Robert M. Sapolsky | Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

TODO_AUTHOR, (Sapolsky 2017)

Summary

Thoughts

Notes

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 7 | Location 94-96 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 12:42:34 AM

This is a central point of this book—we don’t hate violence. We hate and fear the wrong kind of violence, violence in the wrong context. Because violence in the right context is different. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 7 | Location 100-101 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 12:42:59 AM

We build theologies around violence, elect leaders who excel at it, and in the case of so many women, preferentially mate with champions of human combat. When it’s the “right” type of aggression, we love it. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 7 | Location 108-109 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 12:43:49 AM

I think like an academic egghead, believing that if I write enough paragraphs about a scary subject, give enough lectures about it, it will give up and go away quietly. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 9 | Location 123-130 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 12:45:15 AM

by the time you finish this book, you’ll see that it actually makes no sense to distinguish between aspects of a behavior that are “biological” and those that would be described as, say, “psychological” or “cultural.” Utterly intertwined. Understanding the biology of these human behaviors is obviously important. But unfortunately it is hellishly complicated.2 Now, if you were interested in the biology of, say, how migrating birds navigate, or in the mating reflex that occurs in female hamsters when they’re ovulating, this would be an easier task. But that’s not what we’re interested in. Instead, it’s human behavior, human social behavior, and in many cases abnormal human social behavior. And it is indeed a mess, a subject involving brain chemistry, hormones, sensory cues, prenatal environment, early experience, genes, both biological and cultural evolution, and ecological pressures, among other things. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 9 | Location 132-140 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 12:46:04 AM

Suppose there’s a rooster standing next to you, and there’s a chicken across the street. The rooster gives a sexually solicitive gesture that is hot by chicken standards, and she promptly runs over to mate with him (I haven’t a clue if this is how it works, but let’s just suppose). And thus we have a key behavioral biological question—why did the chicken cross the road? And if you’re a psychoneuroendocrinologist, your answer would be “Because circulating estrogen levels in that chicken worked in a certain part of her brain to make her responsive to this male signaling,” and if you’re a bioengineer, the answer would be “Because the long bone in the leg of the chicken forms a fulcrum for her pelvis (or some such thing), allowing her to move forward rapidly,” and if you’re an evolutionary biologist, you’d say, “Because over the course of millions of years, chickens that responded to such gestures at a time that they were fertile left more copies of their genes, and thus this is now an innate behavior in chickens,” and so on, thinking in categories, in differing scientific disciplines of explanation. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Note on page 10 | Location 140 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 12:46:24 AM

blind men and an elephant ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 10 | Location 149-161 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 12:47:37 AM

Thus, the official intellectual goal of this book is to avoid using categorical buckets when thinking about the biology of some of our most complicated behaviors, even more complicated than chickens crossing roads. What’s the replacement? A behavior has just occurred. Why did it happen? Your first category of explanation is going to be a neurobiological one. What went on in that person’s brain a second before the behavior happened? Now pull out to a slightly larger field of vision, your next category of explanation, a little earlier in time. What sight, sound, or smell in the previous seconds to minutes triggered the nervous system to produce that behavior? On to the next explanatory category. What hormones acted hours to days earlier to change how responsive that individual was to the sensory stimuli that trigger the nervous system to produce the behavior? And by now you’ve increased your field of vision to be thinking about neurobiology and the sensory world of our environment and short-term endocrinology in trying to explain what happened. And you just keep expanding. What features of the environment in the prior weeks to years changed the structure and function of that person’s brain and thus changed how it responded to those hormones and environmental stimuli? Then you go further back to the childhood of the individual, their fetal environment, then their genetic makeup. And then you increase the view to encompass factors larger than that one individual—how has culture shaped the behavior of people living in that individual’s group?—what ecological factors helped shape that culture—expanding and expanding until considering events umpteen millennia ago and the evolution of that behavior. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 11 | Location 164-175 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 12:48:33 AM

But something subtler will be done, and this is the most important idea in the book: when you explain a behavior with one of these disciplines, you are implicitly invoking all the disciplines—any given type of explanation is the end product of the influences that preceded it. It has to work this way. If you say, “The behavior occurred because of the release of neurochemical Y in the brain,” you are also saying, “The behavior occurred because the heavy secretion of hormone X this morning increased the levels of neurochemical Y.” You’re also saying, “The behavior occurred because the environment in which that person was raised made her brain more likely to release neurochemical Y in response to certain types of stimuli.” And you’re also saying, “. . . because of the gene that codes for the particular version of neurochemical Y.” And if you’ve so much as whispered the word “gene,” you’re also saying, “. . . and because of the millennia of factors that shaped the evolution of that particular gene.” And so on. There are not different disciplinary buckets. Instead, each one is the end product of all the biological influences that came before it and will influence all the factors that follow it. Thus, it is impossible to conclude that a behavior is caused by a gene, a hormone, a childhood trauma, because the second you invoke one type of explanation, you are de facto invoking them all. No buckets. A “neurobiological” or “genetic” or “developmental” explanation for a behavior is just shorthand, an expository convenience for temporarily approaching the whole multifactorial arc from a particular perspective. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 14 | Location 214-217 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 12:52:01 AM

So we have a first intellectual challenge, which is to always think in this interdisciplinary way. The second challenge is to make sense of humans as apes, primates, mammals. Oh, that’s right, we’re a kind of animal. And it will be a challenge to figure out when we’re just like other animals and when we are utterly different. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 21 | Location 315-316 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 1:01:24 AM

Cold-blooded goodness seems oxymoronic, is unsettling. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 21 | Location 317-320 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 1:02:07 AM

One scientist asked one of the monks whether he ever stops meditating because his knees hurt from all that cross-leggedness. He answered, “Sometimes I’ll stop sooner than I planned, but not because it hurts; it’s not something I notice. It’s as an act of kindness to my knees.” “Whoa,” I thought, “these guys are from another planet.” A cool, commendable one, but another planet nonetheless. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 21 | Location 322-323 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 1:02:19 AM

“The opposite of love is not hate; its opposite is indifference.” ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 38 | Location 568-570 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 2:02:58 AM

Everyone knows that humans are innately afraid of snakes and spiders. But some people keep them as pets, give them cute names.* Instead of inevitable fear, we show “prepared learning”—learning to be afraid of snakes and spiders more readily than of pandas or beagles. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 38 | Location 573-576 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 2:03:24 AM

fuzzy distinction between innate and learned fear maps nicely onto the amygdala’s structure. The evolutionarily ancient central amygdala plays a key role in innate fears. Surrounding it is the basolateral amygdala (BLA), which is more recently evolved and somewhat resembles the fancy, modern cortex. It’s the BLA that learns fear and then sends the news to the central amygdala. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 39 | Location 595-596 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 2:06:03 AM

How does “fear extinction” occur? ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 39 | Location 598-600 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 2:06:31 AM

Where do these “Ohhh, the tone isn’t scary anymore” neurons get inputs from? The frontal cortex. When we stop fearing something, it isn’t because some amygdaloid neurons have lost their excitability. We don’t passively forget that something is scary. We actively learn that it isn’t anymore.* ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 40 | Location 609-610 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 2:09:19 AM

Instead, these findings suggest that the amygdala injects implicit distrust and vigilance into social decision making. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 40 | Location 611-613 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 2:09:32 AM

In the words of the authors of the study, “The generosity in the trust game of our BLA-damaged subjects might be considered pathological altruism, in the sense that inborn altruistic behaviors have not, due to BLA damage, been un-learned through negative social experience.” In other words, the default state is to trust, and what the amygdala does is learn vigilance and distrust. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 42 | Location 634-635 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 2:13:19 AM

Thus the amygdala can be informed about something scary before the cortex has a clue. Moreover, thanks to the extreme excitability of this pathway, the amygdala can respond to stimuli that are too fleeting or faint for the cortex to note. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Note on page 42 | Location 635 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 2:13:53 AM

reminds of advicd to trust your gut in scary situations. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 42 | Location 639-641 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 2:14:33 AM

Crucially, while sensory information reaches the amygdala rapidly by this shortcut, it isn’t terribly accurate (since, after all, accuracy is what the cortex supplies). As we’ll see in the next chapter, this produces tragic circumstances where, say, the amygdala decides it’s seeing a handgun before the visual cortex can report that it’s actually a cell phone. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 43 | Location 650-656 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 2:16:11 AM

Remarkably, humans also activate it by thinking about something morally disgusting—social norm violations or individuals who are typically stigmatized in society. And in that circumstance its activation drives that of the amygdala. Someone does something lousy and selfish to you in a game, and the extent of insular and amygdaloid activation predicts how much outrage you feel and how much revenge you take. This is all about sociality—the insula and amygdala don’t activate if it’s a computer that has stabbed you in the back. The insula activates when we eat a cockroach or imagine doing so. And the insula and amygdala activate when we think of the neighboring tribe as loathsome cockroaches. As we’ll see, this is central to how our brains process “us and them.” ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 47 | Location 711-711 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 2:18:29 AM

the frontal cortex makes you do the harder thing when it’s the right thing to do. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 47 | Location 718-719 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 2:19:25 AM

Amazingly, it’s not fully online until people are in their midtwenties. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 51 | Location 782-783 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 2:28:35 AM

Make the frontal cortex work hard—a tough working-memory task, regulating social behavior, or making numerous decisions while shopping. Immediately afterward performance on a different frontally dependent task declines. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 52 | Location 784-788 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 2:29:04 AM

Importantly, increase cognitive load on the frontal cortex, and afterward subjects become less prosocial*—less charitable or helpful, more likely to lie.46 Or increase cognitive load with a task requiring difficult emotional regulation, and subjects cheat more on their diets afterward.*47 ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 54 | Location 814-815 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 2:32:08 AM

becomes—social complexity expands the frontal cortex. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 56 | Location 845-847 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 2:35:43 AM

During REM sleep, when dreaming occurs, the frontal cortex goes off-line, and dream scriptwriters run wild. Moreover, if the frontal cortex is stimulated while people are dreaming, the dreams become less dreamlike, with more self-awareness. And there’s another nonpathological circumstance where the PFC silences, producing emotional tsunamis: during orgasm. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 59 | Location 899-901 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 2:43:20 AM

vmPFC is not the vestigial appendix of the frontal cortex, where emotion is something akin to appendicitis, inflaming a sensible brain. Instead it’s essential. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 61 | Location 932-937 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 2:46:07 AM

Chapter 6 discusses experiments where a subject plays a game with two other people and is manipulated into feeling that she is being left out. This activates her amygdala, periaqueductal gray (that ancient brain region that helps process physical pain), anterior cingulate, and insula, an anatomical picture of anger, anxiety, pain, disgust, sadness. Soon afterward her PFC activates as rationalizations kick in—“This is just a stupid game; I have friends; my dog loves me.” And the amygdala et al. quiet down. And what if you do the same to someone whose frontal cortex is not fully functional? The amygdala is increasingly activated; the person feels increasingly distressed. What neurological disease is involved? None. This is a typical teenager. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 63 | Location 957-961 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 2:48:23 AM

Antecedent reappraisal is why placebos work.69 Thinking, “My finger is about to be pricked by a pin,” activates the amygdala along with a circuit of pain-responsive brain regions, and the pin hurts. Be told beforehand that the hand cream being slathered on your finger is a powerful analgesic cream, and you think, “My finger is about to be pricked by a pin, but this cream will block the pain.” The PFC activates, blunting activity in the amygdala and pain circuitry, as well as pain perception. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 63 | Location 961-965 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 2:48:39 AM

Thought processes like these, writ large, are the core of a particularly effective type of psychotherapy—cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)—for the treatment of disorders of emotion regulation.70 Consider someone with a social anxiety disorder caused by a horrible early experience with trauma. To simplify, CBT is about providing the tools to reappraise circumstances that evoke the anxiety—remember that in this social situation those awful feelings you’re having are about what happened back then, not what is happening now.* ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 65 | Location 988-1001 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 2:52:30 AM

