‘I was 14 when I decided that there is no free will, that we are just biological machines,’ says the Stanford Neurobiology and Biology Anthropology professor Robert Sapolsky. He is now 65 and still shares the same conviction.

INTERVIEW BY ALPER BAHÇEKAPILI

ARTWORK BY SELMAN HOŞGÖR

What are the defining dynamics at the core of human behaviour? How are our expressions of love, anger, happiness and sadness determined? How are the thoughts and actions, that make us what we are, forged? Leading behavioural biologist, Robert Sapolsky, has been looking for answers to these questions, for almost half a century. He tries to explain his findings to the public throughbooks and seminars, not least the acclaimed lectures he gave at Stanford University. If you want to understand why you behave in a certain way, Sapolsky’s interdisciplinary course titled, Human Behavioural Biology – an amalgamation of biology, neuroscience, endocrinology, socio-biology and psychology – is bound to open new horizons.

At the beginning of your TED talk, The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst Selves, you suggest that humans are not completely opposed to violence and that we can easily acknowledge some of our violent acts as ‘acts of good’, when presented with ‘righteous reasons’. Hence, you define us as a miserably violent species. You bring up this topic in your book, Behave, as well. One would hope that we’re becoming more and more civilised, but even today we witness, not just violence between individuals, but a great deal of war and conflict. Regarding your statement, ‘If you want to understand a behaviour, you need to understand everything from one second before to millions of years before’, is violence embedded in our heritage? Is there any possibility for a non-violent future for humanity?

I am a pessimist by nature, so my easy answer is that violence is inevitable – but some kinds of it really are not. I always fall back on the example of my baboon studies – baboons are amongst the most violent non-human primates, every textbook teaches that. Yet, in the 1980s, something very unique happened to a troop of mine and they developed a culture never reported before in baboons: one very low in aggression and very high in social affiliation. My conclusion is that if, beneath the surface, baboons turn out to have the behavioural flexibility to change that radically, we certainly do as well; I think there are very few inevitabilities, regarding human social behaviour. So, maybe we can progress towards the point of [becoming] hunter-gatherers, where warfare is unheard of. However, this is where the pessimism comes in: there is the same rate of inter-individual violence, of the usual types, amongst hunter-gatherers as in industrialised societies – a man being violent to another man over competition for a woman, or a man displacing aggression onto a woman...