The Trouble With Testosterone And Other Essays On The Biology Of The Human

Thank you for purchasing this Scribner eBook. Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Scribner and Simon & Schuster. CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP or visit us online to sign up at eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com Contents Introduction Acknowledgments How Big Is Yours? Primate Peekaboo The Night You Ruined Your Pajamas Measures of Life The Young and the Reckless The Solace of Patterns Beelzebub’s SAT Scores Poverty’s Remains Junk Food Monkeys The Burden of Being Burden-Free The Trouble with Testosterone The Graying of the Troop Curious George’s Pharmacy The Dangers of Fallen Soufflés in the Developing World The Dissolution of Ego Boundaries and the Fit of My Father’s Shirt Why You Feel Crummy When You’re Sick Circling the Blanket for God About Robert M. Sapolsky For my mother, who, a long time ago, read to me Introduction We all have encountered Reinhold Niebuhr’s serenity prayer at some point: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. Behavioral biology is often the scientific pursuit of that prayer. Which of our less commendable ways of behaving, asks the behavioral biologist, can we hope to change (and how) and which are we stuck with? Asked in a harsher way—as our society so often poses these questions of nature and nurture—for which of our failings should we be held responsible? Did Charles Whitman open fire from the University of Texas observation tower and kill eighteen people because of his brain tumor? Did Richard Speck murder eight nurses because of his alleged extra Y chromosome? Did Dan White kill San Francisco mayor George Moscone and city supervisor Harvey Milk because of his “diminished capacity”: attributable, in part, his lawyers claimed, to a junk food addiction? Did John Hinckley shoot President Reagan because of insanity? Or were they all just rotten characters? What about the spouse sunk in depression? Is a neurochemical imbalance to blame, or is the person just indulging in a profound sulk? Is the floundering schoolchild limited by a learning disability, or plain lazy? In the most narrow sense, behavioral biologists seek to answer questions such as these by exploring the interface between our minds and our bodies. How is it that you can think a thought, have a memory or a surge of emotion —products of our minds—and, as a result, alter the activities of virtually every cell in the body? And, in turn, what are the mechanisms by which events in our bodies—changes in hormonal status, nutrition, health—can change our thoughts and feelings? Answering questions such as these begins to answer the broadest questions of all—what is the biology of what makes us who we are, what is the biology of our individuality, our limits and potentials? This is frightening ground to tread, partly because of the complexity of the questions asked. It’s easier to determine how birds navigate while migrating or how muscle fibers contract than to answer a question like “Is there a genetic basis to criminality?” Scarier still are the abuses to which this work is subject. It’s difficult to become an ideologue about bird migration or muscle physiology, but behavioral biology is a magnet for those with an ax to grind. Conscientious scientists fear that a minute observation, tenuously offered, might be seized upon by someone eager to lend scientific authority to claims like “I’m not responsible for my problems,” or worse, “I don’t have to help you in combating your problems, because they are incurable.” At one extreme can be a wasted life, when prejudice dictates that there is a limit that does not e