“Doing the harder thing” effectively is not an argument for valuing either emotion or cognition more than the other. For example, as discussed in chapter 11, we are our most prosocial concerning in-group morality when our rapid, implicit emotions and intuitions dominate, but are most prosocial concerning out-group morality when cognition holds sway. It’s easy to conclude that the PFC is about preventing imprudent behaviors (“Don’t do it; you’ll regret it”). But that isn’t always the case. For example, in chapter 17 we’ll consider the surprising amount of frontocortical effort it can take to pull a trigger. Like everything about the brain, the structure and function of the frontal cortex vary enormously among individuals; for example, resting metabolic rate in the PFC varies approximately thirtyfold among people.* What causes such individual differences? See the rest of this book.74 “Doing the harder thing when it’s the right thing to do.” “Right” in this case is used in a neurobiological and instrumental sense, rather than a moral one. Consider lying. Obviously, the frontal cortex aids the hard job of resisting the temptation. But it is also a major frontocortical task, particularly a dlPFC task, to lie competently, to control the emotional content of a signal, to generate an abstract distance between message and meaning. Interestingly, pathological liars have atypically large amounts of white matter in the PFC, indicating more complex wiring.75 ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 67 | Location 1024-1025 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 6:56:03 AM

As a first pass, the dopaminergic system is about reward—various pleasurable stimuli activate tegmental neurons, triggering their release of dopamine. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 68 | Location 1031-1034 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 6:57:22 AM

Food evokes dopamine release in hungry individuals of all species, with an added twist in humans. Show a picture of a milkshake to someone after they’ve consumed one, and there’s rarely dopaminergic activation—there’s satiation. But with subjects who have been dieting, there’s further activation. If you’re working to restrict your food intake, a milkshake just makes you want another one. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 69 | Location 1046-1046 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 6:58:49 AM

Punishing norm violations is satisfying. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 69 | Location 1050-1051 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 6:59:19 AM

Not winning the lottery is bad luck; not winning an auction is social subordination. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 69 | Location 1057-1062 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 7:00:13 AM

A monkey has learned that when he presses a lever ten times, he gets a raisin as a reward. That’s just happened, and as a result, ten units of dopamine are released in the accumbens. Now—surprise!—the monkey presses the lever ten times and gets two raisins. Whoa: twenty units of dopamine are released. And as the monkey continues to get paychecks of two raisins, the size of the dopamine response returns to ten units. Now reward the monkey with only a single raisin, and dopamine levels decline. Why? This is our world of habituation, where nothing is ever as good as that first time. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 70 | Location 1064-1067 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 7:00:45 AM

In order to accommodate the pleasures of both mathematics and orgasms, the system must constantly rescale to accommodate the range of intensity offered by particular stimuli. The response to any reward must habituate with repetition, so that the system can respond over its full range to the next new thing. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 70 | Location 1068-1070 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 7:01:02 AM

monkeys were trained to expect either two or twenty units of reward. If they unexpectedly got either four or forty units, respectively, there’d be an identical burst of dopamine release; giving one or ten units produced an identical decrease. It was the relative, not absolute, size of the surprise that mattered over a tenfold range of reward. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 70 | Location 1072-1076 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 7:03:27 AM

that following a reward, the dopamine system codes for discrepancy from expectation—get what you expected, and there’s a steady-state dribble of dopamine. Get more reward and/or get it sooner than expected, and there’s a big burst; less and/or later, a decrease. Some tegmental neurons respond to positive discrepancy from expectation, others to negative; appropriately, the latter are local neurons that release the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA. Those same neurons participate in habituation, where the reward that once elicited a big dopamine response becomes less exciting.* ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Note on page 72 | Location 1089 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 7:11:27 AM

dorito nacho flavor peasant ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 71 | Location 1088-1089 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 7:11:27 AM

Once, hunter-gatherers might chance upon honey from a beehive and thus briefly satisfy a hardwired food craving. And now we have hundreds of carefully designed commercial foods that supply a burst of sensation unmatched by some lowly natural food. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 72 | Location 1094-1098 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 7:14:26 AM

First, soon we barely notice the fleeting whispers of pleasure caused by leaves in autumn, or by the lingering glance of the right person, or by the promise of reward following a difficult, worthy task. And the other consequence is that we eventually habituate to even those artificial deluges of intensity. If we were designed by engineers, as we consumed more, we’d desire less. But our frequent human tragedy is that the more we consume, the hungrier we get. More and faster and stronger. What was an unexpected pleasure yesterday is what we feel entitled to today, and what won’t be enough tomorrow. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 72 | Location 1102-1107 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 7:15:44 AM

However, importantly, lots of dopamine is released when the light first comes on, signaling the start of the reward trial, before the monkey starts lever pressing. Visit bit.ly/2ovJngg for a larger version of this graph. In other words, once reward contingencies are learned, dopamine is less about reward than about its anticipation. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 73 | Location 1109-1112 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 7:16:12 AM

It’s “I know how things work; this is going to be great.” In other words, the pleasure is in the anticipation of reward, and the reward itself is nearly an afterthought (unless, of course, the reward fails to arrive, in which case it’s the most important thing in the world). If you know your appetite will be sated, pleasure is more about the appetite than about the sating.* This is hugely important. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 73 | Location 1112-1112 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 7:16:38 AM

Anticipation requires learning. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 76 | Location 1160-1161 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 5:35:43 PM

Dopamine is not just about reward anticipation; it fuels the goal-directed behavior needed to gain that reward; dopamine “binds” the value of a reward to the resulting work. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 76 | Location 1162-1163 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 5:35:55 PM

In other words, dopamine is not about the happiness of reward. It’s about the happiness of pursuit of reward that has a decent chance of occurring. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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We don’t like waiting. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 78 | Location 1186-1187 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 5:38:48 PM

Individual differences among people in the capacity for gratification postponement arise from variation in the volume of these individual neural voices. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 78 | Location 1190-1198 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 5:39:52 PM

These studies of temporal discounting typically involve delays on the order of seconds. Though the dopamine system is similar across numerous species, humans do something utterly novel: we delay gratification for insanely long times. No warthog restricts calories to look good in a bathing suit next summer. No gerbil works hard at school to get good SAT scores to get into a good college to get into a good grad school to get a good job to get into a good nursing home. We do something even beyond this unprecedented gratification delay: we use the dopaminergic power of the happiness of pursuit to motivate us to work for rewards that come after we are dead—depending on your culture, this can be knowing that your nation is closer to winning a war because you’ve sacrificed yourself in battle, that your kids will inherit money because of your financial sacrifices, or that you will spend eternity in paradise. It is extraordinary neural circuitry that bucks temporal discounting enough to allow (some of) us to care about the temperature of the planet that our great-grandchildren will inherit. Basically, it’s unknown how we humans do this. We may merely be a type of animal, mammal, primate, and ape, but we’re a profoundly unique one. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 79 | Location 1205-1206 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 5:46:42 PM

It predicted impulsive aggression, as well as cognitive impulsivity (e.g., steep temporal discounting or trouble inhibiting a habitual response). ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 80 | Location 1219-1220 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 5:48:32 PM

the hub of fear, aggression, and arousal centered in the amygdala; the hub of reward, anticipation, and motivation of the dopaminergic system; and the hub of frontal cortical regulation and restraint of behavior. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 80 | Location 1227-1227 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 5:49:47 PM

It shouldn’t require neuroscience to validate someone’s internal state. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 81 | Location 1238-1240 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 5:51:08 PM

hegemonic neuroscientist might conclude that their field explains everything. And with that comes the danger, raised by the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik under the sardonic banner of “neuroskepticism,” that explaining everything leads to forgiving everything. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Note on page 81 | Location 1240 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 5:52:46 PM

without readig;i i guessthisis related to explaining away freewill via a view of humans as deterministic based on their neurochemistry. id say thats correct ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 82 | Location 1244-1246 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 5:54:16 PM

A guy does something impulsive and awful, and neuroimaging reveals that, unexpectedly, he’s missing all his PFC neurons. There’s a dualist temptation now to view his behavior as more “biological” or “organic” in some nebulous manner than if he had committed the same act with a normal PFC. However, the guy’s awful, impulsive act is equally “biological” with or without a PFC. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 85 | Location 1298-1300 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 6:01:08 PM

As a subtle example of information being communicated, when female pandas ovulate, their vocalizations get higher, something preferred by males. Remarkably, the same shift and preference happens in humans. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 87 | Location 1323-1324 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 6:04:18 PM

We may claim to judge someone by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin. But our brains sure as hell note the color, real fast. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 90 | Location 1371-1372 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 6:10:32 PM

information reaches the amygdala fast but is often inaccurate. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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shape of women’s faces changes subtly during their ovulatory cycle, and men prefer female faces at the time of ovulation. Subjects guess political affiliation or religion at above-chance levels just by looking at faces. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 92 | Location 1404-1405 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 6:15:40 PM

The human olfactory system is atrophied; roughly 40 percent of a rat’s brain is devoted to olfactory processing, versus 3 percent in us. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 94 | Location 1433-1435 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 6:18:27 PM

As a repeating theme, pain does not cause aggression; it amplifies preexisting tendencies toward aggression. In other words, pain makes aggressive people more aggressive, while doing the opposite to unaggressive individuals. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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There’s debate as to whether the decline in frontal regulation in these circumstances represents impaired capacity for self-control or impaired motivation for it. But either way, over the course of seconds to minutes, the amount of energy reaching the brain and the amount of energy the frontal cortex needs have something to do with whether the harder, more correct thing happens. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Now we come to the “broken window” theory of crime of James Q. Wilson and George Kelling.38 They proposed that small signs of urban disarray—litter, graffiti, broken windows, public drunkenness—form a slippery slope leading to larger signs of disarray, leading to increased crime. Why? Because litter and graffiti as the norm mean people don’t care or are powerless to do anything, constituting an invitation to litter or worse. Broken-window thinking shaped Rudy Giuliani’s mayoralty in the 1990s, when New York was turning into a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Police commissioner William Bratton instituted a zero-tolerance policy toward minor infractions—targeting subway fare evaders, graffiti artists, vandals, beggars, and the city’s maddening infestation of squeegee men. Which was followed by a steep drop in rates of serious crime. Similar results occurred elsewhere; in Lowell, Massachusetts, zero-tolerance measures were experimentally applied in only one part of the city; serious crime dropped only in that area. Critics questioned whether the benefits of broken-window policing were inflated, given that the approach was tested when crime was already declining throughout the United States (in other words, in contrast to the commendable Lowell example, studies often lacked control groups). In a test of the theory, Kees Keizer of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands asked whether cues of one type of norm violation made people prone to violating other norms.39 When bicycles were chained to a fence (despite a sign forbidding it), people were more likely to take a shortcut through a gap in the fence (despite a sign forbidding it); people littered more when walls were graffitied; people were more likely to steal a five-euro note when litter was strewn around. These were big effects, with doubling rates of crummy behaviors. A norm violation increasing the odds of that same norm being violated is a conscious process. But when the sound of fireworks makes someone more likely to litter, more unconscious processes are at work. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 100 | Location 1531-1535 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 6:32:59 PM

Now an example foreshadowing chapter 9’s focus on culture. Show subjects a picture of an object embedded in a complex background. Within seconds, people from collectivist cultures (e.g., China) tend to look more at, and remember better, the surrounding “contextual” information, while people from individualistic cultures (e.g., the United States) do the same with the focal object. Instruct subjects to focus on the domain that their culture doesn’t gravitate toward, and there’s frontal cortical activation—this is a difficult perceptual task. Thus, culture literally shapes how and where you look at the world. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Testosterone did not create new social patterns of aggression; it exaggerated preexisting ones. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 107 | Location 1639-1640 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 7:19:05 PM

It’s causing them to fire at a faster rate if they are stimulated by something else. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Thus, testosterone’s actions are contingent and amplifying, exacerbating preexisting tendencies toward aggression rather than creating aggression out of thin air. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 108 | Location 1646-1647 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 9:14:56 PM

rising testosterone levels increase aggression only at the time of a challenge. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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16 ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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winners.* ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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remarkable.* ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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prompts whatever behaviors are needed to maintain status. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Testosterone makes us more willing to do what it takes to attain and maintain status. And the key point is what it takes. Engineer social circumstances right, and boosting testosterone levels during a challenge would make people compete like crazy to do the most acts of random kindness. In our world riddled with male violence, the problem isn’t that testosterone can increase levels of aggression. The problem is the frequency with which we reward aggression. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 112 | Location 1714-1715 | Added on Saturday, June 27, 2015 10:19:16 PM

oxytocin is central to female mammals nursing, wanting to nurse their child, and remembering which one is their child. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 113 | Location 1723-1724 | Added on Sunday, June 28, 2015 2:49:51 AM

