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Behave, review of R. Sapolsky: Behave, the Bioloigy of Humans at our Best and
Worst. Penguin, 2017. Life of the Mind, July 12, 2018

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ΦBK Book Awards Robert M. Sapolsky. Penguin, 2017. 790 pages. $35.00.

ΦBK Books Blog By Douglas Keith Candland

Book Reviews Archive The question "Are human beings guided by their best or worst angels?" has
become a prominent one in the mind of the public psyche. The question lurks in
every aspect of social science. An answer, often tacit, is unavoidable in the
practice of everyday life, for it is the perennial question of What is nature? What
SEARCH BOOK REVIEWS... is nurture? Tucked away in any complete answer is the additional question as to
whether nature and nurture are by themselves fixed or variable, 'good' or 'bad'.
The answer we select determines our politics, our religious views, our mating
and child-rearing practices, and how we distinguish good from evil, ignorance
from wisdom. In contemporary thought, the answer requires attention to our
human neurology, perhaps not as the sole determiner of behavior, but as a
modifiable partner with environment and culture.

During the last few decades, neuroscience has been the growth industry of the
academies, wherein researchers from previously differing fields have found
common cause. Impetus and sustenance have come from technology,
specifically the inventions of ways to assess activity of the structures of the
central nervous system. As recently as the 19th century, knowledge of the
function of different areas of the human brain was largely based on the
accidental fruits of war when injuries to the brain were examined in relation to
changes in behavior. The remarkable story of Phineas Gage, whose
temperament changed to the intolerable after a steel rod blasted through half
his brain is retold by Robert M. Sapolsky within the book here reviewed, along
with hundreds of other tales, observations, and experiments, all concerned at
varying levels with the relationship between brain and behavior.

Sapolsky's goal is to offer a wide-ranging and vigorous accounting of our

current understanding of how the brain leads to behavior (and behavior to the
structure of the brain), a task which is performed with the spirit, inclusiveness,
and jokes of a first-rate university lecturer on what has come to be called
neuroscience. Sapolsky stands firm: the relationship between brain and
behavior is an intricate tautology with each altering the other.

Today, each day brings forth reports of experiments and observations

regarding how the brain and behavior relate. Sapolsky offers us descriptions
and insights galore, aided by the judicious order of presentation. Chapter 1
elegantly reminds us that we denigrate our understanding of ourselves when we
think of 'science' as existing at any one level. Any behavior can be investigated
at the levels of genetics, epigenetics, physiology, motor patterns, gross
behavior, and, demonstrations conducted by social and cognitive psychology.
No one approach offers a full explanation. As evidence for this view of science,
the book considers all of these approaches in commendable depth.

The reader hooked by the opening chapter is offered the chance to be current
by fast-forwarding to Appendix 1, a refresher course on neurons. This reading is
fruitful for understanding most of the text. There are two other appendices, one
on neuroendocrinology and one on proteins. I shall suggest yet another, this on
the methods now used to measure cranial and bodily activity, such as various
brain imaging.

For the next third of the book, the author treats us to a clever organization
based both on ontogeny and phylogeny, from what the brain is doing one
second before behavior to how that particular connection evolved on human
primates over huge periods of unrecorded time from prenatal, through infancy,
childhood, adolescence, the normal and the unusual human mind. Readers who
do not keep bundles of scientific journals for bed-time reading will be astonished
and invigorated by several accounts of newer ways of thinking, such as that
'genes don't mean much' by which is meant that genes are 'only' the actors for
which the drama of behavior is written. Or, as the author cogently writes ". . .it's
not meaningful to ask what a gene does, just what it does in a particular
environment."

Having been cleverly, thoroughly, and successfully informed on the ontogeny

and phylogeny of genetic importance, the book takes a very sharp, perhaps
dangerous tack. Here the reader travels, via the studies and ideas of social,
cognitive, evolutional psychology, and sociology, toward modern life. The
chapters do so by presenting and evaluating
anthropological/sociological/archeological discoveries and demonstrations
relating, for example, the remnants of ancient bodies scared by war to the type
of society (tight vs. loose; nomad vs. urban) highlighted by the author's
presentations and critiques. The critique section is especially strong in helping
the reader to assess validity among the ideas of those who see in human
beings better angels as opposed to those who are genetic pessimists.

