks like a duck, it probably is a duck. Categorisation and stereotypes can build, and research shows (according to Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate - the denial of human nature) that stereotypes often are correct (there are though exceptions where one should be suspicious of them, eg. when there is little or no contact with the group or in case of intergroup hostilities. And us-them dichotomy can build on a real difference, and not just on prejudice. Another is that it's great that you are able to weed out your own problematic us-them dichotomies, but what do you do, when you are the target of other people's dichotomies. I don't see how he answers to that. Furthermore I think the main lesson in the research into us-them dichotomies is, that they are ubiquitous, they cannot be turned of, they can change at a blink of an eye almost, so we should stay vigilant towards them at all times in ourselves, but - and this is what Sapolsky doesn't give a moments thought, we must also be vigilant towards how others are making us into repugnant, coldhearted, creedy thems.
I think, he doesn't give this much thought, because he does have a 'them'. As a person of the left, he does think that rich people, white men like himself (and myself) are the cause of most evil and injustice in the world.
I have come to prefer the suggestions of Steven Pinker, that we can thank much of our good lives, not so much to the exploitation of other people, but because we got a centralized power, that freed us from the Hobbesian Trap of our ancestors, there was a civilizing process, self control, as described by Elias, literacy, more trade with each other, the use of reason, and expanding moral circle. Sapolsky feels this all has a smack of 'we are a superior civilisation'. I must say that I find these ideas more challenging and true, and worth working for, than some of the 'angels' put forward by Sapolsky.
Sometimes I think that there are two personal anecdotes, that Sapolsky and Pinker gives about themselves, that works like two points of orientation to understand their take on human nature, and maybe even are two real defining moments and epiphanies for their thinking.
For Steven Pinker it's the strike of the Montreal Police back in the sixties or seventies, that left his Bakunin-inspired anarchism of his youth in tatters.
For Sapolsky I think it is his story about the Baboons who died of typhoid. It was only the most aggressive males who died, and this, according to him, changed the 'culture' of the baboon herd. They became way less aggressive, new male baboons who joined the group quickly refrained from their usual aggressive and stressed behaviour. It all seems to epitomize his message about context-dependent behaviour. In many ways it is hard to disagree, we human males are still aggressive as were our ancestors, but we are shaped by our modern context, where aggression is curbed and prohibited in so many ways. I do though think, that his example has some problems. First, and maybe this is doing him un- justice, but if you could say that a nasty subtext, or an implicit implication of his story, could be, that if all the aggressive males were to die - it wouldn't be such a bad thing for society. And yet all he seems to advocate is, that if only we change our culture, then .... I also have a second objection to this example: What on the longer term? Is it and Evolutionary Stable Strategy that the peaceful baboons have found, or could will it be turned around by events in a not all to distant furture
Finally - he also uses a lot of space discussing the penitentiary system, the reasons and un-reasons to punish etc. I'm extremely tired now, so I'll go to bed, but just say, that that part also left me unconvinced. He doesn't seem to consider or discuss punishment as having to do, and working as deterrents.
I'm really tired, so I'll end here.

Steven Pinnker's books: The Blank Slate - the denial of human nature; and The better Angels of our nature are both two tour-de-forces and extremely well-written.
I would recommend anyone having come so far, no one probably has, to read/listen to those books first.

- Henrik

There may be good ideas in here, but I found the informal style irritating. I tried to get past it, but couldn't. I can't think of the upside to using that style in a science book. You risk getting in the way of the content for no gain.

It's not a fast read, nor is it an easy read. But the book is an amazing resource for understanding behaviour from micro to macro levels. I kept finding myself reading news paper articles and other books and noting how the behaviours described there were examples of Dr. Sapolsky was talking about.

That said, I wish for readers' sake Dr. Sapolsky didn't use abbreviations and acronyms so often. I understand that in conversation it's much easier to say ACC than to pronounce Anterior Cingulate Cortex. But in written form, that objection goes away. I found myself endless having to look up the 1000s of abbreviations through out the book. I would have so much preferred to have everything written out -- it's easy to have one's eyes slide over the long complicated phrase (there's no need to even say inside the head when reading). But having to look up dlPFC, and ERPS, and SNPs was endlessly interrupting (not looking them up was endlessly confusing). So this is my one grrr for the book.

