Monkeyluv: And Other Essays on Our Lives as Animals

I absolutely LOVED this book! I read it very quickly and had trouble putting it down. It is fascinating, educational, funny, enjoyable and well written about complex issues. Sapolsky, who is the author of A Primate's Memoir, The Trouble with Testosterone and Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, is a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford and a recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant. I found his genius not only to be in his insight and ability to frame questions and pursue their answers, but also to be able to write about it in a way that is accessible to a "nongenius." This book is a collection of previously published essays that are updated for this edition (the updates include notes for further reading and on source materials). Sapolsky divides the book into three parts ("Genes and Who We Are," "Our Bodies and Who We Are" and "Society and Who We Are") and introduces each section with cogent current thinking on the issues addressed. For example, to introduce the first section, Sapolsky writes about how the nature-nurture argument is a red herring; genes contribute to personality/behavior when the environment interacts with them in ways conducive to gene-induced behavior! For example, in "Of Mice and (Hu)men Genes," Sapolsky writes about genes that may indicate a proclivity for depression, but only in certain environments, and summarizes that the reader should be wary of simple expanations. (And, he asserts, as humans we may have more responsibility to create positive environments that interact benignly with risky genes than to understand which genes cause what.) In the second section's "Why are Dreams Dreamlike?" Sapolsky illustrates how answering some questions about how the brain and psyche function just brings up other, deeper questions. Sapolsky's illustrations of his points are fascinating and enlightening (and often funny!). In "The Genetic War Between Men and Women," he writes about how the genes from the father of a species have one goal ("greater, faster, more expensive growth") while genes from the mother have another ("countering that exuberance"). The success comes in nature's ability to balance these goals: "The placenta is ... the scene of a pitched battle, with paternally derived genes pushing [the placenta] to invade more aggressively while maternally derived genes try to hold it back." He lists other examples of this balance in humans and other species. This view of nature and how reproduction is nurtured fascinated me and helped me to see things in a new way. Sapolsky's topics are wide ranging, and the book reminded me a bit of Freakonomics in its tendency to turn its problem-solving focus on whatever issue crossed its path. For example, in the final section, he writes about the differences between the religions of desert peoples and the religions of tropical peoples -- the former tend to have a single god with miltaristic iterations and few rights for women while the latter tend toward pantheism and matrilocal marita

It's easy to tack the disparaging label "pop science" to this book. That would be misleading and counterproductive. What, after all, is "popular science" but science for non-scientists. From a broader perspective this book is informative, enlightening and ably suited for its intended task. Among other virtues, this book is a well-written account of what too many of us believe is valid science. It then discloses where we are mistaken in that belief and provides corrections. In his vividly rendered chapters, Sapolsky offers numerous challenges to "established" thinking. The challenges are often raw and forceful, but they must be understood fully. A primate researcher, the author has spent many years studying baboon behaviour. Those who fear comparison with other primates may be uncomfortable with Sapolsky's conclusions. The material he draws upon for support, however, shows how universal many of our own behaviours are among our close relatives. In this book, he takes up three themes - why searching for "a gene for" any specific behaviour or illness is doomed to failure; what the body contributes to our personality; and what society contributes in determining our "selves". Each section is preceded by an introductory essay, explaining the significance of the topics discussed. In the first section he severely condemns those who want to lock behaviour to genetics. That's an admirable end, but the selections weighed in his judgement are nearly all media accounts. Simplifying human behaviour issues sells magazines and newspapers, and his references to "those scientists" who appear to have advocated "nature over nurture" vapourise when you look for them in the text. Still, the elmination of "gene centrism" is an admirable ambition. That is what the public too often sees and the illusion needs expulsion from the collective public consciousness. He reminds us that many "genetic" drives are environmentally triggered. Whatever the rules are genes function under, they aren't rigid ones. Environment contributes, often in a major way. In the second section, Sapolsky ranges over body-behaviour issues. From the "Twinky Defence" to definitions of dreaming, he explores how the body and brain relate to influence the mind. Emotions result from the cascades of hormones flowing through our bodies. The brain triggers many of these, but the body sends messages to the brain using that chemical medium. While all this may leave the impression that we are almost helpless observers of what these molecular signals drive us to do, the author reminds us that the "big" part of the brain, the frontal cortex, grants us a level of control denied most other animals. Finally, we are treated to an overview of our relation to the departed. Why is there such an intense drive in humans to deal with the dead? That is most ardently expressed when the body is missing. There are bizarre cases noted here, not the least of which is story of the rituals impose

This is another great book in the line of Matt Ridley, driving many coffin nails through genetic determinism, including practitioners of Evolutionary Psychology (with capital letters, as a philosophical mindset) who remain more genetic determinists than they let on while claiming to preach "nature via nurture." Sapolsky is the real deal on "nature via nurture" - indeed, it should be noted that, with the exception of a totally genetically determined thing like Huntington's disease, he preaches "nature ONLY via nurture," or something along that general line. Beyond that, he gets into the nuts and bolts of what we know today, and don't know, about non-coding areas of our DNA, which are NOT all simply "junk DNA." Rather, you have introns and exons for marking where a coding sequence of DNA starts and stops, and even more importantly, you have regulatory, or modulating, sections of DNA, which may tell a coding section only to switch on when there are more than 12 hours of daylight per day, which could be used to trigger mating behavior. Here are some important page by page notes: 23 "More than 95 percent of DNA is non-coding. Sure, a lot of that is the junk-packing material DNA [a lot of which may be "quarantined" remnants of viral DNA, similar to what Norton Utilities does on your PC when necessary], but your average gene comes with a huge instruction manual about how to operate it, and the operator is often environmental." 23-24 "The startling second fact is that when you examine variability in DNA sequences among individuals, the non-coding regions of DNA are considerably more variable than are the regions that code for genes." Sapolsky admits much of this is due to junk DNA areas, but that much of the variability is attributable to regulatory area. Obviously, this has huge impacts on the nurture side of things. 42-44 Good discussion of imprinted genes, which differ from Mendelian biology in that only one is active, usually the one that comes from the parent of the same sex as a child. (Note: this does NOT mean these genes are limited in placement to our sex chromosomes.) The result? These imprinting genes battle for placental and fetal growth, as male and female genes have different "urges" for the placental and fetal rates of growth, due to male-vs-female differences in mammalian breeding strategy. Placental tumors can result if only the paternal gene is active, lack of placental implantation in the uterus when only the maternal gene is active. 61 Offspring of attractive males, in many species studies, survive less often than average. 63. In a study with ducks, with attractive males, it actually appears that the female invests more energy in the egg, laying a larger egg when impregnated by an attractive male. (The egg size is under female control.) Both of these should put some question to old stereotypes about peacock tails being signs of fitness and so increasing mating, etc. At the least, they should caution us to look for more nuanced

This book opened my eyes to things that I'd always wondered about, as well as to new ideas and concepts! I understand myself and those around me so much better than ever before. Sapolsky does an excellent job of writing to the lay person. He puts all of those strange little behaviors into perspective to show you how much of an animal you really are.

Like most people, I am inundated with new books and papers that need my attention. But I always make the time to read anything that Sapolsky writes. This book is a collection of essays that show once again, that we have an extraordinarily brilliant iconoclast in our midst. Time and again he demonstrates that he is not afraid to say when he does not know something, but that he also uncommonly good at coming up with new questions and new solutions. I suggest reading this at the rate of a chapter a day, and meditating on what you have learned: you will not regret it! The whole thing is witty, unconventional and brilliant!