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Behave!

I just finished reading Robert Sapolsky's Behave. The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Penguin, 2017). Sapolsky is as much an expert of neurology as primatology and the book covers everything from how neurons signal to each other, how genes and environment interact, to economic game theory, and how we and other animals are organised into hierarchies, how we collaborate, what explains cruelties during wars, and how to create conditions to give our best sides a chance.

Sapolsky begins explaining our rapid, automatic reactions and what goes on in various parts of the brain as we feel fear, disgust, recognise a face, or try to reason about moral dilemmas. The writing style is casual. In the first half of the book the phrase "stay tuned" occurs annoyingly often. When you come to the part where those words no longer occur the perspective has shifted from the individual's biology to group psychology, and that part is the most interesting although much of it wouldn't make sense without the introduction.

Behave thus covers a lot of ground, but its casual and sometimes funny style makes it engaging and easy to read. I'm afraid a lot of the content may also be easy to forget, because Sapolsky doesn't dwell as long on any subject as he could. There's also not much discussion of scientific methods, although curious readers will find an enormous number of footnotes with references to academic papers.

A chapter towards the end about the criminal justice system is very interesting and possibly provocative to many readers. Sapolsky discusses the concept of free will, on which there can be three positions:

We have complete free will

We have no free will

Somewhere inbetween

After noting that there are things we just can't do because of some biological constraint the alternative of complete free will is ruled out. We can't fly by flapping our arms no matter how fun that would be (the actual examples are more clever than that). So you might think the reasonable alternative is "somewhere inbetween", but no, Sapolsky ridicules those who seem to think there's an homunculus inside the brain who decides what we should do, and which is somehow separate from the material reality of the rest of the brain. Consequently, since criminals didn't act by free will, Sapolsky argues for abolishing the criminal system as it exists today, just keep dangerous persons away from the rest of society. His argument is not as staunch and rigid as may seem from this review, but he doesn't come across as having dispelled any remaining hope for the existence of free will, be that a failure or a fortune.

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