I've recommended this book to everyone now. It's an amazing work. And if you feel like it's too much in the beginning, it's okay. It gets better and better as Dr. Sapolsky zooms out and changes scales from atoms, molecules, and cell to examples of human interaction. Wonderful book!

This is one of the most comprehensive and intelligent books on behavior that I have ever read. In it, a first-rate sociobiologist cleverly and authoritatively incorporates the latest findings from neuroscience and developmental psychology into explanatory models of behavior that at long last puts genes in their proper place. Of course genes matter, but as this most engaging of mentors reminds us again and again, how behaviors unfold “all depends”, as in, genes matter, but how they matter can only be understood by taking into account the multi-layered environments in which they are expressed. Anyone aspiring to be scientifically literate in this crazy world of ours needs to read Behave, not once but several times. I recommend listening to the Audible version but with a print version on hand to check out the many helpful figures and references.

One of the best best books I've ever read on Human psychology. Sapolsky takes his reader on an epic journey back in time, from the second a behavior is enacted to minutes, hours, years, and decades before. Spolsky's humor is unparalleled, his story-telling remarkable, and his ability to tell a story from dozens of scientific studies unmatched. He starts by asking what a behavior is, then proceeds to build a base on the neuro-correlates of that behavior. What does the brain do to perform a behavior? What chemicals in the bloodstream modulate that behavior? How does the environment affect how a person behaves? How does it affect the person's mother during pregnancy? How do societies learn and transmit certain behaviors?

Sapolsky then takes the reader on a journey of application. How do the findings in neuroscience inform us on how we are biologically wired to identify the 'Us' vs. 'Them'? What are the moralistic ramifications of these studies?

I've read hundreds of books, and this one is EASY top 3.

This may well be the most important book you will ever read. Think of it as an owner's manual for being a human being. Just like with your car's manual, you will be a better operator and owner for having read it. You will also be able to guide and impress your friends with your vast knowledge. I have followed Dr. Sapolsky's work for years. If you want a clear, understandable and clever presentation of the science of human behavior you can either read Malcolm Gladwell or Dr. Sapolsky. If you really just want to be cleverly entertained, then read Gladwell. You won't have to think at all. You also won't really learn anything. It will be likely eating a frozen yogurt. You will be able to fool yourself into thinking it's nourishment, as long as you don't think about the ingredients.

Reading Sapolsky will also entertain you, but does nourish your understanding of how and why humans do what we do over and over again even when it seems irrational. Biology and evolution are rational. They are just rational in terms of interests that may not align perfectly with our personal preferences or individual needs. Sapolsky understands that we as a species are essentially intelligent primates. He says this after spending most of his life observing primates in the wild and documenting their individual behavior and social interactions.

Among his observations, Sapolsky reminds us that in spite of our claims to the contrary, we don't "hate aggression. We hate the wrong kind of aggression but love it in the right context.". He reminds us that behavior is largely influenced by context and social payoffs in terms of rewards or status enhancement. Many books discuss the shaping of behavior by rewards and punishments. Sapolsky goes deeper and wider, integrating neurobiology (including brain structure and neuronal activity along with hormones and developmental stages) into our understanding of how we operate.

This is a book you can dip into anywhere and find fascinating studies, observations, anecdotes and stories. Some findings are well known, while others obscure, but all are significant and revealing of how we think and get along. It is beyond well-researched. Notes are 50+ pages of micro-font text!!! This book is a great gift for any college age reader. It would be a great choice for a community or library reading group to discuss chapter by chapter. There is much to chew on, process and even disagree with. Any book this ambitious and comprehensive in scope will have unevenness, if not other questionable decisions about examples, content, or length.

You will rarely find a 700+ page, non-fiction trade book that has such a large proportion of 5-star ratings. Trust these, they know what they are talking about. "Behave" is something special. So is Sapolsky.

