Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

Robert Sapolsky’s Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst was published by Penguin Books in 2018. Roughly 700 pages excluding references, the work offers an extensive coverage of the science of human behavior from varied disciplinary lenses including evolutionary psychology, genetics and epigenetics, neurobiology and endocrinology, primatology, as well as several other subfields.

Upon publication, the book was hailed as an invaluable contribution to the field of public scholarship on human behavior, due both to the scale and scope of the work and the accessible and often humorous style of Sapolsky’s writing. Though sweeping and enjoyable, the book is also of the highest academic rigor, incorporating thousands of academic references gleaned over the span of Sapolsky’s long career as a primatologist (someone who studies monkeys and apes) and neuroscientist (someone who studies the brain and nervous system). The book offers readers an introduction to the essential functions and findings of each of the fields in the paragraph above as well as coverage of many of the seminal studies and lifeworks of individual figures in these fields.

Summary

The subtitle of the book, The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst details Sapolsky’s major concern throughout the text: explaining exactly how humans are capable of awe-inspiring, deeply altruistic and cognitively, aesthetically or emotionally impressive behaviors at the same time as we are capable of profound selfishness, violence, hate, and depression.