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.