Among pair-bonding tamarin monkeys, lots of grooming and physical contact predicted high oxytocin levels in female members of a pair. What predicted high levels of oxytocin in males? Lots of sex. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 114 | Location 1748-1752 | Added on Sunday, June 28, 2015 2:53:22 AM

Heterosexual male volunteers, with or without an oxytocin spritz, interacted with an attractive female researcher, doing some nonsense task. Among men in stable relationships, oxytocin increased their distance from the woman an average of four to six inches. Single guys, no effect. (Why didn’t oxytocin make them stand closer? The researchers indicated that they were already about as close as one could get away with.) If the experimenter was male, no effect. Moreover, oxytocin caused males in relationships to spend less time looking at pictures of attractive women. Importantly, oxytocin didn’t make men rate these women as less attractive; they were simply less interested.29 ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 115 | Location 1753-1754 | Added on Sunday, June 28, 2015 2:53:39 AM

Thus, oxytocin and vasopressin facilitate bonding between parent and child and between couples.* ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 115 | Location 1754-1759 | Added on Sunday, June 28, 2015 2:54:08 AM

Now for something truly charming that evolution has cooked up recently. Sometime in the last fifty thousand years (i.e., less than 0.1 percent of the time that oxytocin has existed), the brains of humans and domesticated wolves evolved a new response to oxytocin: when a dog and its owner (but not a stranger) interact, they secrete oxytocin.30 The more of that time is spent gazing at each other, the bigger the rise. Give dogs oxytocin, and they gaze longer at their humans . . . which raises the humans’ oxytocin levels. So a hormone that evolved for mother-infant bonding plays a role in this bizarre, unprecedented form of bonding between species. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 116 | Location 1767-1769 | Added on Sunday, June 28, 2015 2:55:36 AM

Stated scientifically, “oxytocin inoculated betrayal aversion among investors”; stated caustically, oxytocin makes people irrational dupes; stated more angelically, oxytocin makes people turn the other cheek. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 130 | Location 1988-1992 | Added on Sunday, June 28, 2015 7:32:40 AM

We have a dichotomy—if you’re stressed like a normal mammal in an acute physical crisis, the stress response is lifesaving. But if instead you chronically activate the stress response for reasons of psychological stress, your health suffers. It is a rare human who sickens because they can’t activate the stress response when it is needed. Instead, we get sick from activating the stress response too often, too long, and for purely psychological reasons. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 135 | Location 2060-2067 | Added on Sunday, June 28, 2015 7:36:39 AM

There’s an additional depressing reason why stress fosters aggression—because it reduces stress. Shock a rat and its glucocorticoid levels and blood pressure rise; with enough shocks, it’s at risk for a “stress” ulcer. Various things can buffer the rat during shocks—running on a running wheel, eating, gnawing on wood in frustration. But a particularly effective buffer is for the rat to bite another rat. Stress-induced (aka frustration-induced) displacement aggression is ubiquitous in various species. Among baboons, for example, nearly half of aggression is this type—a high-ranking male loses a fight and chases a subadult male, who promptly bites a female, who then lunges at an infant. My research shows that within the same dominance rank, the more a baboon tends to displace aggression after losing a fight, the lower his glucocorticoid levels.78 ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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makes m think of the statistic about domestic violence in police officers; its a stressful job combined with a (sevrral) selection bias(es) ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 135 | Location 2067-2067 | Added on Sunday, June 28, 2015 7:42:14 AM

Humans excel at stress-induced displacement aggression—consider ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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way—alcohol only evokes aggression only in (a) individuals prone to aggression (for example, mice with lower levels of serotonin signaling in the frontal cortex and men with the oxytocin receptor gene variant less responsive to oxytocin are preferentially made aggressive by alcohol) and (b) those who believe that alcohol makes you more aggressive, once more showing the power of social learning to shape biology. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 138 | Location 2115-2139 | Added on Sunday, June 28, 2015 8:18:53 AM

Hormones are great; they run circles around neurotransmitters, in terms of the versatility and duration of their effects. And this includes affecting the behaviors pertinent to this book. Testosterone has far less to do with aggression than most assume. Within the normal range, individual differences in testosterone levels don’t predict who will be aggressive. Moreover, the more an organism has been aggressive, the less testosterone is needed for future aggression. When testosterone does play a role, it’s facilitatory—testosterone does not “invent” aggression. It makes us more sensitive to triggers of aggression, particularly in those most prone to aggression. Also, rising testosterone levels foster aggression only during challenges to status. Finally, crucially, the rise in testosterone during a status challenge does not necessarily increase aggression; it increases whatever is needed to maintain status. In a world in which status is awarded for the best of our behaviors, testosterone would be the most prosocial hormone in existence. Oxytocin and vasopressin facilitate mother-infant bond formation and monogamous pair-bonding, decrease anxiety and stress, enhance trust and social affiliation, and make people more cooperative and generous. But this comes with a huge caveat—these hormones increase prosociality only toward an Us. When dealing with Thems, they make us more ethnocentric and xenophobic. Oxytocin is not a universal luv hormone. It’s a parochial one. Female aggression in defense of offspring is typically adaptive and is facilitated by estrogen, progesterone, and oxytocin. Importantly, females are aggressive in many other evolutionarily adaptive circumstances. Such aggression is facilitated by the presence of androgens in females and by complex neuroendocrine tricks for generating androgenic signals in “aggressive,” but not “maternal” or “affiliative,” parts of the female brain. Mood and behavioral changes around the time of menses are a biological reality (albeit poorly understood on a nuts-and-bolts level); in contrast, pathologizing these shifts is a social construct. Finally, except for rare, extreme cases, the link between PMS and aggression is minimal. Sustained stress has numerous adverse effects. The amygdala becomes overactive and more coupled to pathways of habitual behavior; it is easier to learn fear and harder to unlearn it. We process emotionally salient information more rapidly and automatically, but with less accuracy. Frontal function—working memory, impulse control, executive decision making, risk assessment, and task shifting—is impaired, and the frontal cortex has less control over the amygdala. And we become less empathic and prosocial. Reducing sustained stress is a win-win for us and those stuck around us. “I’d been drinking” is no excuse for aggression. Over the course of minutes to hours, hormonal effects are predominantly contingent and facilitative. Hormones don’t determine, command, cause, or invent behaviors. Instead they make us more sensitive to the social triggers of emotionally laden behaviors and exaggerate our preexisting tendencies in those domains. And where do those preexisting tendencies come from? From the contents of the chapters ahead of us. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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There’s wonderful context dependency to these effects. When a rat secretes tons of glucocorticoids because it’s terrified, dendrites atrophy in the hippocampus. However, if it secretes the same amount by voluntarily running on a running wheel, dendrites expand. Whether the amygdala is also activated seems to determine whether the hippocampus interprets the glucocorticoids as good or bad stress.11 ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 148 | Location 2268-2268 | Added on Sunday, June 28, 2015 8:30:35 AM

Neurons abhor a vacuum, ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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heading—adult brains, including aged human brains, do make new neurons. The finding is truly revolutionary, its discovery epic. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 152 | Location 2330-2332 | Added on Sunday, June 28, 2015 8:37:12 AM

new neurons are essential for integrating new information into preexisting schemas, something called “pattern separation.” This is when you learn that two things you previously thought were the same are, in fact, different—dolphins and porpoises, baking soda and baking powder, Zooey Deschanel and Katy Perry. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 156 | Location 2382-2385 | Added on Monday, June 29, 2015 8:09:36 AM

The extent of neuroplasticity is most definitely finite. Otherwise, grievously injured brains and severed spinal cords would ultimately heal. Moreover, the limits of neuroplasticity are quotidian. Malcolm Gladwell has explored how vastly skilled individuals have put in vast amounts of practice—ten thousand hours is his magic number. Nevertheless, the reverse doesn’t hold: ten thousand hours of practice does not guarantee the neuroplasticity needed to make any of us a Yo-Yo Ma or LeBron James. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 157 | Location 2396-2397 | Added on Monday, June 29, 2015 8:10:53 AM

A different world makes for a different worldview, which means a different brain. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 157 | Location 2407-2408 | Added on Monday, June 29, 2015 8:12:00 AM

the final brain region to fully mature (in terms of synapse number, myelination, and metabolism) is the frontal cortex, not going fully online until the midtwenties. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 158 | Location 2409-2410 | Added on Monday, June 29, 2015 8:12:12 AM

First, no part of the adult brain is more shaped by adolescence than the frontal cortex. Second, nothing about adolescence can be understood outside the context of delayed frontocortical maturation. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 158 | Location 2410-2417 | Added on Monday, June 29, 2015 8:12:50 AM

If by adolescence limbic, autonomic, and endocrine systems are going full blast while the frontal cortex is still working out the assembly instructions, we’ve just explained why adolescents are so frustrating, great, asinine, impulsive, inspiring, destructive, self-destructive, selfless, selfish, impossible, and world changing. Think about this—adolescence and early adulthood are the times when someone is most likely to kill, be killed, leave home forever, invent an art form, help overthrow a dictator, ethnically cleanse a village, devote themselves to the needy, become addicted, marry outside their group, transform physics, have hideous fashion taste, break their neck recreationally, commit their life to God, mug an old lady, or be convinced that all of history has converged to make this moment the most consequential, the most fraught with peril and promise, the most demanding that they get involved and make a difference. In other words, it’s the time of life of maximal risk taking, novelty seeking, and affiliation with peers. All because of that immature frontal cortex. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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adolescence. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Adolescence is characterized not only by more risking but by more novelty seeking as well. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 168 | Location 2572-2575 | Added on Monday, June 29, 2015 8:28:01 AM

Neuroimaging studies show the dramatic sensitivity of adolescents to peers. Ask adults to think about what they imagine others think of them, then about what they think of themselves. Two different, partially overlapping networks of frontal and limbic structures activate for the two tasks. But with adolescents the two profiles are the same. “What do you think about yourself?” is neurally answered with “Whatever everyone else thinks about me.“23 ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 169 | Location 2588-2589 | Added on Monday, June 29, 2015 8:29:43 AM

lousier—adolescents lack sufficient frontal forcefulness to effectively hand-wave about why it doesn’t matter. Rejection hurts adolescents more, producing that stronger need to fit ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 173 | Location 2648-2648 | Added on Monday, June 29, 2015 8:37:55 AM

the greatest crime-fighting tool is a thirtieth birthday. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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I think there was evolutionary selection for delayed frontal cortex maturation. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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from birth through young adulthood, the part of the human brain that most defines us is less a product of the genes with which you started life than of what life has thrown at you. Because it is the last to mature, by definition the frontal cortex is the brain region least constrained by genes and most sculpted by experience. This must be so, to be the supremely complex social species that we are. Ironically, it seems that the genetic program of human brain development has evolved to, as much as possible, free the frontal cortex from genes. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 178 | Location 2726-2727 | Added on Monday, June 29, 2015 8:42:57 AM

Sensorimotor stage (birth to ~24 months). ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 178 | Location 2729-2729 | Added on Monday, June 29, 2015 8:43:13 AM

Preoperational stage (~2 to 7 years). ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 179 | Location 2734-2734 | Added on Monday, June 29, 2015 8:49:17 AM

Concrete operational stage (7 to 12 years). ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 179 | Location 2737-2737 | Added on Monday, June 29, 2015 8:49:25 AM

Formal operational stage (adolescence onward). ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 181 | Location 2768-2774 | Added on Monday, June 29, 2015 8:53:53 AM

