Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

by Robert M. Sapolsky

The philosopher George Santayana provided us with an aphorism so wise that it has suffered the fate of becoming a cliché—“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” In the context of this final chapter, we must turn Santayana on his head—those who do not remember the extraordinary truces of the World War I trenches, or who do not learn of Thompson, Colburn, and Andreotta, or of the reconciliative distances traveled by Abe and Fiske, Mandela and Viljoen, Hussein and Rabin, or of the stumbling, familiar moral frailties that Newton vanquished, or who do not recognize that science can teach us how to make events like these more likely—those who do not remember these are condemned to be less likely to repeat these reasons to hope.