Robert M. Sapolsky

Why do we do the things we do? attempts to answer that question, looking at it from every angle. He hops back in time, in stages, ultimately ending up at the deep history of our species and its evolutionary legacy. The result is a dazzling tour of the science of human, 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.

The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

Behave

Hooman Rostami

Can not write a better review than this one right here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Gavin

Has an ingenious structure: starting with a piece of behaviour, work backwards through the many scales that caused it: from the nerve bundles that enable the muscle motion, through the brain processing that ordered those, through that morning's hormonal predisposing, foetal genetic construction, all the way to the ancestral environment.

Sapolsky is engagingly cranky about various things: traditional misogynies, war. He uses the neologism "pseudospeciation" (i.e. the dehumanising kind of racism) about 50 times.

He is often thrillingly unimpressed:

   Jane Goodall blew everyone's socks off by reporting the now-iconic fact that chimps make tools... Most cultural anthropologists weren't thrilled by Goodall's revolution, and now emphasise definitions that cut chimps and other hoi polloi out of the party. There's a fondness for the thinking of Alfred Kroeber, Clyde Kluckhohn, and Clifford Geertz, three heavyweights who focused on how culture is about ideas and symbols, rather than the mere behaviours in which they instantiate, or material products like flint blades or iPhones... 

Basically, I don't want to go anywhere near these debates. For our purposes we'll rely on an intuitive definition of culture emphasised by Frans de Waal: culture is how we do and think about things.


But he's way too credulous about social science. For instance, I recommend skipping the last half of chapter 3, on social psychology, entirely. In the space of two pages (p90-1) he cites power pose, facial feedback, ego depletion, and himmicanes; all as exciting, uncontroversial fact. This is a clean sweep of recent studies well-known to be p-hacked, low-power and spurious. 

He also endorses the results of Implicit Association and stereotype threat tests far too strongly. I don't know enough about neuroscience or endocrinology or ethology to make a similar recommendation for the other chapters. But the "Gell-Mann amnesia" effect sadly suggests that we should (partially) discount everything else in here, primates aside; evidence of credulity in one domain is evidence for others.

(Best case, he just didn't keep up with the latest research dramas. Though some results, like the litter -> theft link or the Macbeth effect, have been comprehensively criticised for 8+ years now, so.)

He also takes anthropologists at their qualitative, cherry-picking word when they try to maintain their academic boundary against Pinker's work on violence.

Still worth it for his first-hand stories - him watching Somali oil workers conduct ritual argument, him watching a troop of baboons spread a culture - a pocket of pacifism and gender sanity in the psychotic roundabout of nature.

Minus 1 point because his empirical judgments are unreliable. : (

Bouke van der Bijl

This book is almost like a manual on how your human biological machine works. Mr. Sapolsky goes through all different kinds of human behavior and does the same thing: explains how the environment/context and hormones together influence the behavior. If there’s one lesson from this book it’s that behavior is always a combination of context + hormones.

It can be a bit of a slog at times because it’s so long and thorough, but his writing style is enjoyable and quite witty at times. I’d recommend this book to anyone who is a human.

THE NEW YORK TIMESBESTSELLER WINNER OF THE 2017 LA TIMES BOOK PRIZE FOR SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 'Awe-inspiringa You will learn more about human nature than in any other book I can think of' Henry Marsh 'One of the best scientist-writers of our time' Oliver Sacks Why do human beings behave as they do? We are capable of savage acts of violence but also spectacular feats of kindness- is one side of our nature destined to win out over the other? Every act of human behaviour has multiple layers of causation, spiralling back seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years, even centuries, right back to the dawn of time and the origins of our species. In the epic sweep of history, how does our biology affect the arc of war and peace, justice and persecution? How have our brains evolved alongside our cultures? This is the exhilarating story of human morality and the science underpinning the biggest question of all- what makes us human?

Simao Freitas

Incredible book. It’s not a simple straightforward book about behavior and requires more dedication and focus then most books, but the satisfaction of having a full holistic understanding of human behavior is mind blowing. 

The first few chapters are biology/neuroscience intense and sometimes are a bit overwhelming. Then it becomes more “friendly” and easier to grasp and the examples and anecdotes also become more relatable. 

Recommend if you find the topic interesting.

Nelson Zagalo

As razões que fazem de “Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst” (2017) um livro obrigatório para todos os que estudam o Humano são as mesmas que Robert M. Sapolsky utiliza para descrever o comportamento humano enquanto “arco multifactorial”. Ou seja, o comportamento humano é apresentado enquanto resultado de um conjunto alargado de fatores biológicos e experienciais, produzindo a necessidade em Sapolsky de escrever um livro evocando um conjunto imensamente alargado de ciências — da biologia à psicologia, passando pela neuroendocrinologia, genética, psicologia evolucionária, primatologia, economia comportamental, teoria dos jogos, educação e ainda a antropologia, a política e a filosofia — não dando primazia a qualquer uma destas, antes buscando em cada uma as partes que contribuem para o resultado final do comportamento humano. Sapolsky não diferencia os genes da experiência, antes coloca ambos como pólos de um eixo dimensional entre os quais atuam múltiplos e variáveis fatores, e em que cada um destes afeta o funcionamento do anterior e posterior, tornando impossível determinar com certeza o que produz o quê. Este problema é o cerne das ciências que estudam o humano e acaba por explicar porque as humanidades nunca se vergaram às ciências. A leitura do comportamento, seja ele expressivo ou meramente funcional, requer além da descrição processual, que a ciência fornece, uma interpretação desse processo que só as humanidades podem fornecer. Por outro lado, é neste problema ou impossibilidade de fechar o ciclo causal que reside o núcleo do nosso livre-arbítrio.

O resto da análise continua no blog VI:
https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...

Jade Flynn

At the beginning of this book Sapolsky makes it clear that people without any understanding of neurobiology will find this book difficult and whilst I agree to some extent, I think even without prior knowledge a lay person wouldn't find the information presented overly challenging if you have a keen interest in the topics paired with Sapolsky's clear presentation of complex scientific ideas. 

"If you had to boil this book down to a single phrase it would be "It's complicated." Nothing seems to cause anything; instead everything just modulates something else."

Behave The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

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