Review: Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The worst in men; the best in men. He covers it all in this astounding tour of the biology of human behavior. The scope of Sapolsky's scholarship is breathtaking and there is no way this humble review can do it any justice, but I'll try.

A professor of biological sciences and of neurology and neurological sciences, Sapolsky has spent more than three decades studying the physiological effects of stress on health. His pioneering work includes ongoing studies of laboratory rats and wild baboons in the African wilderness. He's the real deal.

A chunk of this book is devoted to the discussion around a good stress response (running from a predator) versus repetitive psychosocial stress caused by modern life. This section was easy to take in and interesting, too..

I liked the way he backed into his deterministic view of human behavior, even though I am not entirely in this camp. Just before a human takes decisive action, we have to stop and wonder why this action or that action. What sparked it? He asks the reader to consider what happened just seconds before - neuroscience explains how previous similar situations are in fact stored in the shadowy circuitry informing the ultimate decision. He asks the reader to consider what happened minutes or days before this action - hormonal fluctuations account for A LOT, setting a stage for the action. He asks the reader to consider what happened days to months before and so on and so forth, until the reader is directed to childhood and gestation and genetics. And more. Your head will spin. Mine did.

I was very impressed but I was not entirely convinced. Especially because it all points to the absence of free will. And, to the extent that we are to be changed or made better by reading this book, we'd have to choose that change. Yet, without free will, we can choose nothing at all. If life is going to unfold in one way or another due to combinations of some genetics, some events, and some brain chemistry, doesn't that make the knowledge imparted in this book just a big tease?

Does knowing all of the precise ingredients of a particularly complicated recipe means that you know exactly what's on your plate? Ingredients impact each other and the sum of them can be more or less than expected, right? Admittedly, I am out of my depth in this book and it deserves a second reading. I wonder if my recipe for personhood, behavior, and decision-making will allow it?

The most interesting take-away for me? This:
"Agriculture makes people dependent on a few domesticated crops and animals instead of hundreds of wild food sources, creating vulnerability to droughts and blights and zoonotic diseases. Agriculture makes for sedentary living, leaving humans to do something that no primate with a concern for hygiene and public health would ever do: namely, living in close proximity to their feces. Agriculture makes for surplus and thus almost inevitably, the uneven distribution of surplus generating socio-economic status differences that dwarf anything that other primates cook up with their hierarchies." This is the first time I ever read words throwing down on agriculture. If agriculture was a "wrong turn" for humanity...well, there's no bouncing back from that now.

This is a book I'll return to often. The delivery is spry and often downright amusing. Fun facts, like rich people are less likely to stop for pedestrians entering a crosswalk/intersection and PMS is not a thing experienced universally by women (along with detailed accompanying explanations) make it a worthy read. Finally, the man is living a wildly interesting life. You don't have to agree with all of his conclusions to have multiple jaw-dropping moments of discovery.

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