From Robert Sopolsky’s Behave
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.
No one said this was easy. But the subject matters.
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.
Sapolsky’s Behave book summary:
It’s great if your frontal cortex lets you avoid temptation, allowing you to do the harder, better thing. But it’s usually more effective if doing that better thing has become so automatic that it isn’t hard. And it’s often easiest to avoid temptation with distraction and reappraisal rather than willpower.
While it’s cool that there’s so much plasticity in the brain, it’s no surprise—it has to work that way.
Childhood adversity can scar everything from our DNA to our cultures, and effects can be lifelong, even multigenerational. However, more adverse consequences can be reversed than used to be thought. But the longer you wait to intervene, the harder it will be.
Brains and cultures coevolve.
Things that seem morally obvious and intuitive now weren’t necessarily so in the past; many started with nonconforming reasoning.
Repeatedly, biological factors (e.g., hormones) don’t so much cause a behavior as modulate and sensitize, lowering thresholds for environmental stimuli to cause it.
Cognition and affect always interact. What’s interesting is when one dominates.
Genes have different effects in different environments; a hormone can make you nicer or crummier, depending on your values; we haven’t evolved to be “selfish” or “altruistic” or anything else—we’ve evolved to be particular ways in particular settings. Context, context, context.
Biologically, intense love and intense hate aren’t opposites. The opposite of each is indifference.
Adolescence shows us that the most interesting part of the brain evolved to be shaped minimally by genes and maximally by experience; that’s how we learn—context, context, context.
Arbitrary boundaries on continua can be helpful. But never forget that they are arbitrary.
Often we’re more about the anticipation and pursuit of pleasure than about the experience of it.
You can’t understand aggression without understanding fear (and what the amygdala has to do with both).
Genes aren’t about inevitabilities; they’re about potentials and vulnerabilities. And they don’t determine anything on their own. Gene/environment interactions are everywhere. Evolution is most consequential when altering regulation of genes, rather than genes themselves.
We implicitly divide the world into Us and Them, and prefer the former. We are easily manipulated, even subliminally and within seconds, as to who counts as each.
We aren’t chimps, and we aren’t bonobos. We’re not a classic pair-bonding species or a tournament species. We’ve evolved to be somewhere in between in these and other categories that are clear-cut in other animals. It makes us a much more malleable and resilient species. It also makes our social lives much more confusing and messy, filled with imperfection and wrong turns.
The homunculus has no clothes.
While traditional nomadic hunter-gatherer life over hundreds of thousands of years might have been a little on the boring side, it certainly wasn’t ceaselessly bloody. In the years since most humans abandoned a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, we’ve obviously invented many things. One of the most interesting and challenging is social systems where we can be surrounded by strangers and can act anonymously.
Saying a biological system works “well” is a value-free assessment; it can take discipline, hard work, and willpower to accomplish either something wondrous or something appalling. “Doing the right thing” is always context dependent.
Many of our best moments of morality and compassion have roots far deeper and older than being mere products of human civilization.
Be dubious about someone who suggests that other types of people are like little crawly, infectious things.
When humans invented socioeconomic status, they invented a way to subordinate like nothing that hierarchical primates had ever seen before.
“Me” versus “us” (being prosocial within your group) is easier than “us” versus “them” (prosociality between groups).
It’s not great if someone believes it’s okay for people to do some horrible, damaging act. But more of the world’s misery arises from people who, of course, oppose that horrible act . . . but cite some particular circumstances that should make them exceptions. The road to hell is paved with rationalization.
The certainty with which we act now might seem ghastly not only to future generations but to our future selves as well.
Neither the capacity for fancy, rarefied moral reasoning nor for feeling great empathy necessarily translates into actually doing something difficult, brave, and compassionate.
People kill and are willing to be killed for symbolic sacred values. Negotiations can make peace with Them; understanding and respecting the intensity of their sacred values can make lasting peace.
We are constantly being shaped by seemingly irrelevant stimuli, subliminal information, and internal forces we don’t know a thing about.
Our worst behaviors, ones we condemn and punish, are the products of our biology. But don’t forget that the same applies to our best behaviors.
Individuals no more exceptional than the rest of us provide stunning examples of our finest moments as humans.
JD Vance discusses the strong and negative influence family can have on poor children. I think of generations of glucocorticoid buildup. In line with Sapilsky’s thesis on the impact of family on behavior.
J.D. Vance: America's forgotten working class https://www.ted.com/talks/j_d_vance_america_s_forgotten_working_class