This is a big but accessible book explaining what makes us do what we do. Sapolsky considers the view that we are the product only of our genes to be inaccurate. He also disagrees with the view that we are the result of upbringing and experience. But he goes beyond the general contemporary view that we are the product of a mixture of genes and experience. That is the central theme of this book.

In explaining what lies behind our actions, for example, when we pull a trigger to fire a gun, what exactly is causing us to make that decision to pull the trigger? It is not just genes that make us what we are, nor the culmination of our experience that drives our actions. Culture, and hormones, and a host of other factors also play a part. Divorce is a cultural product, but once legalised, Sapolsky notes, 'a large percentage of marriages end in them'. He discusses the role of testosterone and oxytocin affect us too.

He discusses reasoning in the making of moral decisions and the part played by intuition. To help the reader understand these ideas, Sapolsky intoduces us to the different parts of the brain and what each part does. He tells us what the pre-Frontal Cortex does and illustrates with the example of Phineas Cage who had much of his pre-Frontal Cortex destroyed in an industrial accident. Sapolsky also studies how evolution as well as group behaviour influence individual behaviour. Some of the studies draw out fascinating stories of ape and chimpanzee colonies and how the alpha male and females in the group shaped the group's behaviour.

Sapolsky also discusses the concepts of free will and punishment in the chapter, 'Biology, the Criminal Justice System, and Free Will'. It is a chapter that expands our thinking into the idea of punishment. He accepts that punishment may still be necessary to shape behaviour 'But there is simply no place for the idea that punishment is a virtue'.

He discusses Steven Pinker's book, "Better Angels of Our Nature' in which Pinker thinks that our worst days are behind us. But Sapolsky tells us that Pinker's book (scholarly as it is) provoked three controversies. First, 'Why were people so awful then?' Second, 'Why have people gotten less awful?', and third, 'Have people really gotten less awful?' Sapolsky tells us to recognise our irrationalities - 'We decide if someone is guilty based on reasoning but then decide their punishment based on emotion'. Those who have enjoyed 'Sapiens' and 'Homo Deus' by Yuval Noah Harari will enjoy Sapolsky's book. The paperback edition is a little cheaper and more colourful.

In Behave, neurobiologist and primate expert Robert Sapolsky takes us on a whirlwind tour of several scientific fields. His subject? Behavior. Just a quick mental checklist of all the fields that can be described as falling entirely under the rubric of human behavior -- all the social sciences, marketing, business, criminology, communications, and so on, are breathtaking. The sheer magnitude of the ambition taken on by Sapolsky is breathtaking, exhilarating, and refreshing. In a few pages or even paragraphs he clearly summarizes entire fields of work for the lay reader. Appendices cover the mechanics of neurons, hormones, and genes respectively. Given the number of controversial subjects he touches on, he remains remarkably even handed, presenting multiple sides of a number of scientific controversies, and endorsing many ideas in part, with caveats. One will not always agree with him, but that is inevitable given his topic.

The organization of the book involves examining behavior from a temporal scope: given a behavior, what events explain it based on what happened seconds before, then hours before, then days before, then in childhood, in the environment, in the womb, in evolution? An overarching theme in the book is that neurons, hormones, environment, gene expression, genes, species, and so on all matter and contribute. No single factor is determinative. Rather, multiple factors interact with one another. In doing so Sapolsky obliterates the nature/nurture dichotomy as well as many others. In the second part of the book, Sapolsky tends to get more on his soapbox and state what he thinks are the implications of what is known up until now.

A tour de force for anyone who wants to understand the study of human behavior. Given the nature of the book, I hope that it will be updated with additional editions every five to ten years as the science is updated.

This is an excellent book that should be required reading for any graduate program in the social sciences. Because the book breezily touches on an array of interdisciplinary themes, virtually all readers will gain something from reading it. I recommend it across disciplines because (as this book illustrates) transdiscplinary perspectives are increasingly common in research, and this book is great for teeth-cutting. Whether your program emphasizes social, psychological, or post-structuralist perspectives, you can get through this book and learn a lot in the process.The book is not an easy read per se, but it is enjoyable, and makes a great first exposure to neuroscience and epidemiology. Others have commented that Sapolsky's writing is very teacherly here. That observation is spot on. Watch some of his class lectures on Youtube and you will have a good sense for what you are signing up for. Sapolsky writes very much like he speaks.

