HOUSE OVERSIGHT 025158 "us" or "they" and it's a question asked millions of times a day in all the languages of the world in response to all manner of human behavior, good and bad. What brings out the best in us? What brings out the worst? For every complex problem, there's a solution that's simple, appealing, and wrong, H. L. Mencken famously said, and there are certainly many simple and wrong answers to this most important of questions, the question at the root of the way we parent, the way we educate, the way we manage, and the way we punish. The simple yet correct response, of course, is that it's complicated. The longer answer? For that, the great neuroscientist and primatologist Robert Sapolsky needed ten years, and this book. Behave is an epic achievement. In order to make sense of all the sources that conspire to affect human behavior, it begins in the very moment of action, when we commit the decisive deed in question. What is happening in our brain and body at the very moment, and in the minutes that preceded it? The book then pulls back to look how the behavior is conditioned by what the body is exposed to in the days, weeks and months leading up to that behavior. It then goes back to childhood and adolescence, at how the bending of the bough effects how the tree grows. And so on, from neurobiology, endocrinology and the interaction of our senses with the environment to a lifetime's most primal shaping influences, and from there back to our genetic makeup and the very sticky wicket of how genes and environment interact (and how they don't). Finally, Sapolsky expands the view to take in factors that push us past any single person's inheritance and experience: namely culture, in the present tense and back hundreds, even thousands of years, and then back millions of years, to the first humans and the evolution of behavior. The result is surely among the most dazzling tours d 'horizon of the science of human behavior ever attempted, a maj