Emotion and affect can alter cognitive stage in remarkably local ways. I saw a wonderful example of this when my daughter displayed both ToM and failure of ToM in the same breath. She had changed preschools and was visiting her old class. She told everyone about life in her new school: “Then, after lunch, we play on the swings. There are swings at my new school. And then, after that, we go inside and Carolee reads us a story. Then, after that . . .” ToM: “play on the swings”—wait, they don’t know that my school has swings; I need to tell them. Failure of ToM: “Carolee reads us a story.” Carolee, the teacher at her new school. The same logic should apply—tell them who Carolee is. But because Carolee was the most wonderful teacher alive, ToM failed. Afterward I asked her, “Hey, why didn’t you tell everyone that Carolee is your teacher?” “Oh, everyone knows Carolee.” How could everyone not? ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 184 | Location 2817-2819 | Added on Monday, June 29, 2015 8:59:55 AM

Lawrence Kohlberg, then a graduate student at the University of Chicago and later a professor at Harvard, began formulating his monumental stages of moral development.17 Kids ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 187 | Location 2858-2858 | Added on Monday, June 29, 2015 9:00:07 AM

conservatives and liberals reason at different Kohlberg stages. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 189 | Location 2895-2896 | Added on Monday, June 29, 2015 9:02:59 AM

To Mischel, maturation of willpower is more about distraction and reappraisal strategies than about stoicism. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 190 | Location 2905-2915 | Added on Monday, June 29, 2015 4:59:17 PM

A first challenge is to truly incorporate biology into our thinking. A child suffers malnutrition and, as an adult, has poor cognitive skills. That’s easy to frame biologically—malnutrition impairs brain development. Alternatively, a child is raised by cold, inexpressive parents and, as an adult, feels unlovable. It’s harder to link those two biologically, to resist thinking that somehow this is a less biological phenomenon than the malnutrition/cognition link. There may be less known about the biological changes explaining the link between the cold parents and the adult with poor self-esteem than about the malnutrition/cognition one. It may be less convenient to articulate the former biologically than the latter. It may be harder to apply a proximal biological therapy for the former than for the latter (e.g., an imaginary neural growth factor drug that improves self-esteem versus cognition). But biology mediates both links. A cloud may be less tangible than a brick, but it’s constructed with the same rules about how atoms interact. How does biology link childhood with the behaviors of adulthood? Chapter 5’s neural plasticity writ large and early. The developing brain epitomizes neural plasticity, and every hiccup of experience has an effect, albeit usually a miniscule one, on that brain. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 191 | Location 2927-2928 | Added on Monday, June 29, 2015 5:00:31 PM

this suggested that once you’ve addressed a child’s need for nutrition, proper temperature, plus other odds and ends, they’re set to go. Affection, warmth, physical contact? Superfluous. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 191 | Location 2919-2921 | Added on Monday, June 29, 2015 5:00:52 PM

Mothers are crucial. Except that well into the twentieth century, most experts didn’t think so. The West developed child-rearing techniques where, when compared with traditional cultures, children had less physical contact with their mothers, slept alone at earlier ages, and had longer latencies to be picked up when crying. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 192 | Location 2935-2936 | Added on Monday, June 29, 2015 5:03:03 PM

John Bowlby challenged the view of infants as simple organisms with few emotional needs; his “attachment theory” birthed our modern view of the mother-infant bond. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 192 | Location 2938-2940 | Added on Monday, June 29, 2015 5:03:34 PM

“What do children need from their mothers?”: love, warmth, affection, responsiveness, stimulation, consistency, reliability. What is produced in their absence? Anxious, depressed, and/or poorly attached adults.* ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 193 | Location 2946-2946 | Added on Monday, June 29, 2015 5:05:17 PM

“Man cannot live by milk alone. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 193 | Location 2948-2949 | Added on Monday, June 29, 2015 5:05:46 PM

Starting in the 1990s, crime rates plummeted across the United States. Why? ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 193 | Location 2951-2951 | Added on Monday, June 29, 2015 5:05:53 PM

legalization of abortions. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 193 | Location 2952-2955 | Added on Monday, June 29, 2015 5:06:26 PM

Surprise—this was highly controversial, but it makes perfect, depressing sense to me. What majorly predicts a life of crime? Being born to a mother who, if she could, would have chosen that you not be. What’s the most basic thing provided by a mother? Knowing that she is happy that you exist.*26 ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 194 | Location 2960-2964 | Added on Monday, June 29, 2015 5:08:07 PM

It wasn’t that these ex-isolates did behaviors wrong—they didn’t aggressively display like an ostrich, make the sexually solicitive gestures of a gecko. Behaviors were normal but occurred at the wrong time and place—say, giving subordination gestures to pipsqueaks half their size, threatening alphas they should cower before. Mothers and peers don’t teach the motoric features of fixed action patterns; those are hardwired. They teach when, where, and to whom—the appropriate context for those behaviors. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 195 | Location 2975-2976 | Added on Monday, June 29, 2015 5:09:43 PM

as in the world of abused children and battered partners, infants held harder. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 196 | Location 2997-2997 | Added on Monday, June 29, 2015 5:29:54 PM

Any kind of mother in a storm. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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If this applies to humans, ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 196 | Location 3002-3003 | Added on Monday, June 29, 2015 5:30:46 PM

occurs—infant monkeys abused by their mothers are more likely to become abusive mothers. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 197 | Location 3010-3014 | Added on Monday, June 29, 2015 5:49:53 PM

Basically, childhood adversity increases the odds of an adult having (a) depression, anxiety, and/or substance abuse; (b) impaired cognitive capabilities, particularly related to frontocortical function; (c) impaired impulse control and emotion regulation; (d) antisocial behavior, including violence; and (e) relationships that replicate the adversities of childhood (e.g., staying with an abusive partner).31 And despite that, some individuals endure miserable childhoods just fine. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 197 | Location 3021-3021 | Added on Monday, June 29, 2015 5:50:24 PM

