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.
