Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

by Robert M. Sapolsky

Moreover, inequality expands enormously when cultures invent inheritance within families. Once invented, inequality became pervasive. Among traditional pastoralist or small-scale agricultural societies, levels of wealth inequality match or exceed those in the most unequal industrialized societies.

And the more inequality, the more the powerful adhere to myths about the hidden blessings of subordination—“They may be poor, but at least they’re happy/honest/loved.”

Only about a third of the gradient is explained by lower SES equaling more health risk factors (e.g., lead in your water, nearby toxic waste dump, more smoking and drinking) and fewer protective factors (e.g., everything from better mattresses for overworked backs to health club memberships).

It’s feeling poor—someone’s subjective SES (e.g., the answer to “How do you feel you’re doing financially when you compare yourself with other people?”) is at least as good a predictor of health as is objective SES.

Calhoun’s rats were more complicated than this (something underem-phasized in his lay writing). High-density living doesn’t make rats more aggressive. Instead it makes aggressive rats more aggressive. (This echoes the findings that neither testosterone, nor alcohol, nor media violence uniformly increases violence. Instead they make violent individuals more sensitive to violence-evoking social cues.) In contrast, crowding makes unaggressive individuals more timid. In other words, it exaggerates preexisting social tendencies.

Nevertheless, some of the highest-density places on earth—Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo—have miniscule rates of violence. High-density living is not synonymous with aggression in rats or humans.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, by Harvard’s Steven Pinker.56 Cliché police be damned, you can’t mention this book without calling it “monumental.” In this monumental work Pinker

Otzi, in his current state (left), and in an artist’s reconstruction (right). Note: his killer, still at large, probably looked pretty much the same.

gorillas, who practice competitive infanticide. The problem is that, overall, gorillas display minimal aggression, something Wrangham ignores in linking human violence to gorillas.

Crucially, humans share as much of their genes with bonobos as with chimps, something unknown when Demonic Males was published (and, notably, Wrangham has since softened his views).

To start, it was once assumed that among HGs, women do the gathering while men supply most of the calories by hunting. In actuality, the majority of calories come from foraging; men spend lots of time talking about how awesome they were in the last hunt and how much awesomer they’ll be in the next—among some Hadza, maternal grandmothers supply more calories to families than do the Man the Hunter men.69

In reality, HGs typically work fewer hours for their daily bread than do traditional farmers and are longer-lived and healthier. In the words of anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, HGs were the original affluent society.

Basically, if you’re observing a band of thirty people, it will take a long time to see that, on a per-capita basis, they have murder rates approximating Detroit’s (the standard comparison always made).

Which brings us to agriculture. I won’t pull any punches—I think that its invention was one of the all-time human blunders, up there with, say, the New Coke debacle and the Edsel.

Soon the computerized game strategies were having sex with each other, which must have been the most exciting thing ever for the mathematicians involved.

Likewise with subtle secondary sexual characteristics like canine length, where men average slightly longer canines than women.

Racial Us/Them-ing can seem indelibly entrenched in kids because the parents most intent on preventing it are often lousy at it. As shown in studies, liberals are typically uncomfortable discussing race with their children. Instead they counter the lure of Us/Them-ing with abstractions that mean squat to kids—“It’s wonderful that everyone can be friends” or “Barney is purple, and we love Barney.”

No one follows them anyway; instead everyone follows the old females, who do know.

Sociality is more complex in fission-fusion species. You must remember if someone’s rank differs when in a subgroup versus the entire group. Being away from someone all day makes it tempting to see if dominance relations have changed since breakfast.

And, as emphasized by Tajfel in his writing, is the authority perceived as legitimate and stable? I’d more likely comply with, say, lifestyle advice issued by the Dalai Lama than by the head of Boko Haram.

As first emphasized by the anthropologist Ruth Benedict in 1946, collectivist cultures enforce with shame, while individualistic cultures use guilt. This is a doozy of a contrast, as explored in two excellent books, Stanford psychiatrist Herant Katchadourian’s Guilt: The Bite of Conscience and NYU environmental scientist Jennifer Jacquet’s Is Shame Necessary?30

Anthropologists, studying everyone from hunter-gatherers to urbanites, have found that about two thirds of everyday conversation is gossip, with the vast majority of it being negative.

