Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

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Your brain decides to move before you even aware of it. How can you claim to have chosen to move with the Cascade of neural signalling, nating in movement started before you consciously chose? iOnline version: |aSapolsky, Robert M. |tBehave. |dNew York : Penguin Press, 2017 |z9780735222786 |w(DLC) 2017006806 |w(OCoLC)972640222

In 2008, he received Wonderfest's Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization. [46] In February 2010 Sapolsky was named to the Freedom From Religion Foundation's Honorary Board of distinguished achievers, [47] following the Emperor Has No Clothes Award for 2002. [48] Steve Pinker failed to take things one logical step further in his book Enlightenment Now. He didn’t correct for different durations of events. He compares the half-dozen years of World War 2 with 12 centuries of the middle age slave trade! When correcting for duration as well as total world population the top 10 most violent wars now include World War 2, World War 1, the Russian Civil War now and another 20th Century event that didn’t even make Pinker’s original list, the Rwandan genocide. However, there is a caveat here. Many people suffer extreme adversity and still end up as very functioning adults. Keep this in mind. So although childhood adversity can make someone more likely to have certain challenges later in life, none of it is guaranteed or set in stone. Playa b Brown, Patricia Leigh (April 19, 2001). "AT HOME WITH: DR. ROBERT M. SAPOLSKY; Family Man With a Foot In the Veld". The New York Times . Retrieved August 25, 2014. In 1944, near the end of World War 2, the Netherlands was being occupied by Nazi forces, which caused the Dutch people to endure a terrible famine called the Dutch Hunger Winter. More than 20,000 people died, but the most surprising result is that decades later effects of the famine still echo inside Dutch people’s genes. Women pregnant during the famine gave birth to babies that later in life were more likely to have obesity, diabetes, schizophrenia. They also die more easily or at a higher rate than other people. This event really illustrated for scientists the powerful influence of a person’s environment even before birth. Now, what about after birth?

Robert Sapolsky: The biology of our best and worst selves". TED: Ideas Worth Spreading. April 2017 . Retrieved September 5, 2023. It’s measured that younger people are more risk taking and novelty seeking than adults. Well, no surprise there. As adolescents, most of us are itching to get out of the house, we crave new stimulation in the form of music, movies, travel and other experiences. Part of this novelty seeking seems to have something to do with dopamine, but the studies are conflicted whether young people’s dopamine response is more or less sensitive than adults. The Trouble with Testosterone: And Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament ( Scribner, 1997) ISBN 978-0-6848-3409-2 a b Sapolsky, Robert (April 2003). "Belief and Biology". Freedom from Religion Foundation . Retrieved July 27, 2023. Another method is to study people adopted at birth. Imagine 100 people born in Germany then immediately adopted into France. Well, the differences between these people and biological Germans raised in Germany can provide a lot of insight into the effects of genes vs. environment.

In a reductionist view, understanding something complex requires breaking it down into its components, understand those parts, and them together, and you’ll understand the big picture.