early-life stress permanently blunts the ability of the brain to rein in glucocorticoid secretion. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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marinating the brain in excess glucocorticoids, particularly during development, adversely effects cognition, impulse control, empathy, and so on. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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wrong—foolishly pick a poor family to be born into, and by kindergarten, the odds of your succeeding at life’s marshmallow tests are already stacked against you.34 ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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part of the link reflects the corrosive effects of subordination in all hierarchical species. For example, having a low-ranking mother predicts elevated glucocorticoids in adulthood in baboons. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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What happens when children observe domestic violence, warfare, a gang murder, a school massacre? For weeks afterward there is impaired concentration and impulse control. Witnessing gun violence doubles a child’s likelihood of serious violence within the succeeding two years. And adulthood brings the usual increased risks of depression, anxiety, and aggression. Consistent with that, violent criminals are more likely than nonviolent ones to have witnessed violence as kids. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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The violence is key—aggression isn’t boosted by material that’s merely exciting, arousing, or ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Endless studies have analyzed the effects of kids witnessing violence on TV, in movies, in the news, and in music videos, and both witnessing and participating in violent video games. A summary: Exposing children to a violent TV or film clip increases their odds of aggression soon after. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Effects are stronger when kids are younger or when the violence is more realistic and/or is presented as heroic. Such exposure can make kids more accepting of aggression—in ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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This is a reliable finding of large magnitude. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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The effect typically remains after controlling for total media-watching time, maltreatment or neglect, socioeconomic status, levels of neighborhood violence, parental education, psychiatric illness, and IQ. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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The link between exposure to childhood media violence and increased adult aggression is stronger than the link between lead exposure and IQ, calcium intake and bone mass, or asbestos and laryngeal cancer. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Two caveats: (a) there is no evidence that catastrophically violent individuals (e.g., mass shooters) are that way because of childhood exposure to violent media; (b) exposure does not remotely guarantee increased aggression—instead, effects are strongest on kids already prone toward violence. For them, exposure desensitizes and normalizes their own aggression.* ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Being bullied is mostly another garden-variety childhood adversity, with adult consequences on par with childhood maltreatment at home. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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bullying targets aren’t selected at random. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Kids with the metaphorical “kick me” signs on their backs are more likely to have personal or family psychiatric issues and poor social and emotional intelligence. These are kids already at risk for bad adult outcomes, and adding bullying to the mix just makes the child’s future even bleaker. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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the more categories of adversities a child suffers, the dimmer his or her chances of a happy, functional adulthood. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Considering cross-cultural child rearing often brings out the most invidious and neurotic in parents—do other cultures do a better job at it? ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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there is no anthropological ideal of child rearing. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Cultures (starting with parents) raise children to become adults who behave in the ways valued by that culture, ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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ilink to node ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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personality traits of fascists, ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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introspection—traits typically rooted in childhood. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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authoritative parenting. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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authoritarian parenting. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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permissive parenting, ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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neglectful parenting. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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each style usually produces adults with that same approach, with different cultures valuing different styles. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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the next way cultural values are transmitted to kids, namely by peers. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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peer influences are underappreciated, but parents still are plenty important, including by influencing what peer groups their kids experience. Why are peers so important? Peer interactions teach social competence—context-dependent behavior, when to be friend or foe, where you fit in hierarchies. Young organisms utilize the greatest teaching tool ever to acquire such information—play.52 ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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What is social play in the young? Writ large, it’s an array of behaviors that train individuals in social competence. Writ medium, it’s fragments of the real thing, bits and pieces of fixed action patterns, a chance to safely try out roles and improve motor skills. Writ small and endocrine, it’s a demonstration that moderate and transient stress—“stimulation”—is great. Writ small and neurobiological, it’s a tool for deciding which excess synapses to prune. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Play is vital. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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the opposite of play is not work—it’s depression. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Expanding beyond peers, neighborhoods readily communicate culture to kids. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Collectivist Versus Individualist Cultures ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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On average, mothers in individualist cultures, when compared with those in collectivist ones, speak louder, play music louder, have more animated expressions.54 They view themselves as teachers rather than protectors, abhor a bored child, value high-energy affect. Their games emphasize individual competition, urge hobbies involving doing rather than observing. Kids are trained in verbal assertiveness, to be autonomous and influential. Show a cartoon of a school of fish with one out front, and she’ll describe it to her child as the leader.* Mothers in collectivist cultures, in contrast, spend more time than individualist mothers soothing their child, maintaining contact, and facilitating contact with other adults. They value low arousal affect and sleep with their child to a later age. Games are about cooperation and fitting in; if playing with her child with, say, a toy car, the point is not exploring what a car does (i.e., being automobile), but the process of sharing (“Thank you for giving me your car; now I’ll give it back to you”). Kids are trained to get along, think of others, accept and adapt, rather than change situations; morality and conformity are nearly synonymous. Show the cartoon of the school of fish, and the fish out front must have done something wrong, because no one will play with him. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Cultures of Honor ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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A particularly lethal combo is when a culture of victimization—we were wronged last week, last decade, last millennium—is coupled with a culture of honor’s ethos of retribution. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Parenting in cultures of honor tends to be authoritarian. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Class Differences ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Baboon mothers teach their young appropriate behavioral context; human parents teach their young what to bother dreaming about. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Class differences in parenting in Western countries resemble parenting differences between Western countries and those in the developing world. In the West a parent teaches and facilitates her child exploring the world. In the toughest corners of the developing world, little more is expected than the awesome task of keeping your child alive and buffered from the menacing world. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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In higher-SES strata, parenting tends to be authoritative or permissive. In contrast, parenting in society’s lower-SES rungs is typically authoritarian, reflecting two themes. One concerns protecting. When are higher-SES parents authoritarian? When there is danger. “Sweetie, I love that you question things, but if you run into the street and I scream ‘Stop,’ you stop.” A lower-SES childhood is rife with threat. The other theme is preparing the child for the tough world out there—for the poor, adulthood consists of the socially dominant treating them in an authoritarian manner. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Parenting in the poor neighborhood involved “hard defensive individualism.” ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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working-class parenting involved “hard offensive individualism.” ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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kids were fungible members of a category, rather than individualized—“You kids get over here.” ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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“soft individualism” of upper-middle-class parenting.* Children’s eventual success, by conventional standards, was a given, as were expectations of physical health. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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newborns recognize and prefer the sound of their mother’s voice.* ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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experimentally—inject lemon-flavored saline into a pregnant rat’s amniotic fluid, and her pups are born preferring that flavor. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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newborns whose mothers had read The Cat in the Hat out loud for hours during the last trimester preferred Dr. Seuss. Wow. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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And it turns out that unless there is testosterone and anti-Müllerian hormone around, fetal mammalian brains automatically feminize. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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feale as biological default ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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an organizational effect of perinatal testosterone is to make the brain responsive to testosterone in adulthood. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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According to this view, if an infant was born with sexually ambiguous genitalia (roughly 1 to 2 percent of births), it didn’t matter which gender they were raised, as long as you decided within the first eighteen months—just do whichever reconstructive surgery was more convenient. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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The authors speculate that this reflects the higher activity levels in males, and how masculine toys facilitate more active play. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Testosterone exposure throughout pregnancy produced daughters who were “pseudohermaphrodites”—looked like males on the outside but had female gonads on the inside. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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more rough-and-tumble play, were more aggressive, and displayed male-typical mounting behavior and vocalizations (as much as males, by some measures). ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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these androgenized females were as interested as control females in infants. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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some but not all ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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The authors noted the relevance of this to transgender individuals—the external appearance of one sex but the brain, if you will, of the other. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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These effects are small and variable, producing a meaningful relationship only when considering large numbers of individuals. Do testosterone’s organizational effects determine the quality and/or quantity of aggression? No. How about the organizational plus the activational effects? Not those either. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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maternal stress impacts fetal development. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Do what we can to reduce Cayas stress duting pregnancy ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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There are indirect routes—for example, stressed people consume less healthy diets and consume more substances of abuse. More directly, stress alters maternal blood pressure and immune defenses, which impact a fetus. Most important, stressed mothers secrete glucocorticoids, which enter fetal circulation and basically have the same bad consequences as in stressed infants and children. Glucocorticoids accomplish this through organizational effects on fetal brain construction and decreasing levels of growth factors, numbers of neurons and synapses, and so on. Just as prenatal testosterone exposure generates an adult brain that is more sensitive to environmental triggers of aggression, excessive prenatal glucocorticoid exposure produces an adult brain more sensitive to environmental triggers of depression and anxiety. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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each gene specifies the production of a specific type of protein; ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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a gene has to be “activated” for the protein to be produced and “deactivated” to stop producing it—thus genes come with on/off switches; ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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every cell in our bodies contains the same library of genes; ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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during development, the pattern of which genes are activated determines which cells turn into nose, which into toes, and so on; ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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forever after, nose, toes, and other cells retain distinctive patterns of gene activation. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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shown previously that offspring of more “attentive” rat mothers (those that frequently nurse, groom, and lick their pups) become adults with lower glucocorticoid levels, less anxiety, better learning, and delayed brain aging. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Whoa—mothering style alters gene regulation in pups’ brains. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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such rat pups, as adults, are more attentive mothers—passing this trait epigenetically to the next generation. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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adult behavior produces persistent molecular brain changes in offspring, “programming” them to be likely to replicate that distinctive behavior in adulthood. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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most epigenetic changes are transient. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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But the excitement should be restrained on a deeper level, one relevant to the entire chapter. Stimulating environments, harsh parents, good neighborhoods, uninspiring teachers, optimal diets—all alter genes in the brain. Wow. And not that long ago the revolution was about how environment and experience change the excitability of synapses, their number, neuronal circuits, even the number of neurons. Whoa. And earlier the revolution was about how environment and experience can change the sizes of different parts of the brain. Amazing. But none of this is truly amazing. Because things must work these ways. While little in childhood determines an adult behavior, virtually everything in childhood changes propensities toward some adult behavior. Freud, Bowlby, Harlow, Meaney, from their differing perspectives, all make the same fundamental and once-revolutionary point: childhood matters. All that the likes of growth factors, on/off switches, and rates of myelination do is provide insights into the innards of that fact. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Similarly, it shouldn’t require molecular genetics or neuroendocrinology factoids to prove that childhood matters and thus that it profoundly matters to provide childhoods filled with good health and safety, love and nurturance and opportunity. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Genes are relevant to, say, aggression, which is why we’re less alarmed if a toddler pulls at the ears of a basset hound rather than a pit bull. Genes are relevant to everything in this book. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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many people being troubled by linking genes with behavior—in ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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because of the pseudoscientific genetics used to justify various “isms,” prejudice, and discrimination. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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In a reductionist view, understanding something complex requires breaking it down into its components; understand those parts, add them together, and you’ll understand the big picture. And in this reductionist world, to understand cells, organs, bodies, and behavior, the best constituent part to study is genes. Overenthusiasm for genes can reflect a ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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People see essentialism embedded in bloodlines—i.e., genes. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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number—95 percent of DNA is noncoding. Ninety-five percent. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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evolution. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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This is huge. Saying that a gene “decides” when it is transcribed* is like saying that a recipe decides when a cake is baked. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Genes are not the deterministic holy grail if they can be regulated by the smell of a baby’s tushy. Genes are regulated by all the incarnations of environment. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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genes don’t make sense outside the context of environment. Promoters and transcription factor introduce if/then clauses: “If you smell your baby, then activate the oxytocin gene.” ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Now consider a genome consisting of genes A and B, meaning three different transcription profiles—A is transcribed, B is transcribed, A and B are transcribed—requiring three different TFs (assuming you activate only one at a time). Three genes, seven transcription profiles: A, B, C, A + B, A + C, B + C, A + B + C. Seven different TFs. Four genes, fifteen profiles. Five genes, thirty-one profiles.* As the number of genes in a genome increases, the number of possible expression profiles increases exponentially. As does the number of TFs needed to produce those profiles. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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TFs are usually proteins, coded for by genes. Back to genes A and B. To fully exploit them, you need the TF that activates gene A, and the TF that activates gene B, and the TF that activates genes A and B. Thus there must exist three more genes, each coding for one of those TFs. Requiring TFs that activate those genes. And TFs for the genes coding for those TFs . . . Whoa. Genomes aren’t infinite; instead TFs regulate one another’s transcription, solving that pesky infinity problem. Importantly, across the species whose genomes have been sequenced, the longer the genome (i.e., roughly the more genes there are), the greater the percentage of genes coding for TFs. In other words, the more genomically complex the organism, the larger the percentage of the genome devoted to gene regulation by the environment. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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disproportionate share of genetic differences between chimps and humans are in genes for TFs. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Conversely, each TF usually activates more than one gene, meaning that multiple genes are typically activated in networks (for example, cell injury causes a TF called NF-κB to activate a network of inflammation genes). Suppose the promoter upstream of gene 3 that responds to promoter TF-A has a mutation making it responsive to TF-B. Result? Gene 3 is now activated as part of a different network. Same networkwide outcome if there is a mutation in a gene for a TF, producing a protein that binds to a different promoter type.4 ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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the human genome codes for about 1,500 different TFs, contains 4,000,000 TF-binding sites, and the average cell uses about 200,000 such sites to generate its distinctive gene-expression profile. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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epigenetic changes can be multigenerational. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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epigenetic marks can be passed on by both (e.g., make male mice diabetic, and they pass the trait to their offspring via epigenetic changes in sperm). ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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combinatorial genetics ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Introns and exons destroy this simplicity. Imagine a gene consisting of exons 1, 2, and 3, separated by introns A and B. In one part of the body a splicing enzyme exists that splices out the introns and also trashes exon 3, producing a protein coded for by exons 1 and 2. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the body, a different splicing enzyme jettisons exon 2 along with the introns, producing a protein derived from exons 1 and 3. In another cell type a protein is made solely from exon 1. . . . Thus “alternative splicing” can generate multiple unique proteins from a single stretch of DNA; so much for “one gene specifies one protein”—this gene specifies seven (A, B, C, A-B, A-C, B-C, and A-B-C). Remarkably, 90 percent of human genes with exons are alternatively spliced. Moreover, when a gene is regulated by multiple TFs, each can direct the transcription of a different combination of exons. Oh, and splicing enzymes are proteins, meaning that each is coded for by a gene. Loops and loops. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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wonderfully inspirational, as disinterested in acclaim as in her ostracism, working until her nineties). ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Consider a hypothetical stretch of DNA coding for “The fertilized egg is implanted in the uterus.” There has been a transpositional event, where the underlined stretch of message was copied and randomly plunked down elsewhere: “The fertilized eggterus is implanted in the uterus.” Gibberish. But sometimes “The fertilized egg is implanted in the uterus” becomes “The fertilized eggplant is implanted in the uterus.” ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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transposons occur in the brain. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Some Key Points, Completing This Part of the Chapter ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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The field began with the primitive idea that, if everyone in a family does it, it must be genetic. This was confounded by environment running in families as well. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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“cross-fostering”—switching ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Identical twins separated at birth are so spectacular and rare that behavior geneticists swoon over them, want to collect them all. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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So does this mean there is a gene “for” finding chest hair on guys to be hot, for likelihood of voting, for feelings about dentists? Vanishingly unlikely. Instead, gene and behavior are often connected by tortuous routes.20 Consider the genetic influence on voter participation; the mediating factor between the two turns out to be sense of control and efficacy. People who vote regularly feel that their actions matter, and this central locus of control reflects some genetically influenced personality traits (e.g., high optimism, low neuroticism). Or how about the link between genes and self-confidence? Some studies show that the intervening variable is genetic effects on height; taller people are considered more attractive and treated better, boosting their self-confidence, dammit.* In other words, genetic influences on behavior often work through very indirect routes, something rarely emphasized when news broadcasts toss out behavior genetics sound bites—“Scientists report genetic influence on strategy when playing Candyland.” ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Epigenetic transmission via sperm seems of small significance. But prenatal and epigenetic effects from the mother can be huge—for ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Everyone agrees that confounds from prenatal environment, epigenetics, selective placement, range restriction, and assumptions about equal environment are unavoidable. Most of these confounds inflate the perceived importance of genes. Efforts have been made to control for these confounds and generally have shown that they are of less magnitude than charged by many critics. Crucially, these studies have mostly been about psychiatric disorders, which, while plenty interesting, aren’t terribly relevant to the concerns of this book. In other words, no one has studied whether these confounds matter when considering genetic influences on, say, people’s tendency to endorse their culture’s moral rules yet rationalize why those rules don’t apply to them today, because they’re stressed and it’s their birthday. Lots more work to be done. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Now starts a bruising, difficult, immensely important subject. I review its logic every time I teach it, because it’s so unintuitive, and I’m still always just words away from getting it wrong when I open my mouth in class. Behavior genetics studies usually produce a number called a heritability score.28 For example, studies have reported heritability scores in the 40 to 60 percent range for traits related to prosocial behavior, resilience after psychosocial stress, social responsiveness, political attitudes, aggression, and leadership potential. What’s a heritability score? “What does a gene do?” is at least two questions. How does a gene influence average levels of a trait? How does a gene influence variation among people in levels of that trait? These are crucially different. For example, how much do genes have to do with people’s scores averaging 100 on this thing called an IQ test? Then how much do genes have to do with one person scoring higher than another? Or how much do genes help in explaining why humans usually enjoy ice cream? How much in explaining why people like different flavors? These issues utilize two terms with similar sounds but different meanings. If genes strongly influence average levels of a trait, that trait is strongly inherited. If genes strongly influence the extent of variability around that average level, that trait has high heritability.* It is a population measure, where a heritability score indicates the percentage of total variation attributable to genetics. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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For example, it’s more interesting to consider why some people are smarter than others than why humans are smarter than turnips. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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research consistently inflates heritability measures, leading people to conclude that genes influence individual differences more than they do. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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You can appreciate the difference by considering cases where they dissociate. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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What do genes have to do with humans averaging five fingers per hand? Tons; it’s an inherited trait. What do genes have to do with variation around that average? Not much—cases of other than five fingers on a hand are mostly due to accidents. While average finger number is an inherited trait, the heritability of finger number is low—genes don’t explain individual differences much. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Say you want to guess whether some organism’s limb has five fingers or a hoof. Knowing their genetic makeup will help by identifying their species. Alternatively, you’re trying to guess whether a particular person is likely to have five or four fingers on his hand. Knowing whether he uses buzz saws while blindfolded is more useful than knowing the sequence of his genome. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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What do genes directly have to do with humans being more likely than chimps to wear earrings? Not much. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Now consider individual differences among humans—how much do genes help predict which individuals are wearing earrings at a high school dance in 1958? Tons. Basically, if you had two X chromosomes, you probably wore earrings, but if you had a Y chromosome, you wouldn’t have been caught dead doing so. Thus, while genes had little to do with the prevalence of earrings among Americans in 1958 being around 50 percent, they had lots to do with determining which Americans wore them. Thus, in that time and place, wearing earrings, while not a strongly inherited trait, had high heritability. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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latter—you versus your neighbor—than ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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former—you versus a wildebeest. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Say a plant geneticist sits in the desert, studying a particular species of plant. In this imaginary scenario a single gene, gene 3127, regulates the plant’s growth. Gene 3127 comes in versions, A, B, and C. Plants with version A always grow to be one inch tall; version B, two inches; C, three inches.* What single fact gives you the most power in predicting a plant’s height? Obviously, whether it has version A, B, or C—that explains all the variation in height between plants, meaning 100 percent heritability. Meanwhile, twelve thousand miles away in a rain forest, a second plant geneticist is studying a clone of that same plant. And in that environment plants with version A, B, or C are 101, 102, or 103 inches tall, respectively. This geneticist also concludes that plant height in this case shows 100 percent heritability. Then, as required by the plot line, the two stand side by side at a conference, one brandishing 1/2/3 inch data, the other 101/102/103. They combine data sets. Now you want to predict the height of one example of that plant, taken from anywhere on the planet. You can either know which version of gene 3127 it possesses or what environment it is growing in. Which is more useful? Knowing which environment. When you study this plant species in two environments, you discover that heritability of height is miniscule. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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The more environments in which you study a genetic trait, the more novel environmental effects will be revealed, decreasing the heritability score. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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making sure that the plants all have their height measured around the same time of year. This inflates heritability scores, because you’ve prevented yourself from ever discovering that some extraneous environmental factor isn’t actually extraneous.* Thus a heritability score tells how much variation in a trait is explained by genes in the environment(s) in which it’s been studied. As you study the trait in more environments, the heritability score will decrease. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Genes typically still play hefty roles in explaining individual variability, given that any given species lives in a limited range of environments—capybaras stick to the tropics, polar bears to the Arctic. This business about heterogeneous environments driving down heritability scores is important only in considering some hypothetical species that, say, lives in both tundra and desert, in various population densities, in nomadic bands, sedentary farming communities, and urban apartment buildings. Oh, that’s right, humans. Of all species, heritability scores in humans plummet the most when shifting from a controlled experimental setting to considering the species’ full range of habitats. Just consider how much the heritability score for wearing earrings, with its gender split, has declined ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Environment A: 1, 2, 3. Environment B: 3, 2, 1. In this case even talking about a heritability score is problematic, because different gene variants have diametrically opposite effects in different environments. We have an example of a central concept in genetics, a gene/environment interaction, where qualitative, rather than just quantitative, effects of a gene differ by environment. Here’s a rule of thumb for recognizing gene/environment interactions, translated into English: You are studying the behavioral effects of a gene in two environments. Someone asks, “What are the effects of the gene on some behavior?” You answer, “It depends on the environment.” Then they ask, “What are the effects of environment on this behavior?” And you answer, “It depends on the version of the gene.” “It depends” = a gene/environment interaction. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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if you eat a normal diet, phenylalanine accumulates, damaging the brain. But eat a phenylalanine-free diet from birth, and there is no damage. What are the effects of this mutation on brain development? It depends on your diet. What’s the effect of diet on brain development? It depends on whether you have this (rare) mutation. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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A gene called 5HTT codes for a transporter that removes serotonin from the synapse; having a particular 5HTT variant increases the risk of depression . . . but only when coupled with childhood trauma.* What’s the effect of 5HTT variant on depression risk? It depends on childhood trauma exposure. What’s the effect of childhood trauma exposure on depression risk? It depends on 5HTT variant (plus loads of other genes, but you get the point). ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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it’s not meaningful to ask what a gene does, just what it does in a particular environment. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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most of the gene variants were so sensitive to environment that gene/environment interactions occurred even in these obsessively similar lab settings, where incredibly subtle (and still unidentified) environmental differences made huge differences in what the gene did. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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“It’s difficult to quantitatively assess the relative contributions of genes and environment to a particular trait when they interact.” ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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key points: ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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poverty—poverty’s adverse effects trump the genetics. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Probably the biggest reason to reject warrior-gene determinism nonsense is something that should be utterly predictable by now: MAO-A effects on behavior show strong gene/environment interactions. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Did MAO-A variant status predict antisocial behavior in twenty-six-year-olds (as measured by a composite of standard psychological assessments and convictions for violent crimes)? No. But MAO-A status coupled with something else powerfully did. Having the low-activity version of MAO-A tripled the likelihood . . . but only in people with a history of severe childhood abuse. And if there was no such history, the variant was not predictive of anything. This is the essence of gene/environment interaction. What does having a particular variant of the MAO-A gene have to do with antisocial behavior? It depends on the environment. “Warrior gene” my ass. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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the effects of this genetic variant can be understood only by considering other, nongenetic factors in individuals’ lives, such as childhood adversity and adult provocation.47 ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Repeat the mantra: don’t ask what a gene does; ask what it does in a particular context. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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terra incognita. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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“In short, educational attainment looks to be a very polygenic trait.” ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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key points: ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Genes have plenty to do with behavior. Even more appropriately, all behavioral traits are affected to some degree by genetic variability.65 They have to be, given that they specify the structure of all the proteins pertinent to every neurotransmitter, hormone, receptor, etc. that there is. And they have plenty to do with individual differences in behavior, given the large percentage of genes that are polymorphic, coming in different flavors. But their effects are supremely context dependent. Ask not what a gene does. Ask what it does in a particular environment and when expressed in a particular network of other genes (i.e., gene/gene/gene/gene . . . /environment). Thus, for our purposes, genes aren’t about inevitability. Instead they’re about context-dependent tendencies, propensities, potentials, and vulnerabilities. All embedded in the fabric of the other factors, biological and otherwise, that fill these pages. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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culture matters. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Culture leaves long-lasting residues—Shiites and Sunnis slaughter each other over a succession issue fourteen centuries old; across thirty-three countries population density in the year 1500 significantly predicts how authoritarian the government was in 2000; over the course of millennia, earlier adoption of the hoe over the plow predicts gender equality today.2 ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Thus, the goals of this chapter: Look at systematic patterns of cultural variation as they pertain to the best and worst of our behaviors. Explore how different types of brains produce different culture and different types of culture produce different brains. In other words, how culture and biology coevolve.3 See the role of ecology in shaping culture. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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DUNE ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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All this is mighty impressive. Nonetheless, such cultural transmission doesn’t show progression—this year’s chimp nut-cracking tool is pretty much the same as that of four thousand years ago. And with few exceptions (more later), nonhuman culture is solely about material culture (versus, say, social organization). ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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“culture” is how we do and think about things, transmitted by nongenetic means. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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partial list of his proposed cultural universals: ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Greece and Oman are more likely to spend resources to punish overly generous players than to punish those who are cheaters, ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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In a study of employees throughout the world working for the same multinational bank, what was the most important reason cited to help someone? Among Americans it was that the person had previously helped them; for Chinese it was that the person was higher ranking; in Spain, that they were a friend or acquaintance.12 ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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cultures.* ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Remarkably, this is even observed on the level of eye tracking—typically Westerners’ eyes first look at a picture’s center, while East Asians scan the overall scene. Moreover, force Westerners to focus on the holistic context of a picture, or East Asians on the central subject, and the frontal cortex works harder, activating more. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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The United States is the individualism poster child for at least two reasons. First there’s immigration. Currently, 12 percent of Americans are immigrants, another 12 percent are (like me) children of immigrants, and everyone else except for the 0.9 percent pure Native Americans descend from people who emigrated within the last five hundred years.20 And who were the immigrants? Those in the settled world who were cranks, malcontents, restless, heretical, black sheep, hyperactive, hypomanic, misanthropic, itchy, unconventional, yearning to be free, yearning to be rich, yearning to be out of their damn boring repressive little hamlet, yearning. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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the majority of its colonial and independent history, America has had a moving frontier luring those whose extreme prickly optimism made merely booking passage to the New World insufficiently novel—and you’ve got America the individualistic. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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The key is how culture is shaped by the way people traditionally made a living, which in turn is shaped by ecology. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Rice, which was domesticated there roughly ten thousand years ago, requires massive amounts of communal work. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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rice. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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In parts of northern China it’s difficult to grow rice, and instead people have grown wheat for millennia; this involves individual rather than collective farming. And by the standard tests of individualist versus collectivist cultures (e.g., draw a sociogram, which two are most similar of a rabbit, dog, and carrot?)—they look like Westerners. The region has two other markers of individualism, namely higher rates of divorce and of inventiveness—patent filings—than in rice-growing regions. The roots of individualism, likes those of wheat, run deep in northern China. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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“social interdependence fosters holistic thinking.” ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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the descendants of people who, having made it to the future downtown Anchorage, decided to just keep going for another six thousand miles.* A high incidence of 7R, associated with impulsivity and novelty seeking, is the legacy of humans who made the greatest migrations in human history. And then in the middle of the chart is the near-zero incidence of 7R in China, Cambodia, Japan, and Taiwan (among the Ami and Atayal). When East Asians domesticated rice and invented collectivist society, there was massive selection against the 7R variant; in Kidd’s words, it was “nearly lost” in these populations. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 284 | Location 4349-4353 | Added on Monday, June 29, 2015 11:57:49 PM

