Behave

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Pick any human act — a stranger pulled from traffic, a village burned to the ground — and Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford neurobiologist, wants to know what caused it. Not the single tidy reason, but every layer at once: the neurons that fired a second before, the hormones circulating that week, the childhood and the womb, the genes, the culture, the ecology stretching back generations. Boiled down to one phrase, his answer is “it’s complicated.” Nothing causes anything by itself; everything just modulates something else. That sounds like a shrug until you follow it to the end, where it quietly dismantles the case for punishing people at all.

Robert M. Sapolsky on SummaryShelf

Behave