Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

All you could ever want to know about human behavior from a scientific perspective.

Looking at behavior through different lenses, Sapolsky slowly zooms out in time, going from neurons firing (milliseconds) to sensory inputs (seconds) to hormones (hours) to neural-plasticity (days, months) to epigenetics and genetics (your lifetime) to cultural programming (many many lifetimes) to evolution itself (humanity's lifetime). And the path is highlighted with summaries and anecdotes from the most famous scientific studies. The second half of the book talks about topics like Us-Them, hierarchy/obedience/resistance, morality, pain and empathy, what leads us to kill and the free will discourse.

Things I've learned:
- The prefrontal-cortex is the last part of our brain that matures (in the early twenties), therefore it's more prone to be influenced by nurture than nature. This is where our culture takes root, overrules our genes and influences our decision making.
- Ecology shapes culture. Asia, a continent build on rice, has a holistic world-view, as rice-agriculture requires the collaboration of the many. The west has a individualistic world-view in contrast.
- The brains of conservatives and progressives are indeed different!
- As soon as societies evolved into forming bigger groups, the need for a moralizing god emerged.

The writing is a lot more engaging as one might expect from a 700-page psychology book. Sapolsky is quite witty, which keeps it entertaining. Still took a while to get through though.