The main reason I gave the book four stars instead of five is that the book is unlikely to profoundly change one's worldview. That is, it is very good, but it is probably not one for the ages. For example, many of the book's neuroscientific observations will be dated in ten years. Meanwhile, where the book ventures into other social scientific disciplines, it is not groundbreaking, or even very adventurous. In some places, I'd even say it is clunky. If you are in academia, you will likely notice some superficiality in depth of coverage wherever Sapolsky ventures toward your discipline, and it may irk you. Thus, the book is not quite a game-changer. (For reference, I would say the same thing of Pinker's Better Angels. It is hard to popular and profound at the same time.)

Still, I highly recommend the book because it will help readers make novel connections, and the fact that it is in the realm of timeless books is nothing to scoff at. I also suspect that the book will have greater pedagogical value BECAUSE of its limitations. It provides plenty of fodder for conversation. Sociological and humanities-oriented disciplines might consider pairing it with Rose and Abi-Rached's Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind.

Behave is both a brilliant and immensely frustrating work. On the one hand, Sapolsky provides a comprehensive survey of what is known about the genetic, neurochemical, evolutionary and cultural bases of human behavior. On the other hand, Sapolsky admits in every section that studies conflict or are not replicable, that the knowledge we do have is incomplete and that any conclusions are only provisional.

Given widely known instances like when scientists erroneously claimed that meats and other fatty foods were a primary cause of heart attacks leading Americans to switch to high calorie carbohydrates with disastrous consequences for health, it is probably wise for Sapolsky to be so modest in his conclusions.

But I couldn’t help feeling that I’d read seven hundred pages of conjectures, hypotheses and theories with little I could definitively rely upon. Ingenious but incredibly frustrating.

I'm writing this as a long-term neuroscience lover with main focus on ethical decision making. This book is an educational tour de force. It's comprehensive, yet approachable. If you're new to the topic, all the scientific paraphernalia might drag on you a tad, but what's the alternative for a layman who is eager to build a framework of understanding human behavior? Learning Kandel's Principles of Neural Science by heart and pushing through hundreds of research papers in relevant disciplines? Well, good luck with that! The work by the esteemed prof. Sapolsky is not a science textbook, so a reader might expect it would suffer from omnipresent slight misinterpretations and seemingly unavoidable misconceptions of the pop-sci behavioral science, but in fact its precision in choosing the examples of behaviors examined is unrivaled and the systemic outlook saves it from many troubles other books on the topic can't avoid. It's a very careful, self-conscious book, treading mindfully on the terrain full of biases and common misconceptions, nudging you towards a more sane, more critical view of yourself and the others. It is written from a deeply humanistic standpoint. It's witty, well-paced, always putting things into context and gauging the phenomena in terms of periods of time they unfold. If you're trying to understand human ethics, as many of us are, I think this might be the best introduction to the topic.

Brilliant book. I was hanging on every word from descriptions of what, in the brain and body, happens the split second before we react to how our long ago pasts affect it. I didn't worry about not fully grasping Sapolsky's scientific descriptions of chemical reactions and biological processes. His commentary on them sufficed to illuminate the meaning of these things. So, a scientist can enjoy the book on a technical level and I can enjoy it on a layman's level.

Btw, the other comments on here castigating Sapolsky for being a liberal are pretty funny. It's interesting how this style has arisen in this post Rush Limbaugh era of sarcasm and arrogance standing in the place of reason.

