It Is All Connected

- Rajeev Srinivasan

ROBERT SAPOLSKY, A MacArthur “Genius” Fellow and professor of biology and neuroscience at Stanford University, has written a fascinating new book on human behaviour, Behave: The Biology of Humans At Our Best and Worst.

Sapolsky is justly famous for his research in primate biology, and in this book, he distills the wisdom of his years of research into the human condition.

Surprisingly, what Sapolsky has come up with is a notion of the connectedness of things. There has long been a debate about whether it is nature or nurture that determines our behaviour, and Sapolsky’s answer would be disappointing to those who expect a clear-cut answer one way or the other. Because the answer, as we in the East could have told Cartesian Westerners, is, “It’s complicated, and it’s either, and it’s both.” And he also cautions us that almost all the factors he considers are pliable and plastic, much as epigenetics can modify your own genes.

In a recent conversation on the KQED Forum, Sapolsky said: “Often due to ideology, there’s a pull towards saying ‘Aha, here’s the area of the brain that explains everything, the gene, the hormone, the evolutionary mechanism, the childhood trauma, the special pair of socks you were wearing that morning that explains everything.” Historically, there’s been a pull towards trying to make sense of the biology of the human being saying ‘Aha, it’s all about this brain region,’ but what you see instead is not only do you have to incorporate all these perspectives to make sense of what just happened, you have to incorporate the neurobiology of what happened one second before, and the endocrinology of what happened the day before, and adolescence, and the epigenetics of fetal life, and genetics and culture.”