Determined, page 61
sterilization, compulsory, 305
stigmergy, 187–88n
stochastic movement, 205–6
Brownian motion, 205–8, 214n, 238, 462n
Stokes, George, 206n
Stokes-Einstein equation, 206n
Stoltenberg, Jens, 380, 486n
strange attractors, 132, 144, 146, 147
Strawson, Galen, 6n
Strawson, Peter, 242
stress, 55–56, 59, 65, 70, 78n, 81, 109–111, 113, 116, 117, 119n, 290, 315, 335n, 388, 397
childhood adversity and, 81, 285
Gulf War syndrome and, 339
hormones and, 59, 65, 68, 70, 75, 109, 111, 285, 287, 396, 397n
maternal, in pregnancy, 68, 117, 456n
predictive information and, 388
schizophrenia and, 323, 326
striatum, 99
stroke, 25, 95
substance dualists, 11n
Sullivan, Anne, 91
superposition, 209, 210, 213, 217, 218, 221, 222, 229, 237
supplementary motor area (SMA), 22, 24, 25, 29, 30, 34, 38, 41, 41n, 45, 96
Supreme Court, 305
Surviving Schizophrenia (Torrey), 332
swarm intelligence, 159, 161, 161n, 190
sweatshop workers, 401–2n
synapses, 57, 58, 60, 61, 113, 114, 120, 168n, 186, 220–24, 226, 237, 415–23
in Aplysia, 274, 276, 278, 283
conditioning and, 283, 290
synctitium, 415–16
Szasz, Thomas, 317n
T
tail sensory neuron (TSN), 272, 272, 274–75, 274, 275, 276
Tanzania, 77n
tardive dyskinesia, 328n
Tarlaci, Sultan, 222
tau protein, 150
Tegmark, Max, 219
Teller, Edward, 25n
Temkin, Owsei, 304n, 307–8
temporoparietal junction, 121, 371
temptation, 95, 98, 101, 103, 106, 108, 123
teneurins, 120
Tero, Atsushi, 164–65
terrorist attacks
Boston Marathon, 485n
by Breivik, 379–82, 485n, 486n
by McVeigh, 373–76, 379
9/11, 385, 486n
terror management theory, 386
testosterone, 52–54, 59, 61, 65, 78n, 109, 110, 196, 290, 292, 371, 437–38n
THC, 287
Thompson, Everett, 356
Thompson, Florence Shoemaker, 356–57
Thorazine, 327, 328n
three-body problem, 132
Thunberg, Greta, 336n
time, 221n, 222n, 237
tit for tat, 362
toenails, 188–89, 188, 189
Torrey, E. Fuller, 321, 331–35, 334, 337
town, designing, 179–82, 200
Toxoplasma, 315, 323
transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), 26n, 101
transcription factors, 207
transgender identity, 339–40
transposons, 360–61n, 361
trauma, 111
post-traumatic stress disorder, 58, 338–39
traveling-salesman problem, 158–59, 196
Tree of Life Synagogue, 381
trees, 159, 172–73, 174n
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, 401n
trolley problem, 40n
Trujillo, Rafael, 294n
Trump, Donald, 288–90, 378, 394n
truth, 387–88, 392
truth and reconciliation commission model, 347–48
tryptophan, 420
Tsarnaev brothers, 485n
Tse, Peter, 26n, 33n, 81, 88–89, 218, 231, 236, 391–92
TSN (tail sensory neuron), 272, 272, 274–75, 274, 275, 276
tubulin, 220
Tuchman, Barbara, 341
Turing, Alan, 176n
Turing mechanism, 176n
“turtles all the way down,” 1–2, 44, 46, 81, 82, 173, 241
Twenty-One Balloons, The (Pène du Bois), 126
twins, 207n, 323
schizophrenia and, 333, 334
typhoid, 350
tyrosine, 420, 421
U
Ultimatum Game, 361, 362, 364, 371
Umbreit, Mark, 378
uncertainty principle, 210
unconscious behaviors, 32
Unger, Howard, 314, 315
United States, 372
university graduation ceremony scenario, 16–17
unpredictability and predictability, 147–50, 152, 154, 192, 202, 203, 241, 388
in chaotic systems, 129–34, 193
determinism and, 148–51, 154, 160, 193, 196, 205
in emergent systems, 157–58
urban planning, 179–82, 200
Urschel, John, 185n
V
Vargas, Manuel, 7–8, 27
vasopressin, 54, 55
Vaziri, Alipasha, 218
ventricles, 325, 333, 334, 335n
ventromedial PFC (vmPFC), 102–3, 109–11, 113–15, 121–24, 371
Versailles, Palace of, 155, 189
vesicles, 222–26, 417, 421
veto power, 33–36, 38, 96
Vicious, Sid, 295, 296, 296
victim’s rights, 355, 378
violence, 351, 390
epilepsy associated with, 308–10
schizophrenia associated with, 319
viruses, 231–32, 359, 403
visual cortex, 167, 199–200
Vohs, Katherine, 248
von Braun, Wernher, 25n
von Economo neuron (VEN), 61–62n, 99n
von Neumann, John, 25n, 139n, 142n
Vulpiani, Angelo, 148
W
Waco siege, 372–73
Wall, Patrick, 428
warriors, 245
Washington, D.C., 20n
Washington Advocates for the Mentally Ill, 330
Washington Post, 357, 375
water, 157, 163, 200, 459n
amino acids and, 182
wave/particle duality, 208–11, 221
Wayne, Ron, 385–86
wealth, 401
weather, 65, 129
computer modeling of, 129–31, 131
Weaver, Randy, 372
Wegner, Daniel, 26, 27
Weil, Andrew, 317n
Weiss, Paul, 157
Weissmuller, Johnny, 296, 296
Wellstone, Paul, 332–33
Weyer, Johann, 344
wheat farming, 76
Wheatley, Thalia, 33
Where Does the Weirdness Go? (Lindley), 218
“Where I Rest” (Rosenfeld), 401–2
white noise, 462n
White supremacists, 372, 379, 381, 383
Why Free Will Is Real (List), 193
Wicked, 399
Williamson, Tom, 215n
willpower, 93, 99, 124, 241, 388n, 397
Winfrey, Oprah, 91, 334
Wingfield, John, 437n
witches, 306–7, 317, 344
Wolfram, Stephen, 142
World War II, 477n
see also Nazi Germany
Wozniak, Steve, 386
Y
Yamaguchi, Tsutomu, 385, 386
Young, Beverly, 331
Young, Thomas, 208
Z
Zamora Bonilla, Jesús, 201
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
About the Author
Robert M. Sapolsky is the author of several works of nonfiction, including A Primate’s Memoir, The Trouble with Testosterone, and Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. His most recent book, Behave, was a New York Times bestseller and named a best book of the year by The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. He is a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant.” He and his wife live in San Francisco.
