by Robert M. Sapolsky
ISBN: 0684838915
Sapolsky enjoys being provocative (just look at his title) yet at the same time he actually cares about delivering accurate information. At the end of each of these essays, he lists items for furthering reading which include the sources he talks about — so if you don’t believe him, or want to dig deeper, you can. Well, you can if you have access to a medical library.
Sapolsky is, however, conscious of writing for a nonspecialist audience; he is also, refreshingly, conscious of the potential for bias in his point of view. He is upfront about being a primatologist, a professor, an atheist, a grieving son, and a scientist. He explores big questions in behavioral biology, which in his introduction he refers to as “the scientific pursuit” of the serenity prayer: What can an organism know and accept about itself? What can it change? How can it change?
Whether he is considering physical brain science as it relates to sexual orientation, rubber-necking as a primate phenomenon, or the idea that major religious practices were founded by individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder, he steers clear of absolutes either blaming or exulting biology. Real life — real biology — is often lived in shades of gray, and it can be impossible to draw the line between nature and nurture based on the available evidence.
How we see the evidence, or even how we frame the questions, are subject to “cognitive pitfalls.” Sapolsky asks if scientists searching for “a single magic bullet” are acting as the result of cognitive bias. An example: for a given population, two diseases are responsible for all the deaths. You have a choice about what you can discover — a cure for all the cases of one disease, or a cure for half the cases of both diseases. Logically, mathematically, it doesn’t matter which you choose: half the people will live, half will die from disease. But apparently, human beings have “a strong bias” for choice one, eradicating a single disease.
Some of his points might seem like common sense:
“Be really certain before you ever pronounce something to be the norm, because at that instant, you have now make it supremely difficult to ever again look at an exception to that supposed norm and to see it objectively.”
Yet the sense behind points like this one is not, sadly, common enough: from the 1920s through the 1950s, doctors wound up causing numerous cases of thyroid cancer in pursuit of preventing SIDS, all because they didn’t know what a “normal” thymus gland looked like.
I didn’t always agree with Sapolsky (I’m more inclined to believe some animals have the ability to self-medicate than he is; I don’t agree with the “classic picture of many depressives” that he offers) but I always appreciated the way he made his case. You get the sense that he is a man who would rather educate and entertain with a good story than win an argument pursuing a strategy of “I win because I’m louder, I win because I have more degrees.”
I think his real purpose in this collection is to popularize science for a general audience, not by “dumbing down” what he does, but by telling interesting stories and asking fascinating questions that engage the nonscientist with scientific ideas. He ends with this line: “The purpose of science is not to cure us of our sense of mystery and wonder, but to constantly reinvent and reinvigorate it.”
Recommended.