Twice (or more) shy from disappointment on buying and reading other heavily and ultimately spoiled by pc science books (eg Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah) like other reviewers here I fell for the cover plug from the Wall Street Journal, only to be disappointed again. Again like other reviewers: Rich, dense opening chapters and related appendices make for a promising start. Yes there are early pointers (Sapolsky wears his badges) but it’s a light touch initially and the the biology and neuroscience are rich pickings. But then he gets into social science and the howlers (not a monkey joke) start: humans invented agriculture and thus invented poverty. I see. Until then hunter gatherers and indeed all animals had lived and loved in bucolic groups spoon feeding from crib to grave. Then the most glaring: chapter 9 which he opens with “Let’s start with a digression...”. As often happens it’s in the digression that the mask slips and the thinking - or failure to think- shows. He continues: “..a remarkably consistent finding ...is that males are better at math than females. While the difference is minor when considering average scores there is huge difference when it comes to math scores at the upper extreme of the distribution. For example for every girl scoring in the highest percentile of the SAT there were 11 boys.”
He continues with observarions on brain development and testosterone that may explain this finding.

All done ? Nope. The reader may recall Larry Summers lost his job for having the temerity to make this same observation. Nah. Not an issue. He points to the paper “Culture, Gender and Math” which showed for once and for all (we should so believe) that as countries get closer in gender equality, the math score difference between girls and boys disappears. Yay. Shows how those narrow minded conservatives just need to read more of the literature. And like that, the issue, the digression is over.

Except: the issue of gender difference in math scores is about the tail of the distribution of math scores, not the average. The proposed resolution is about averages, not the tail. Why don’t his editors spot this. Why doesn’t he ? Because he has too much congnitive assonance at stake: on heritability of intelligence, on gender and racial differences. On wishing the world were a certain way or that truths might all be comfortable. And that’s where he stops being a scientist and the book stops being a good science book. It’s also where I realized I should stop reading but I plugged on as one does for another 250 pages.

For a better writer with the courage to address these issues read Nicholas Wade- in particular the superb “Before the Dawn”.

At his worst, the phrase from the book: "Fifth-rate scientists at Podunk U". Tsk, tsk. His inner baboon is yet speaking. Many modern science writers (excluding Matt Ridley and Nick Lane as benign oppositely-inclined examples) seem to possess a deep insecurity and nervousness that comes spewing out with name-dropping and castigation of others in the profession. The science and nature are the things, not the scientists -- "fifth-rate" or otherwise.

Otherwise, pretty good reading.

The book is an effective lay review of brain science that is both wide and deep in scope. I found his writing monotone and his approach to examples lacking in thought and creativity. It’s a decent book about human behavior if you know nothing about human behavior. Ultimately the sub-title is misleading; the book was prodominantly about the “worst” and focused very little of the “best” of our animal nature.

Great masterpiece! Yes some parts were very technical and the author presents both sides of the argument for almost every discussion but they were all very necessary to make his conclusion very convincing. I have background in biochemical and anatomical science in undergrad and grad school so it helped.

Basically he said like everything else in life, "its complicated, everything depends on context/enviroment" Be careful of people offering simplistic solutions. The genes/receptors/hormones responsible for the greatest harm can also do the greatest goods under different circumstances. The opposite of love is not hate, its indifference. When we study human behaviors we need a macro view of everything especially the background and context of the situation. More people need to read and understand this book and hopefully the world would be a better place to live.

Behave has an ambitious mandate: using biology to explain the best and worst of human behavior. Pulling from a startlingly wide array of scientific disciplines, Sapolsky delves into genetics, neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, anthropology, molecular and evolutionary biology and many other fields in order to explain why we do what we do. This is a challenging book with extensive acronyms and citations, but the rigor of Sapolsky's analysis yields worthy, deep, and surprising insights into everything from criminal justice to compassion, inequality, adultery, war, redemption, and our most intimate inner lives.

Robert M. Sapolsky’s “Behave” is a landmark achievement in behavioral science. He reports and interprets hundreds of human and animal research findings, exhibiting a dazzling breadth and depth of scholarship rarely found in one book. With a focus on behaviors such as aggression, morality, and empathy, his unique approach to unraveling the causes of behavior takes the reader on a journey from proximal to increasingly distal causes starting with the neural events immediately preceding the act and working backwards in time. In succession, he explores the role of external and internal stimuli, hormones, learning, adolescence, childhood, prenatal, genetic, cultural and evolutionary factors that contribute to the behavior and all through the lens of the brain and nervous system which he calls “the final pathway by which all the factors converge”. Dashes of humor, sprinkled throughout the narrative style, provide welcome interludes to serious and sometimes difficult analysis.