Thus, in this most studied of cultural contrasts, we see clustering of ecological factors, modes of production, cultural differences, and differences in endocrinology, neurobiology, and gene frequencies.* The cultural contrasts appear in likely ways—e.g., morality, empathy, child-rearing practices, competition, cooperation, definitions of happiness—but also in unexpected ones—e.g., where, within milliseconds, your eyes look at a picture, or you’re thinking about bunnies and carrots. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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This is the vulnerability of pastoralism, a world of rustlers and raiders. This generates various correlates of pastoralism:26 Militarism abounds. Pastoralists, particularly in deserts, with their far-flung members tending the herds, are a spawning ground for warrior classes. And with them typically come (a) military trophies as stepping-stones to societal status; (b) death in battle as a guarantee of a glorious afterlife; (c) high rates of economic polygamy and mistreatment of women; and (d) authoritarian parenting. It is rare for pastoralists to be pastoral, in the sense of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony. Worldwide, monotheism is relatively rare; to the extent that it does occur, it is disproportionately likely among desert pastoralists (while rain forest dwellers are atypically likely to be polytheistic). This makes sense. Deserts teach tough, singular things, a world reduced to simple, desiccated, furnace-blasted basics that are approached with a deep fatalism. “I am the Lord your God” and “There is but one god and his name is Allah” and “There will be no gods before me”—dictates like these proliferate. As implied in the final quote, desert monotheism does not always come with only one supernatural being—monotheistic religions are replete with angels and djinns and devils. But they sure come with a hierarchy, minor deities paling before the Omnipotent One, who tends to be highly interventionist both in the heavens and on earth. In contrast, think of tropical rain forest, teeming with life, where you can find more species of ants on a single tree than in all of Britain. Letting a hundred deities bloom in equilibrium must seem the most natural thing in the world. Pastoralism fosters cultures of honor. As introduced in chapter 7, these are about rules of civility, courtesy, and hospitality, especially to the weary traveler because, after all, aren’t all herders often weary travelers? Even more so, cultures of honor are about taking retribution after affronts to self, family, or clan, and reputational consequences for failing to do so. If they take your camel today and you do nothing, tomorrow they will take the rest of your herd, plus your wives and daughters.* Few ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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the most pertinent cultures of honor are ones in more Westernized settings. “Culture of honor” has been used to describe the workings of the Mafia in Sicily, the patterns of violence in rural nineteenth-century Ireland, and the causes and consequences of retributive killings by inner-city gangs. All occur in circumstances of resource competition (including the singular resource of being the last side to do a retributive killing in a vendetta), of a power vacuum provided by the minimal presence of the rule of law, and where prestige is ruinously lost if challenges are left unanswered and where the answer is typically a violent one. Amid those, the most famous example of a Westernized culture of honor is the American South, ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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end of the dreamtime. one may prefer to avoid vonflict by producing a surplus, or by relocating to another pasture. territorilism, violence, zero sum games, arrise when we are metephorically and litterally backr into corners an are unable to gain without taking ftom nother. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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When coupled with lesser mobility in the South, honor in need of defense readily extends to family, clan, and place. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Carrying out justice personally was viewed as a requirement in the absence of a functional legal system. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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The core of retribution for honor violations was, of course, violence. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Southern, but not Northern, college studies show strong physiological responses to a social provocation. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Southern violence was explored in one of the all-time coolest psychology studies, involving the use of a word rare in science journals, conducted by Nisbett and Cohen. Undergraduate male subjects had a blood sample taken. They then filled out a questionnaire about something and were then supposed to drop it off down the hall. It was in the narrow hallway, filled with file cabinets, that the experiment happened. Half the subjects traversed the corridor uneventfully. But with half, a confederate (get it? ha-ha) of the psychologists, a big beefy guy, approached from the opposite direction. As the subject and the plant squeezed by each other, the latter would jostle the subject and, in an irritated voice, say the magic word—“asshole”—and march on. Subject would continue down the hall to drop off the questionnaire. What was the response to this insult? It depended. Subjects from the South, but not from elsewhere, showed massive increases in levels of testosterone and glucocorticoids—anger, rage, stress. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 289 | Location 4429-4432 | Added on Tuesday, June 30, 2015 12:12:46 AM

