**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.