Dr. Sapolsky boldly addresses such wide-ranging subjects as free will, evolution as fact - not theory, the realistic role of genetics, adult neurogenesis, the molecular and cellular basis for learning, the contingent effects of hormones such as testosterone and oxytocin, us vs. them tribalism, and the bio-psycho-social differences between conservatives and progressives, and between high and low socioeconomic groups. He concludes by drawing implications for the criminal justice system, war and peace and ultimately, prospects for human well-being.

So I have not completely finished it, but I listen to it when I am on a long drive and it is by far my favorite Psychology/Neuroscience read. It encorporates all fields when trying to understand human behavior helping to provide not only a full picture, but a fuller understanding of how different approaches tackle big questions.

There were definitely times that I wish I was reading because of complex terminology, but even if I missed something or did not understand it, a concept I did understand would come up. I did re-listen to some topics like the brain and genetics because of the hard terminology, but regardless, I learned so much and enjoyed, and continue to enjoy it immensely.

This book is exactly what I would point to, to distinguish between the work of a scholar and the work of a scientist. The scholar not only knows what is, he is also very well aware of the limitations of our knowledge pertaining to what is and why it is so. Therefore, he approaches the subject not with a reductionist approach, but with a microdetailed approach cascading and building towards a gradual holistic image. A beautiful book work on behavior.

Most books about behavioral science and neurobiology have a tendency to exaggerate claims and oversimplify topics.

This book does not fall into either of those traps.

Sapolsky makes some bold claims, but is always willing to back them up with expansive evidence, thoroughly interrogate his ideas, and admit when we just don't know enough. He somehow manages to expertly weave through incredibly complex topics and questions with without ever losing you on the way.

This is a dense book that really requires you to really invest your time and focus. Yet after all the hours it will take to read, you'll finish knowing it was worth it.

I do not understand parts of this book but I my gut feeling is that my frontal lobe will eventually let me.

This might be in part because I have an audio book which presumably cuts me off from some of the visual aids afforded by dead tree medium.

It is my favorite book of the decade. Sapolsky describes a ridiculous amount of literature in a very readable format. Few individuals are well versed in molecular biology, primatology and group prejudice. Even fewer can write about it in such an engaging way. Thank you Robert Sapolsky, for this wonderful book.

A book that should be entitled "All You Ever Wanted to Know About Bob Sapolsky and then some". He tries to please everyone. Those who know little science so its boring and repetitive for those who do. Now I must admit that I got bored early on and must go back and finish it (after all it WAS expensive) before I render judgement. I would advise those interested in primates to go back and read his earlier books. They are funny, informative and mesmerizing. Perhaps he lost his editor

The review by Roger J. Jones is completely accurate. I did find enough of interest in this book to take two pages of notes. The author tellingly admits, "On any big, important issue it seems like 51 percent of the scientific studies conclude one thing, and 49 percent conclude the opposite." (p. 674)

This book totally changed the way in which I view human behavior. It recognizes inherent flaws in the human cooperation system as it assigns freedoms to the actions committed by humans. Sapolsky displays how we have very little free will when it comes to the choices we make. The body has a pre-defined DNA, genetic type, and biology that predispose it to behave one way in one specific environment, and another way in another environment.

Some times it gets a bit technical but overall I love this book. After reading it I have a better understanding of why we act the way we do. I really like the author's style. Just when you are getting too serious he tosses in a zinger or two to make you smile or even laugh. I especially found the segment about liberals and conservatives enlightening.

This is one of those books that if everyone in the world read, our society would be organized very differently with regard to human behavior, social interaction, reward, and most especially punishment. And by "differently" I really mean "better", or at least in a more logically well-reasoned way based on scientific empiricism and understanding.

I would highly recommend this book and would even put it on my top 10 nonfiction favorites. Sapolsky makes this important topic accessible and funny at times, while continuing to stick to the hard science. Don't be intimidated by the 800 pages! It's definitely worth picking it up if you're interested in the topic.

