Nothing But Reading Challenges discussion

This thread is open to discuss Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky



Synopsis
Why do we do the things we do?
More than a decade in the making, this game-changing book is Robert Sapolsky's genre-shattering attempt to answer that question as fully as perhaps only he could, looking at it from every angle. 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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I've recently started and am about 15% through this very long book. It is written for science minded folks who aren't experts but have some foundation (or are willing to go through the reviews in the appendices).

So far I am liking how the author is making the case for the complexity and interactions of behavior and the biology. Chapter 2 was hard for me and I had to pay a lot of attention, but now that we are getting into real issues it is fascinating.

Jumping in here...
I read this when it came out, and I would join in a reread, but I can't find my copy. I think I lent it out. Boo.

But, if you guys have not seen any of his lectures at Stanford, or his random talks, here is a link to his Tedtalk.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORthz...

Jenny wrote: "Jumping in here...
I read this when it came out, and I would join in a reread, but I can't find my copy. I think I lent it out. Boo.

But, if you guys have not seen any of his lectures at Stanford..."

Shame, I'd love to hear your thoughts. This is one I may have to reread in order to get everything. Thanks to the link to the Tedtalk!

I've really been enjoying. It's fun to see how things change and how quickly they are adopted/spread. So many interesting things to talk about here, but the one that stuck with me for some reason is his mention of the immune system and self versus non-self. This was the thinking when I was back in graduate school but evolved a few years later. It is much more complicated than that. I'm wondering if he used this since it is easier for people to understand or if it hadn't been accepted as much in other circles.

This book is really making me think about my implicit bias in new and different ways.