“No warthog restricts calories to look good in a bathing suit next summer.”) He likes to call certain facts “boggling” when he is personally amazed by them it’s charmingly infectious. (Humans, he notes, can “delay gratification for insanely long times” compared with other animals. He makes the book consistently entertaining, with an infectious excitement at the puzzles he explains, and wry dude-ish asides. Sapolsky goes back through adolescence, childhood and gestation (including genetics), and, beyond the birth of the individual, to more distant causes still – those found in culture, evolutionary psychology, game theory and comparative zoology. Days to months before, we focus on the brain’s ability to learn and rewire itself. Seconds before our action, it is neuroscience that investigates what is going on in the brain minutes to days before is the domain of endocrinology (hormonal fluctuations). The backwards time-travel is an excellent organising principle. His governing question is: what explains the fact that humans can massacre one another but also perform spectacular acts of altruistic kindness? Is one side of our nature destined to win out over the other? What made that happen? In this extraordinary survey of the science of human behaviour, the biologist Robert Sapolsky takes the reader on an epic journey backwards through time, and through different scientific disciplines. Y ou reach out to touch someone’s arm, or perhaps you pull a trigger.
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