This is the single most enjoyable book I have read to date. This book astonishes me because it is the first neuroscience book I have read in a while that isn't full of useless fluff. Sapolsky is even at at times apologizing because he wishes it could be shorter! There is piles upon piles of amazing, just amazing, content in this book. Wow.

Interesting topic, often written with humor. While this is fascinating material, it is not best consumed by a general audience. There are repeated sections that are, for non-neuro surgeons, completely confusing, not to mention tedious. Might be best used as a medical school text.

A good view into human neurology, I haven't finished it, but I continue to listen to it in spurts. listen a bit, think about it, absorb, move on. his political opinions occasionally slip in but thats to be expected.

Unless it's the marshmallow test in which case it's incontrovertible truth. So in the discussion of gene variant 7R and gratification postponement, no studies done w the marshmallow kids. And then southern culture promotes violent behavior, but what about the guy from Queens? It just seems like the science is a lot of "well, who the heck knows," but the social science research is presented with an odd confidence. It is a little unreliable. Where's the editor ?

Was interesting and seemed inspiring until the later chapter (forget which number), that the author decided to plug his own evolutionary views and berate belief systems of religious folk. Too bad was a good read up until then!

Content subjects are disorganized. Author regurgitates what the Stanford professor says about frontal cortex damage. This author has copied verbatim and show's little analytical development. Poor form. Will never read his writing again.

From the first page of the introduction the lack of intellectual rigor is set - an revenge fantasy straight from a Tarantino exploitation movie, wherein we have to wade through graphic descriptions of what the author would like to do to Hitler, as if a single man magically personified all that went wrong in a country, a continent, a time, and vast intellectual currents.

But then, what can we expect from the man who arranged a petition back in the day to have the experiments by Robert Sloviter that contradicted his pet theory blocked from publication in 'Science' journal. What sort of credential is THAT to lecture the reader on right and wrong? What does a scientist do when his "big idea" is contradicted by experiment? Well, he can used social pressure to get the work suppressed and then go and write books about Ulcers and Zebras and overly long pastiches of pop psychology like this one. Better he stuck with the baboons that made his name.

A truly awful book. Basically a (very long) set of lecture notes containing every single pop psychology anecdote you've ever come across, interspersed with passages of overly technical neuroscience detail, made even more annoying by the author's embarrassing attempts to sound cool and breezy, as if he's desperately trying to ingratiate himself with an undergraduate class. Complete waste of time.

Take biology 101, psychology 101 and anthropology 101- throw the whole lot against the wall and see what sticks. The entire book could be summarised in 5 pages of bullet points. Like another reviewer stated, this book reads like a text book. Tedious and repetitive.

This book is a long argument against the notion of free will. So if he is right, you have no ability to decide whether to buy this book, or whether you like this review, or anything. You are a pre-programmed robot.

These arguments about free will are on the fringes of philosophy, not science. I point this out in order to warn potential readers who might be looking for a science book. If you can make a decision about this, then his main thesis is wrong.

Chapter 48, when the author ascribes various negative mental defects as causative of conservative political ideology, was the last pseudoscience assertion that I could take with a straight face. This guy would have been laughed out of any legitimate peer-reviewed scientific journal as just the newest version of the old Phrenology theories from the 1930's. Well written, but bad science (if it can be dignified as such).

80% - 5 star, 10% - 3 star, 10% 1 star. Interesting range. I find it difficult to understand how any 5 start reviews were given for this book. It's very long, and I tried for a long time to find any part of it that was even moderately interesting to me. I have given a number of 4 and 5 star reviews, which are normally quite detailed. For Behave, I really have nothing more to say other than I wish I had not purchased a copy.

The first two chapters or so are very nice about the neurophysiology of emotions. Really learned a lot. Excellent information. The rest of the book is amazingly left wing, incoherent ramblings about behavior. Not worth the read.

He talks about "good" and "bad" behavior, but NEVER defines in his book the ethical system by which he judges behavior. I guess he assumes that everybody just knows what good and bad is.

