Behave

This an amazing read - Sapolsky delivers riveting revelations about behaviors across multiple species backed by scientific rigor where he has figured out an optimal way of efficiently transferring dense information to the reader by sprinkling his witty humor throughout the book.

He beautifully describes how something that happened either in an animal or outside it a second before, or a minute before, or an hour before, or days before, or years before, or even centuries before led to particular behavior. He builds on his years of rigorous behavioral scientific studies on babooons and other animals in Africa, finally drawing lines eventually to humans across different cultures. He portrays a wonderful picture telling us how we are at essentially a result of our biology and our environemnt. He touches a wide range of topics that seem to have no connection to behavior at first - like state of hunger, smell of the space you’re in, the softness of the chair you’re sitting on, your skull size, quantum mechanics and manny more thath I am definitely forgetting; and glues them together seemingly effortlessly with topics that seem to directly affect behavior - religion, culture, neuroscience (he goes really into it), hormones (this part was really interesting), childhood and upbringing.

All of this with grounded scientific conviction. I would 100% recommend this to anyone curious about what do we behave like we do. This book will definitely quench your thrist for causality, at least when it comes to humans (and some other animals).