The New York Times Bestseller "It's no exaggeration to say that
Behave is one of the best nonfiction books I've ever read." -David
P. Barash, The Wall Street Journal "It has my vote for science book
of the year." -Parul Sehgal, The New York Times "Hands-down one of
the best books I've read in years. I loved it." -Dina
Temple-Raston, The Washington Post Named a Best Book of the Year by
The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal From the celebrated
neurobiologist and primatologist, a landmark, genre-defining
examination of human behavior, both good and bad, and an answer to
the question: Why do we do the things we do? 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 evolutionary legacy. And so
the first category of explanation is the neurobiological one. A
behavior occurs--whether an example of humans at our best, worst,
or somewhere in between. What went on in a person's brain a second
before the behavior happened? Then Sapolsky pulls out to a slightly
larger field of vision, a little earlier in time: What sight,
sound, or smell caused the nervous system to produce that behavior?
And then, what hormones acted hours to days earlier to change how
responsive that individual is to the stimuli that triggered 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: How was that behavior influenced by
structural changes in the nervous system over the preceding months,
by that person's adolescence, childhood, fetal life, and then back
to his or her genetic makeup? Finally, he expands the view to
encompass factors larger than one individual. How did culture shape
that individual's group, what ecological factors millennia old
formed that culture? And on and on, back to evolutionary factors
millions of years old. The result is one of the most dazzling tours
d'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.
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