Subjects were then told a scenario where a guy observes a male acquaintance making a pass at his fiancée—what happens next in the story? In control subjects, Southerners were a bit more likely than Northerners to imagine a violent outcome. And after being insulted? No change in Northerners and a massive boost in imagined violence among Southerners. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 290 | Location 4433-4440 | Added on Tuesday, June 30, 2015 12:14:22 AM

pastoralist roots have been suggested to explain the Southern culture of honor. The theory as first propounded by historian David Hackett Fischer in 1989: Early American regionalism arose from colonists in different parts of America coming from different places.31 There were the Pilgrims from East Anglia in New England. Quakers from North Midlands going to Pennsylvania and Delaware. Southern English indentured servants to Virginia. And the rest of the South? Disproportionately herders from Scotland, Ireland, and northern England. Naturally, the idea has some problems. Pastoralists from the British Isles mostly settled in the hill country of the South, whereas the honor culture is stronger in the Southern lowlands. Others have suggested that the Southern ethos of retributive violence was born from the white Southern nightmare scenario of slave uprisings. But most historians have found a lot of validity in Fischer’s idea. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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honor killings typically differ from garden-variety domestic violence in several ways: (a) The latter is usually committed by a male partner; the former are usually committed by male blood relatives, often with the approval of and facilitation by female relatives. (b) The former is rarely an act of spontaneous passion but instead is often planned with the approval of family members. (c) Honor killings are often rationalized on religious grounds, presented without remorse, and approved by religious leaders. (d) Honor killings are carried out openly—after all, how else can “honor” be regained for the family?—and the chosen perpetrator is often an underage relative (e.g., a younger brother), to minimize the extent of sentencing for the act. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Hunter-gatherer societies have typically been egalitarian, as we’ll soon see, throughout hominin history. Inequality emerged when “stuff”—things to possess and accumulate—was invented following animal domestication and the development of agriculture. The more stuff, reflecting surplus, job specialization, and technological sophistication, the greater the potential inequality. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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cross-cultural variation concerns how unequally resources (e.g., land, food, material goods, power, or prestige) are distributed. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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inequality expands enormously when cultures invent inheritance within families. Once invented, inequality became pervasive. Among traditional pastoralist or small-scale agricultural societies, levels of wealth inequality match or exceed those in the most unequal industrialized societies. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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stratified cultures are ideally suited to being conquerors—they come with chains of command. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 293 | Location 4490-4495 | Added on Tuesday, June 30, 2015 12:19:44 AM

You learn a ton about a community’s social capital with two simple questions. First: “Can people usually be trusted?” A community in which most people answer yes is one with fewer locks, with people watching out for one another’s kids and intervening in situations where one could easily look away. The second question is how many organizations someone participates in—from the purely recreational (e.g., a bowling league) to the vital (e.g., unions, tenant groups, co-op banks). A community with high levels of such participation is one where people feel efficacious, where institutions work transparently enough that people believe they can effect change. People who feel helpless ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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cheaters. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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“Unequal societies may need ambivalence for system stability: Income inequality compensates groups with partially positive social images.” ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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it’s not so much being poor that predicts poor health. It’s feeling poor—someone’s subjective SES (e.g., the answer to “How do you feel you’re doing financially when you compare yourself with other people?”) is at least as good a predictor of health as is objective SES. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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it’s not so much that poverty predicts poor health; it’s poverty amid plenty—income inequality. The surest way to make someone feel poor is to rub their nose in what they don’t have. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 296 | Location 4537-4538 | Added on Tuesday, June 30, 2015 12:24:36 AM

“secession of the wealthy” promotes “private affluence and public squalor.” ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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key crime-fighting tool, education. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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here—despite the conservative nightmare of class warfare, of the poor rising up to slaughter the wealthy, when inequality fuels violence, it is mostly the poor preying on the poor. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 297 | Location 4553-4558 | Added on Tuesday, June 30, 2015 12:26:20 AM

if the plane has a first-class section, there’s almost a fourfold increase in the odds of a coach passenger having air rage. Force coach passengers to walk through first class when boarding, and you more than double the chances further. Nothing like starting a flight by being reminded of where you fit into the class hierarchy. And completing the parallel with violent crime, when air rage is boosted in coach by reminders of inequality, the result is not a crazed coach passenger sprinting into first class to shout Marxist slogans. It’s the guy being awful to the old woman sitting next to him, or to the flight attendant.* ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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goals ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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The year 2008 marked a human milestone, a transition point nine thousand years in the making: for the first time, the majority of humans lived in cities. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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cities—in traditional settings there’s no whodunit, since everyone knows what everyone dun. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Growing cultures had to invent mechanisms for norm enforcement among strangers. For example, across numerous traditional cultures, the larger the group, the greater the punishment for norm violations and the more cultural emphases on equitable treatment of strangers. Moreover, larger groups evolved “third-party punishment” (stay tuned for more in the next chapter)—rather than victims punishing norm violators, punishment is meted out by objective third parties, such as police and courts. At an extreme, a crime not only victimizes its victim but also is an affront to the collective population—hence “The People Versus Joe Blow.”*44 ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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it is only when societies grow large enough that people regularly encounter strangers that “Big Gods” emerge—deities who are concerned with human morality and punish our transgressions.45 Societies with frequent anonymous interactions tend to outsource punishment to gods.* In contrast, hunter-gatherers’ gods are less likely than chance to care whether we’ve been naughty or nice. Moreover, in further work across a range of traditional cultures, Norenzayan has shown that the more informed and punitive people consider their moralistic gods to be, the more generous they are to coreligionist strangers in a financial allocation game. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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it makes aggressive rats more aggressive. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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makes unaggressive individuals more timid. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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exaggerates preexisting social tendencies. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Surprise: both outcomes occur; ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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violence can arise “due to the structure of boundaries between groups rather than as a result of inherent conflicts between the groups themselves.” They then showed that the clarity of borders matters as well. Good, clear-cut fences—e.g., mountain ranges or rivers between groups—make for good neighbors. “Peace does not depend on integrated coexistence, but rather on well defined topographical and political boundaries separating groups, allowing for partial autonomy within a single country,” the authors concluded. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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weather—Western-style planning ahead arose from the annual reality of winter coming. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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The relationship between drought and violence is tricky. The civil conflict referred to in the previous paragraph concerned deaths caused by battle between governmental and nongovernmental forces (i.e., civil wars or insurgencies). Thus, rather than fighting over a watering hole or a field for grazing, this was fighting for modern perks of power. But in traditional settings drought may mean spending more time foraging or hauling water for your crops. Raiding to steal the other group’s women isn’t a high priority, and why rustle someone else’s cows when you can’t even feed your own? Conflict declines. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Why does religion arise? Because it makes in-groups more cooperative and viable (stay tuned for more in the next chapter). Because humans need personification and to see agency and causality when facing the unknown. Or maybe inventing deities is an emergent by-product of the architecture of our social brains.54 Amid these speculations, far more boggling is the variety of the thousands of religions we’ve invented. They vary as to number and gender of deities; whether there’s an afterlife, what it’s like, and what it takes to enter; whether deities judge or interfere with humans; whether we are born sinful or pure and whether sexuality changes those states; whether the myth of a religion’s founder is of sacredness from the start (so much so that, say, wise men visit the infant founder) or of a sybarite who reforms (e.g., Siddhārtha’s transition from palace life to being the Buddha); whether the religion’s goal is attracting new followers (say, with exciting news—e.g., an angel visited me in Manchester, New York, and gave me golden plates) or retaining members (we’ve got a covenant with God, so stick with us). On and on. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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desert cultures are prone toward monotheistic religions; rain forest dwellers, polytheistic ones. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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a religion reflects the values of the culture that invented or adopted it, and very effectively transmits those values; ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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both (starting with Keeley’s subtitle) suggest a hidden agenda among archaeologists to ignore that evidence. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 308 | Location 4723-4723 | Added on Tuesday, June 30, 2015 12:45:15 AM

document savagery galore in prehistoric tribal societies—mass ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 308 | Location 4721-4723 | Added on Tuesday, June 30, 2015 12:45:22 AM

violence and the worst horrors of inhumanity have been declining for the last half millennium, thanks to the constraining forces of civilization; and (b) the warfare and barbarity preceding that transition are as old as the human species. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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these groups often live in degraded habitats that increase resource competition, thanks to being increasingly hemmed in by the outside world. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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HGs typically work fewer hours for their daily bread than do traditional farmers and are longer-lived and healthier. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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an HG’s best investment against future hunger is to put meat in other people’s stomachs now. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Gossip is the weapon of norm enforcement. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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From our biological perspective, the most fascinating point is how brains shape cultures, which shape brains, which shape . . . That’s why it’s called coevolution. We’ve seen some evidence of coevolution ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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what is most consequential is childhood, the time when cultures inculcate individuals into further propagating their culture. In that regard, probably the most important fact about genetics and culture is the delayed maturation of the frontal cortex—the genetic programming for the young frontal cortex to be freer from genes than other brain regions, to be sculpted instead by environment, to sop up cultural norms. To hark back to a theme from the first pages of this book, it doesn’t take a particularly fancy brain to learn how to motorically, say, throw a punch. But it takes a fancy, environmentally malleable frontal cortex to learn culture-specific rules about when it’s okay to throw punches. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 327 | Location 5008-5009 | Added on Tuesday, June 30, 2015 1:06:02 AM

most of earth’s humans have inherited their beliefs about the nature of birth and death and everything in between and thereafter from preliterate Middle Eastern pastoralists. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Kill the infants. This decreases the reproductive success of the previous male and, thanks to the females ceasing to nurse, they start ovulating.* ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 334 | Location 5119-5120 | Added on Tuesday, June 30, 2015 1:14:27 AM

hamsters; because males are nomadic, any infant a male encounters is unlikely to be his, and thus he attempts to kill it ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 336 | Location 5152-5152 | Added on Tuesday, June 30, 2015 1:23:09 AM

The extent to which a male primate cares for infants reflects his certainty of paternity. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 340 | Location 5208-5211 | Added on Tuesday, June 30, 2015 1:29:13 AM

What does the immune system do? It differentiates between you and invaders—“self” and “nonself”—and attacks the latter. All your cells carry your unique MHC-derived protein, and surveillance immune cells attack any cell lacking this protein password. And MHC-derived proteins also wind up in pheromones, producing a distinctive olfactory signature. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 340 | Location 5204-5206 | Added on Tuesday, June 30, 2015 1:29:20 AM

For example, place a mouse in an arena; at one end is an unrelated female, at the other, a full sister from a different litter, never encountered before. The mouse spends more time with the sister, suggesting genetically based kin recognition. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 340 | Location 5212-5215 | Added on Tuesday, June 30, 2015 1:29:59 AM

