At times, its exhaustive in the number of variables considered when looking at human behavior, but that's Sapolsky's whole point: The decisions we make are a result of "prenatal environment, genes, and hormones, whether parents were authoritative or egalitarian, whether witnessed violence in childhood, when had breakfast…"ĭr. The tome is a buffet of neurology, philosophy, politics, evolutionary science, anthropology, history, and genetics. He breaks all of this down in his new book, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. He's opposed to the concept of "free will." Instead, he believes that our behavior is made up of a complex and chaotic soup of so many factors that it's downright silly to think there's a singular, autonomous "you" calling the shots. Neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky sees things differently. The idea is so ubiquitous that most people have never even pondered an alternative. It's the whole reason we "punish" people for committing crimes. There is no concept more American than "free will"-the idea that we're all gifted (probably by God) with the power to choose a path of success or destruction and bear responsibility for the resulting consequences.
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