Rules of behaviour

It’s the constant dilemma of the pop science author: how to write something flashy enough to grab readers, but solid enough that it won’t be embarrassing in a few years when the science has moved on. Full scientific rigour entails tedious jargon and even more tedious equations, and nobody wants that. But neither should the messy, uncertain world of scientific research be oversimplified. In his lengthy new book, Behave, the Stanford neuroscientist primatologist Robert Sapolsky walks this tightrope as he explains the biology of humanity’s ‘best and worst’ behaviours.

Behave is a crammed compendium of scientific findings, organised in an ingenious way. Beginning with a human behaviour — the pulling of a trigger, say: Sapolsky recounts the science of what happened in the trigger-puller’s brain seconds before, then hours before, then weeks and years before, continuing with what happened in their childhood, in the womb and so on, finishing up with no less than the evolution of behaviour, millennia ago.