He talks about some behaviors being adaptive and promoting better lives than other types of behavior, but doesn't define what makes for a good or successful life. I guess he assumes everybody knows. The marshmellow study of impulse control was interesting, in that those who did well on that test had better lives: Higher IQ, higher SAT's, and lower BMI's. That's it? By modern standards, IQ is racist, SAT's scores are due to economic factors, and BMI has nothing to say regarding the value of a human life. How about number of children and grandchildren. NOT ONCE in this book did I see him talk about behavior and reproductive success. Maybe I missed it. Reproductive success is all that matters in evolution.

His is flippant and disrespectful to people he doesn't agree with. He takes cheap shots. Some scientist.

He is also ignorant of human biology. He said that by the 8th week of gestation the human gonads were making sex hormones, testosterone in males and estrogen in females. If he knew any human reproductive biology, he would know that the human ovary only makes estrogen at menarche. The estrogens are produced by the developing egg, which requires FSH support from the pituitary to mature. This is a very, very, basic error in his book. What else doesn't he know? I suspect quite a bit, based on his dogmatism. Ignorant people tend to be dogmatic.

So, skip this book or just read the first couple of chapters in the library.

Dr. Sapolsky didn't do his homework - he certainly does NOT understand behaviorism or B. F. Skinner! To summarily dismiss behaviorism and, presumably, all of the behavioral research conducted over the past 90 years, says to me that he is not a "real" scientist - conjecture is easy, understanding scientific findings is more difficult. I guess he avoids the difficult!!

After providing excellent tutorials on the brain, genetics, and evolution, the author concludes that none of them have much effect on human behavior. Instead, the only thing that matters is being born in an environment of poverty, and then learning that wealthy folks exist. One of his many ridiculous comments is that “high rates of violence, particularly of murder, by white southern males…..(who) would shoot each other at Fourth of July picnics.” Coincidentally, southern Chicago just had 100 shootings last Fourth of July. He actually states “Warrior gene my ass”. He also claims that “Global Warming” is responsible for violent behavior.
The two questions he does not answer are: 1. Why do most “educators”, entertainers, and “journalists” exhibit extreme and fanatical liberal behavior (genes or environment)? 2. In the world today, why do those pockets of primitive tribal behavior (Hadza, Mbuti, Batwa, Gunwinggu, Andaman, Batak, Semang, Inuit, and Urban Warriors) still exist?
I should add that I enjoyed the author’s writing style and humor but not the manipulation, cherry-picking, and misrepresentation of scientific data to promote his personal bias.

Read the sample and was quite impressed with it, but nothing like it ever returned. The sample was never replicated in the ensuing chapters.
What did ensue was chapter after chapter of build up of some obscure study followed by its critical destruction, and no evidence of anything constructive to the contrary.

I am a firm believer that present and futu re of the USA are not in Wall Street, but in Silicon Valley, and that Stanford University has done a lot for Silicon Valley. So, when I saw in a scientific journal an ad, informing me that Behave was written by a standard Stanford University professor, I bought it. And read it. Well...First of all, the book is in 2 parts: the first part is a boring review of the central nervous system (amygdala and frontal cortex get all the attention, but the author does not tell us what the frontal cortex does, and how). And when he runs out of arguments, he goes back to the baboons, and with all the respect I have for baboons, a baboon is not a human being (although some human beings are...baboons).The second part is on behavior and apart from annoying :stay tuned: and :we will discuss it in the next chapter: (it is not ), the behavior is analyzed by non-scientists, despite their claims. What kind of science is to have a baboon offered two choices, one of them with a bitter substance, and the baboon choses always the right one, I would too if nobody ever tells me that the bitter substance has been removed, but who is going to tell t he baboon? All the experiments are given as fantastic, and then demolished (stay tuned) in the next page. Stanford University can make you a professor (of Latin, for instance), but no one will ever make you a scientist if you are not trained for it.. The book? Oh, I will forget it at a train station, my train station actually accepts books and I left several there, and someone will pick it up and read it, and maybe he or she will like it. I didn't.