Shaming is also effective when dealing with outrages by corporations.

Jacquet also emphasizes the dangers of contemporary shaming, which is the savagery with which people can be attacked online and the distance such venom can travel—in a world where getting to anonymously hate the sinner seems more important than anything about the sin itself.

We have the most complex innervation of facial muscles and use massive numbers of motor neurons to control them—no other species can be poker-faced.

burned in northern Nigeria. Protesters were killed

What should be the IQ cutoff for someone to be smart enough to be executed? The standard is an IQ of 70 or higher, and debate concerns whether it should be an average of 70 across multiple IQ tests, or if achieving that magic number even once qualifies you for being executed. This issue pertains to about 20 percent of people on death row.4

Now that’s a liberal reform of the witch justice system, imposing some sound thinking in one tiny corner of an irrational edifice. Much like what scientifically based reform of our current system does, which is why something more extreme is needed.

Of all the stances of mitigated free will, the one that assigns aptitude to biology and effort to free will, or impulse to biology and resisting it to free will, is the most permeating and destructive. “You must have worked so hard” is as much a property of the physical universe and the biology that emerged from it as is “You must be so smart.” And yes, being a child molester is as much a product of biology as is being a pedophile. To think otherwise is little more than folk psychology.

Archaeologists do something impressive, reflecting disciplinary humility. When archaeologists excavate a site, they recognize that future archaeologists will be horrified at their primitive techniques, at the destructiveness of their excavating. Thus they often leave most of a site untouched to await their more skillful disciplinary descendants. For example, astonishingly, more than forty years after excavations began, less than 1 percent of the famed Qin dynasty terra-cotta army in China has been uncovered.

The Punisher’s Brain: The Evolution of Judge and Jury (2014) by Morris Hoffman,

When a car is being dysfunctional and dangerous and we take it to a mechanic, this is not a dualistic situation where (a) if the mechanic discovers some broken widget causing the problem, we have a mechanistic explanation, but (b) if the mechanic can’t find anything wrong, we’re dealing with an evil car;

I can’t really imagine how to live your life as if there is no free will. It may never be possible to view ourselves as the sum of our biology. Perhaps we’ll have to settle for making sure our homuncular myths are benign, and save the heavy lifting of truly thinking rationally for where it matters—when we judge others harshly.

Pinker’s monumental The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.2

Similarly, in World War II only 15 to 20 percent of riflemen ever fired their guns. The rest? Running messages, helping people load ammunition, tending to buddies—but not aiming a rifle at someone nearby and pulling a trigger.

In the Korean War, 55 percent of American riflemen fired their weapons; in the Vietnam War, over 90 percent. And this was before the rise of violent, desensitizing video games.

One historian records a chilling anecdote concerning a German soldier writing home about the truce, mentioning that not everyone participated—there was one soldier who condemned the others as traitors, an obscure corporal named … Hitler.

We aren’t chimps, and we aren’t bonobos. We’re not a classic pair-bonding species or a tournament species. We’ve evolved to be somewhere in between in these and other categories that are clear-cut in other animals. It makes us a much more malleable and resilient species. It also makes our social lives much more confusing and messy, filled with imperfection and wrong turns.

If you had to boil this book down to a single phrase, it would be “It’s complicated.”

On any big, important issue it seems like 51 percent of the scientific studies conclude one thing, and 49 percent conclude the opposite.

The word is from the Greek αμυγδαλη´ (thank you, Wikipedia),

give a sense of this, consider someone deciding whether to press a button. The frontal cortex makes its decision; know its neurons’ firing patterns, and you can predict the decision with 80 percent accuracy about seven hundred milliseconds before the person is consciously aware of their decision.

The next two paragraphs can be skipped if you already have enough complications in your life.

great analysis of this can be found in The Myth of Monogamy (New York: Henry Holt, 2002), by University of Wash-ington psychologist David Barash and psychiatrist Judith Lipton.

Actually, I haven’t a clue how many atoms there are in the universe, but you’re required to say stuff like this.