Among the many values of the book are clear and straightforward explanations
that may seem to be but academic warfare when, in fact, they are nuanced
explanations of such matters as adaptation, kin-selection, punctuated
equilibrium, and the continuing argument regarding whether it is useful to
explain phylogeny in terms of social selection. The engaged and patient reader
will come to see that while 'evolution' is not a pattern to be dismissed, neither is
its complexity to be ignored.

The remaining two-thirds of the book tack into dangerous winds that lead the
reader to exciting intellectual landscapes. Among these are viewpoints on such
matters as obedience, morality, empathy, the language of metaphor as killers,
the criminal justice system, and, of course, free will. The support for the various
views expressed are invariably and necessarily summaries of the one-shot
demonstrations, passing as experiments.

These demonstrations have in common little opportunity to measure

repeatability as they describe unique happenings. Many show a lack of
consideration of alternative conclusions whose possibility needs, but is not,
tested by appropriate control studies. Some few are tied to neurology by
correlational, not causal, measures of anatomical and physiological activation.

In an Epilogue, the author lists thirty take-away conclusions, some specific,

some very general. The chief take-away refers to the complicated interactions
among genes, the environment, now and past, and behavior. The author wisely
offers a glossary of 66 abbreviations used; e.g., v1PFC us the ventrolateral
prefrontal cortex while vmPFC is ventromedial PFC 54. Reading the informative
and witty footnotes is worthwhile.

The term 'activation' is used throughout the book as the measure of neural
correlates to behavior. A thoughtful reader will wonder how activation is
measured, how reliable such measures are upon repeated testing, the meaning
of variability, the choice of subjects, and the likely generality of the results. To
ask the author to consider these matters for each of the demonstrations cited is
to ask the author to write a book he did not write. Nonetheless, as we have
instructive appendices on other technical subjects, the readers' ability to judge
the author's speculations would be aided by an appendix on how neuroscience
measures activation so as to know what activation means and represents.

We think that current technologies represent accurate measures of brain and

behavior. Before definitive conclusions regarding society, justice, and life vs.
death are made through these technologies, it would be wise to attend to their
methodological epistemologies so as to understand their variability and
reliability.

Attempts to relate brain anatomy to temperament, emotions, talents, and

behavior are many, expressed, as by the ancient Greeks as the four humors, by
contemporaries as tests of personality, and, not so long ago as history goes, by
phrenology. When Walt Whitman, then a reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle, visited
'Professor' O. S. Fowler's 'Phrenological Cabinet', he traveled to lower
Manhattan where customers could be informed of aspects of their personality
by an examination of the shape of their skull.

The Cabinet was said to be the second most visited property in New York City,
the number of visitors ranking right behind Mr. Barnum's Museum of Oddities.
Perhaps Whitman was interested in knowing the degree of his degree of
spirituality or amativeness. Phrenology got a bad rap over the last two century,
perhaps because it became a vast commercial enterprise conducted at county
fairs by the trained and untrained alike. In its earliest manifestations in the
1830s, it had a respectable empirical base. The validity of the measures—
whether phrenology reliably measured temperament and behavior—was never
assessed experimentally.

Knowledge of how the brain relates to behavior has experienced a fruitful two
centuries since phrenology ruled, mostly because we now have measures of
activation and images of changes within the brain. As foolish as phrenology
may seem to the modern reader, its success still provides a warning. When one
reads a sentence in Sapolsky's work such as " . . .among male rhesus monkeys
a large prefrontal cortex goes hand in hand with social dominance." One
suspects that 'Professor' Fowler, Walt Whitman, and maybe even Lamarck
would think themselves rediscovered.

As author Sapolsky suggests, perhaps the book's subtitle should be "It's

complicated."
 Douglas Keith Candland (ΦBK, Pomona College, 1956) is the editor of Review
of General Psychology and the Homer P.Rainey Professor of Psychology and
Animal Behavior, Emeritus at Bucknell University. Bucknell University is home to
the Mu of Pennsylvania chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.

(Posted on 7/12/2018 )

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