I used to very politely say that if there is free will then it's in all sorts of boring places, like whether you're going to pick up this or that fork as you begin your meal. There really is none: It's all biology.
The stress response is incredibly ancient evolutionarily. Fish, birds and reptiles secrete the same stress hormones we do, yet their metabolism doesn't get messed up the way it does in people and other primates.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The stress response is a primitive survival mechanism shared among various species without the negative metabolic consequences seen in humans.
Robert Sapolsky highlights the evolutionary origins of the stress response, indicating that it is a fundamental survival mechanism that exists across many species, including fish, birds, and reptiles. Unlike humans and other primates, these animals do not exhibit the same detrimental effects on metabolism from stress, suggesting a difference in how stress impacts different organisms, reflecting both the adaptability of life and the specific vulnerabilities of human physiology.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture about human health, one might quote Sapolsky to explain the impacts of stress.
More from Robert Sapolsky
All quotes →When you've wised up enough, there is a very clear conclusion that you have to reach after a while, which is, at the end of the day, it is really impossible for one person to make a difference.
My adolescent rebellions took the form of, if anything, passive aggressively doing what was asked of me but doing it ten times more than what was asked of me, so that eventually they'd have to beg me to stop.
When humans invented material inequality, they came up with a way of subjugating the low-ranking like nothing ever seen before in the primate world.
Yes, genes are important for understanding our behavior. Incredibly important - after all, they code for every protein pertinent to brain function, endocrinology, etc., etc. But the regulation of genes is often more interesting than the genes themselves, and it's the environment that regulates genes.
I expected social rank to be the determining factor in health, and in some ways that's true. But far more important is what sort of society that rank occurs in. Being low ranking in a benevolent troop is a hell of a lot better for your blood pressure than being low ranking in an aggressive troop.
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I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale. We should not allow it to be believed that all scientific progress can be reduced to mechanisms, machines, gearings, even though such machinery has its own beauty.
Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.
As a physicist, I've always found cosmology to be a rational elixir; it distances me from ordinary concerns.
As someone who flew two space capsules and twice landed in the ocean, I can attest from personal experience how much logistics work is needed to get you home.
We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.
Science has a culture that is inherently cautious and that is normally not a bad thing. You could even say conservative, because of the peer review process and because the scientific method prizes uncertainty and penalises anyone who goes out on any sort of a limb that is not held in place by abundant and well-documented evidence.