The closer the relative, the more similar their cluster of MHC genes and the more similar their olfactory signature. Olfactory neurons in a mouse contain receptors that respond most strongly to the mouse’s own MHC protein. Thus, if the receptor is maximally stimulated, it means the mouse is sniffing its armpit. If near maximally stimulated, it’s a close relative. Moderately, a distant relative. Not at all (though the MHC protein is being detected by other olfactory receptors), it’s a hippo’s armpit.* ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 341 | Location 5216-5218 | Added on Tuesday, June 30, 2015 1:30:18 AM

Recall from chapter 5 how the adult brain makes new neurons. In rats, pregnancy triggers neurogenesis in the olfactory system. Why there? So that olfactory recognition is in top form when it’s time to recognize your newborn; if the neurogenesis doesn’t occur, maternal behavior is impaired.25 ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Tit for Tat doesn’t stand a chance. Always Defect–ers playing each other produces the second-worst outcome for each. But a Tit for Tat–er playing an Always Defect–er does worse, getting the sucker payoff that first round before becoming a de facto Always Defect–er. This raises the second great challenge for reciprocal altruism: forget which strategy is best at fostering cooperation—how do you ever start any type? ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 352 | Location 5397-5399 | Added on Tuesday, June 30, 2015 1:40:49 AM

Consider two Tit for Tat–ers amid ninety-eight Always Defect–ers. Both will crash and burn . . . unless they find each other and form a stable cooperative core, where the Always Defect–ers either must switch to Tit for Tat or go extinct. A nidus of cooperation crystallizes outward through the population. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 353 | Location 5412-5416 | Added on Tuesday, June 30, 2015 1:42:30 AM

Suppose you’ve discovered two new species of primates. Despite watching both for years, here’s all you know: In species A, male and females have similar body sizes, coloration, and musculature; in species B, males are far bigger and more muscular than females and have flashy, conspicuous facial coloration (jargon: species B is highly “sexually dimorphic”). We’ll now see how these two facts allow you to accurately predict a ton of things about these species. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Note on page 354 | Location 5415 | Added on Tuesday, June 30, 2015 1:44:26 AM

humans not sexually dimorphic ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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“pair-bonding” species, B a “tournament” species. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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In some species the fetus has an ally during maternal/fetal conflict—the father. Consider a species where males are migratory, mating with females and then moving on, never to be seen again. What’s a male’s opinion about maternal/fetal conflict? Make sure the fetus, i.e., his child, grabs as much nutrition as possible, even if that lessens Mom’s future reproductive potential—who cares, that won’t be his kid down the line. He’s more than just rooting for his fetus. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Paternal imprinted genes bias toward more fetal growth, while maternal imprinted genes counter this. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Dawkins introduced a great metaphor: a cake recipe is a genotype, and how the cake tastes is the phenotype.* Genotype chauvinists emphasize that the recipe is what is passed on, the sequence of words that make for a stable replicator. But people select for taste, not recipe, say the phenotypists, and taste reflects more than just the recipe—after all, there are recipe/environment interactions where bakers differ in their skill levels, cakes bake differently at various altitudes, etc. The recipe-versus-taste question can be framed practically: Your cake company isn’t selling enough cakes. Do you change the recipe or the baker? ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 362 | Location 5546-5551 | Added on Tuesday, June 30, 2015 1:57:42 AM

Here’s a great example of neo–group selectionism: As a poultry farmer, you want your groups of chickens to lay as many eggs as possible. Take the most prolific egg layer in each group, forming them into a group of superstar chickens who, presumably, will be hugely productive. Instead, egg production is miniscule.45 Why was each superstar the egg queen in her original group? Because she would aggressively peck subordinates enough to stress them into reduced fertility. Put all these mean ones together, and a group of subordinated chickens will outproduce them. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Human social interactions are profoundly organized around kin selection; ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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we are obsessed with kinship terms, but the terms often don’t overlap with actual biological relatedness. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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we do kin recognition cognitively, by thinking about ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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crucially, not always rationally—as a general rule, we treat people like relatives when they feel like relatives. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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crucial—we can be manipulated into feeling more or less related to someone than we actually are. When it is the former, wonderful things happen—we adopt, donate, advocate for, empathize with. We look at someone very different from us and see similarities. It is called pseudokinship. And the converse? One of the tools of the propagandist and ideologue drumming up hatred of the out-group—blacks, Jews, Muslims, Tutsis, Armenians, Roma—is to characterize them as animals, vermin, cockroaches, pathogens. So different that they hardly count as human. It’s called pseudospeciation, and as will be seen in chapter 15, it underpins many of our worst moments. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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We’re the species with unprecedented cooperation among unrelated individuals, even total strangers; ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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sharing—all driven by the third leg of the evolution of behavior, namely that it is evolutionarily advantageous for nonrelatives to cooperate. Sometimes. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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core of cooperation and competition among human groups and cultures. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 373 | Location 5715-5716 | Added on Tuesday, June 30, 2015 2:15:24 AM

So critics will often demand, “Show me the gene that you assume is there.” And sociobiologists will respond, “Show me a more parsimonious explanation than this assumption.” ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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What triggers punctuated events of sudden change? A sudden, massive selective factor that kills most of a species, the only survivors being ones with some obscure genetic trait that turned out to be vital—an “evolutionary bottleneck.” ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

• Your Highlight on page 384 | Location 5888-5894 | Added on Tuesday, June 30, 2015 2:24:42 AM

The context and meaning of a behavior are usually more interesting and complex than the mechanics of the behavior. To understand things, you must incorporate neurons and hormones and early development and genes, etc., etc. These aren’t separate categories—there are few clear-cut causal agents, so don’t count on there being the brain region, the neurotransmitter, the gene, the cultural influence, or the single anything that explains a behavior. Instead of causes, biology is repeatedly about propensities, potentials, vulnerabilities, predispositions, proclivities, interactions, modulations, contingencies, if/then clauses, context dependencies, exacerbation or diminution of preexisting tendencies. Circles and loops and spirals and Möbius strips. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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“There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don’t.” There are more of the first. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Kids grow in environments whose nonrandom stimuli tacitly pave the way for dichotomizing. If an infant sees faces of only one skin color, the salient thing about the first face with a different skin color will be the skin color. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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age eight ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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liberals are typically uncomfortable discussing race with their children. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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the parents most intent on preventing it are often lousy at it. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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the speed and minimal sensory stimuli required for the brain to process group differences; (b) the unconscious automaticity of such processes; (c) its presence in other primates and very young humans; and (d) the tendency to group according to arbitrary differences, and to then imbue those markers with power. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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people often make in-group amends by being more antisocial to another group. Moreover, in such scenarios, the guiltier the person feels about her in-group violation, the worse she is to Thems.16 Thus, sometimes you help Us by directly helping Us, sometimes by hurting Them. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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is the goal that your group do well, or simply better than Them? If the former, maximizing absolute levels of in-group well-being is the goal, and the levels of rewards to Them is irrelevant; if the latter, the goal is maximizing the gap between Us and Them. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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As we saw, people are more likely to make amends for transgressions against Us than against Them. What about responses to other in-group members violating a norm? Most common is forgiving Us more readily than Them. As we will see, this is often rationalized—we screw up because of special circumstances; They screw up because that’s how They are. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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when someone’s transgression constitutes airing the group’s dirty laundry that affirms a negative stereotype. The resulting in-group shame can provoke high levels of punishment as a signal to outsiders.21 ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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If you want someone to prosecute mafiosi with tireless intensity, get a proud Italian American outraged by the stereotypes generated by the Mob.22 ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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being in a group means that someone else’s behaviors can make you look bad.*24 ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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“Disgust serves as an ethnic or out-group marker.” ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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people with the strongest negative attitudes toward immigrants, foreigners, and socially deviant groups tend to have low thresholds for interpersonal disgust (e.g., are resistant to wearing a stranger’s clothes or sitting in a warm seat just vacated).27 ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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whether it was ancient Rome, medieval England, imperial China, or the antebellum South, the elite had the system-justifying stereotype of slaves as simple, childlike, and incapable of independence.29 ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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no other primate kills over ideology, theology, or aesthetics. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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“Stereotyping isn’t a case of lazy, short-cutting cognition. It isn’t conscious cognition at ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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cognitions are post-hoc justifications for feelings and intuitions, to convince yourself that you have indeed rationally put your finger on why. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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The guy’s authoritarian temperament is unsettled by novelty and ambiguity about hierarchies; ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Our cognitions run to catch up with our affective selves, searching for the minute factoid or plausible fabrication that explains why we hate Them.42 ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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And it’s the same derogation—they’re cold, greedy, cleverly devious, clannish, don’t assimilate,* have loyalties elsewhere—but, dang, they sure know how to make money, and you probably should go to one who is a doctor if you have something serious. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Hurrah for clawing your way to the top, for sweaty, zero-sum, muscular capitalism. But what about the more interesting issue of how high rank, once attained, is maintained? As we’ll see, this has less to do with muscle than with social skills. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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point—social competence is challenging, and this is reflected in the brain. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Try not to be a subordinate baboon. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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This is impossible to determine in wild animals, but in captive primate populations the distinctive physiological features of a rank generally follow, rather than precede, the establishment of the rank.19 ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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In other words, conservatives start gut and stay gut; liberals go from gut to head.34 ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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It’s that liberals are more motivated to push toward situational explanations. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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the personal attributions of snap judgments readily feel dissonant to liberals, at odds with their principles; thus they are motivated to think their way to a more consonant view. In contrast, even with more time, conservatives don’t become more situational, because there’s no dissonance. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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increasing cognitive load* should make people more conservative. This is precisely the case. The time pressure of snap judgments is a version of increased cognitive load. Likewise, people become more conservative when tired, in pain or distracted with a cognitive task, or when blood alcohol levels rise. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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willpower takes metabolic power, thanks to the glucose demands of the frontal cortex. This was the finding that when people are hungry, they become less generous in economic games. A real-world example of this is startling (see graph on previous page)—in a study of more than 1,100 judicial rulings, prisoners were granted parole at about a 60 percent rate when judges had recently eaten, and at essentially a 0 percent rate just before judges ate (note also the overall decline over the course of a tiring day). Justice may be blind, but she’s sure sensitive to her stomach gurgling.36 ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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six foundations of morality—care versus harm; fairness versus cheating; liberty versus oppression; loyalty versus betrayal; authority versus subversion; sanctity versus degradation. Both experimental and real-world data show that liberals preferentially value the first three goals, namely care, fairness, and liberty (and, showing an overlap with Kohlbergian formulations, undervaluing loyalty, authority, and sanctity is in many ways synonymous with postconventional thinking). In contrast, conservatives heavily value loyalty, authority, and sanctity. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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Obviously, this is a big difference. Is it okay to criticize your group to outsiders? Rightists: no, that’s disloyal. Leftists: yes, if justified. Should you ever disobey a law? Rightists: no, that undermines authority. Leftists: of course, if it’s a bad law. Is it okay to burn the flag? Rightists: never, it’s sacred. Leftists: come on, it’s a piece of cloth. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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categories of emotional makeup. To summarize: on the average, rightists are made more anxious by ambiguity and have a stronger need for closure, dislike novelty, are more comforted by structure and hierarchy, more readily perceive circumstances as threatening, and are more parochial in their empathy. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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as compared with liberals, such conservatives are more likely to associate “arms” with “weapons” (rather than with “legs”), more likely to interpret ambiguous faces as threatening, and more easily conditioned to associate negative (but not positive) stimuli with neutral stimuli. Republicans report three times as many nightmares as do Democrats, particularly ones involving loss of personal power. As the saying goes, a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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finding—social conservatives tend toward lower thresholds for disgust than liberals. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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“bad barrel” theory—the issue isn’t how a few bad apples can ruin the whole barrel; it’s how a bad barrel can turn any apple bad. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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some environments cause epidemics of evil, a “public health” approach. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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“The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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warriors who transform and standardize their appearance before battle are more likely to torture and mutilate their enemies than warriors from cultures that don’t transform themselves. ======== Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)

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SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS ========

Bibliography