Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

This book explores the biology of violence, aggression, and competition – the behaviors and the impulses behind them, the acts of individuals, groups, and states, and when these are bad or good things. It is a book about the ways in which humans harm one another. But it is also a book about the ways in which people do the opposite. What does biology teach us about cooperation, affiliation, reconciliation, empathy, and altruism?

Behave took me longer than average to read – at a rate of about 30 pages/hour, this was approximately a twenty-five hour commitment for me – and while some of that reflects the care I took to understand the well-explained but still complex neurobiology behind human behaviour, nothing about this book encourages the reader to skim or gloss over: everything is just so interesting and I went slowly in an effort to absorb as much as possible. I can't ask for more from a book. Author Robert M. Sapolsky must be an inspirational professor to study under at Stanford, and in addition to his clear explanations of the sciencey bits, this book is full of (mostly bad) jokes, personal anecdotes, and illustrative examples that keeps everything relatable and focussed; Behave feels like a magnum opus, the synthesis of all that Sapolsky has learned over his professional and personal life, and to that end, I think it's valuable to let Sapolsky explain himself and his intent here:

I make my living as a combination neurobiologist – someone who studies the brain – and primatologist – someone who studies monkeys and apes. Therefore, this is a book that is rooted in science, specifically biology. And out of that come three key points: First, you can't begin to understand things like aggression, competition, cooperation, and empathy without biology; I say this for the benefit of a certain breed of social scientist who finds biology to be irrelevant and a bit ideologically suspect when thinking about human social behavior. But just as important, second, you're just as much up the creek if you rely only on biology; this is said for the benefit of a certain style of molecular fundamentalist who believes that the social sciences are destined to be consumed by “real” science. And a third point, by the time you finish this book, you'll see that it actually makes no sense to distinguish between aspects of a behavior that are “biological” and those that would be describes as, say, “psychological” or “cultural”. Utterly intertwined.

I wish I could find the quote now, but I once read something like, “American high school students learn that their Civil War was about slavery, but if they go to college, they'll soon learn that it was fought over taxation, State Rights, etc. However, anyone who studies further and learns the intricacies and nuances of history will discover that the Civil War was fought over...slavery (just not in the simplistic way that a high school student might believe).” Sapolsky follows the same kind of dialectic arc in his explanation of human behaviour. In the first sections, he describes the neural processes (the gooey brain stuff) that immediately precede any action: Fear triggers the amygdala, and in a split second choice between fight or flight, you punch an approaching stranger in the face; you are a slave to your biology. In the next sections, Sapolsky expands the neural picture to include all of the environmental factors that set individuals up to choose, for example, between fight and flight (ie., the so-called “warrior gene” in aggressive adults needs to be activated by a lousy childhood); proving that we are notslaves to our biology; there are a multitude of factors that influence behaviour; we have the free will (or the “free won't”) to choose amongst options, and that punch is an individual choice. Sapolsky then goes on to expand the picture further – to include the historical, cultural, and familial factors that inform behaviour – and as we can't control how we have been conditioned to behave, we are each enslaved by our conditioned biology. (Sapolsky rejects the notion that “no one can choose not to be a pedophile but pedophiles can choose not to be child molesters”: just as we are justifiably horrified by a society that once condemned epileptics as witches when they had seizures, Sapolsky imagines a more knowledgeable future in which we have mapped the brain to the extent that a child molester's desires can be cured; until that day, we are the equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition in our bloodlust for punishing these sex offenders for an uncontrollable brain disease. As a final aside on this, Sapolsky does agree that child molesters need to be separated from society, but doesn't see the efficacy of “punishment” and is looking forward to a more enlightened future.) The final sections explain how, in general, our society has been evolving towards less aggression, and as the state of the world literally moulds the state of our brains, we should all be working towards a more peaceful society that will, in turn, evolve more peace-seeking brains.

The biology of the behaviors that interest us is, in all cases, multifactorial – that is the thesis of this book.

As I started with, Behave reads like the synthesis of what Sapolsky has learned in both his professional and personal life, and his personal beliefs were never far from the surface here (which will cost him a star in my estimation; this book is not purely about the science). He refers to himself as a “progressive”, a “clichéd card-carrying liberal”, and cites studies that apparently show liberals to be more morally evolved than conservatives (conservatives are apparently more enslaved to fear-based triggers to their amygdalas; liberals take the time to sift kneejerk reactions through their more prudent prefrontal cortexes), but I don't know how, if we are all slaves to our biology, one belief system can be more “moral” than another (and I say this as a Canadian; I am not talking specifics about any country's political landscape). I was routinely turned off by value-laden phrases such as “the 'Islam=terrorism' idiocy”, and “the standard, wearisome critique of atheism”, and in particular, Sapolsky's professed atheism seems instructive: It is because he rejects the notion of humans having anything separate from their brains that make higher level decisions – whether you want to call that the mind, or the soul, or what he neutrally refers to as the homunculus before rejecting it as ridiculous – because he doesn't believe there's anything separate from the brain, he believes the gooey stuff of the brain itself contains all there is to know about human behaviour. I'm too agnostic to follow him to an absolute conclusion like that, but can't argue with his ultimate epilogue:

• 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. Scientists keep saying, “We used to think X, but now we realize that...” Fixing one thing often messes up ten more, as the law of unintended consequences reigns. On any big, important issue it seems like 51 percent of the scientific studies conclude one thing, and 49 percent conclude the opposite. And so on. Eventually it can seem hopeless that you can actually fix something, can make things better. But we have no choice but to try. And if you are reading this, you are probably ideally suited to do so. You've amply proven you have intellectual tenacity. You probably also have running water, a home, adequate calories, and low odds of festering with a bad parasitic disease. You probably don't have to worry about Ebola virus, warlords, or being invisible in your world. And you've been educated. In other words, you're one of the lucky humans, so try. 

• Finally, you don't have to choose between being scientific and being compassionate.

Twenty-five hours of never boring reading to get to this point was a very good use of my time. The neuroscience did get complex, but Sapolsky ends each chapter with a clarifying summing-up. I also really appreciated Sapolsky's frequent shoutouts to other scientists and what appears to have been an army of undergrads who helped with his research for this book; makes him seem like a good guy and that upped my enjoyment as well.