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Behave : the biology of humans at our best and worst / Robert M. Sapolsky.

by Sapolsky, Robert M.

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Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House, 2017.

Neurophysiology.

Human behavior.

Human behaviour -- Physiological aspects.

Animal behavior.

9780143110910 (pbk.)

9781594205071 (hc.)

790 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 721-773) and index.

The behavior -- One second before -- Seconds to minutes before -- Hours to days before -- Days to months before -- Adolescence: or, Dude, where's my frontal cortex? -- Back to the crib, back to the womb -- Back to when you were just a fertilized egg -- Centuries to millennia before -- The evolution of behavior -- Us versus them -- Hierarchy, obedience, and resistance -- Morality and doing the right thing, once you've figured out what that is -- Feeling someone's pain, understanding someone's pain, alleviating someone's pain -- Metaphors we kill by -- Biology, the criminal justice system, and (oh, why not?) free will -- War and peace.

"Why do we do the things we do? Robert Sapolsky's genre-shattering attempt to answer that question, looking at it from every angle. 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. 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. Robert M. Sapolsky is the author of A Primate's Memoir, The Trouble with Testosterone, and Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. He is a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University."--Provided by publisher.

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