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*The “turtles all the way down” story has versions featuring other celebrated thinkers as the fall guy, rather than William James. We told our version because we liked James’s beard, and there was a building on campus named for him. The “turtles all the way down” punch line has been referenced in numerous cultural contexts, including a great book with that title by John Green (Dutton Books, 2017). All the versions of the story have a male Philosopher King Whoever being challenged by an absurd old woman, which now seems kind of sexist and ageist. That didn’t particularly register with us then, we adolescent males of our time and place.
*My wife is a musical theater director, and I’m her rusty rehearsal pianist/generalized gofer; as a result, this book is riddled with allusions to musicals. If my college self, being ostensibly cool by referring to William James, had been told that my future included my family and me debating who was the greatest Elphaba of all time,* I would have been astonished—“Musicals? Broadway MUSICALS?! What about atonalism?” It’s not what I asked for; sometimes life just slips in through a back door.
(*Idina Menzel. Obviously.)
* The appendix is an introduction to neuroscience, for readers without a background in this area. Also, anyone who has read an agonizingly long book that I wrote (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, Penguin Press, 2017) will recognize the book summarized in the next few paragraphs: Why did that behavior occur? Because of events one second before, one minute . . . one century . . . one hundred million years before.
*“Interactions” implies that those biological influences are meaningless outside the context of social environment (as well as the reverse). They’re inseparable. My orientation happens to be biological, and analyzing the inseparability from that angle is clearest in my mind. But at times, framing the inseparability from a biological rather than a social science perspective makes things clunky; I’ve tried to avoid that to the best of my biologist abilities.
*Some of the most extreme “there’s NO free will” fellow travelers include philosophers such as Gregg Caruso, Derk Pereboom, Neil Levy, and Galen Strawson; I’ll often be discussing their thinking in the pages to come; as an important point, while all reject free will in the everyday sense we understand it when justifying punishment and reward, their rejection is not particularly along biological grounds. In terms of rejecting free will almost entirely on biological grounds, my views are closest to those of Sam Harris, who, appropriately, is not only a philosopher, but a neuroscientist as well.
*That said, there are a few rare diseases that are guaranteed to alter behavior because of a mutation in a single gene (e.g., Tay-Sachs, Huntington’s, and Gaucher diseases). Nonetheless, this isn’t remotely related to issues of our everyday sense of free will, as these diseases cause massive damage in the brain.
*I’d like to note something in preparation for my spending the first half of the book repeatedly saying, “They’re all wrong,” about a lot of scholars thinking about this subject. I can be intensely emotional about ideas, with some evoking the closest I can ever feel to religious awe and others seeming so appallingly wrong that I can be bristly, acerbic, arrogantly judgmental, hostile, and unfair in how I critique them. But despite that, I am majorly averse to interpersonal conflict. In other words, with a few exceptions that will be clear, none of my criticisms are meant to be personal. And as a “some of my best friends” cliché, I like being around people with a particular type of belief in free will, because they’re generally nicer people than those on “my side” and because I hope some of their peace will rub off on me. What I’m trying to say is that I hope I won’t be sounding like a jerk at times, because I very much don’t want to.
*Note: I won’t be considering any theologically based Judeo-Christian views about these subjects beyond this broad summary here. As far as I can tell, most of the theological discussions center around omniscience—if God’s all-knowingness includes knowing the future, how can we ever freely, willingly choose between two options (let alone be judged for our choice)? Amid the numerous takes on this, one answer is that God is outside of time, such that past, present, and future are meaningless concepts (implying, among other things, that God could never relax by going to a movie and being pleasantly surprised by a plot turn—He always knows that the butler didn’t do it). Another answer is one of the limited God, something explored by Aquinas—God cannot sin, cannot make a boulder too heavy for Him to lift, cannot make a square circle (or, as another example that I’ve seen offered by a surprising number of male but not female theologians, even God cannot make a married bachelor). In other words, God cannot do everything, He can just do whatever is possible, and foreseeing whether someone will choose good or evil is not knowable, even for Him. Related to this all, Sam Harris mordantly notes that even if we each have a soul, we sure didn’t get to pick it.
