letusreadnlowerscreentime 's review for:

The Trouble with Testosterone: And Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament by Robert M. Sapolsky

4.0

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This is the first book I have read of this person. He seems like an interesting person. The whole religion OCD and schizotypical thing was so so so fascinating. I LOVED how he started with cultures that white people side eye so that they would agree with everything he was saying and then he pulled the rug from under them by mentioning their religion. IT WAS HILARIOUS. HE GOT YOU WHITE PEOPLE HA. 

Anyways.. to properly understand more of the concepts that were being talked about, I'd probably have to read the book again but I don't think I would. Still.. an interesting read. 

Some things I highlighted:

“You see, I’ve always told you I just felt gay. This is what I was meant to be.”

Being gay is not a disease. (If you don’t believe me, just ask the American Psychiatric Association. Being gay used to be a mental illness until the APA, in a spasm of political correctness and enlightenment, changed its mind and struck homosexuality from its bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Overnight, millions of people had one less disease, which is a pretty impressive outcome of a committee meeting.)

drawing a boundary between “the essence of a person” and “the biological distortion of that essence” is artificial

Being healthy, it has been said, really consists of having the same disease as everyone else.

We are not alone.

Bunch of baboons sitting around in a field when there’s a fight

even Baboons love the gossip after all.

“Humans had to invent language so we would have something to talk about around the fire at night.”

what I do with my college education is creep around in the bushes after a bunch of baboons, waiting for the instant when they are all looking the other way so that I can zip a dart into someone’s tush

To hell with logic and sensible behavior, to hell with tradition and respecting your elders, to hell with this drab little town, and to hell with that knot of fear in your stomach. Curiosity, excitement, adventure—the hunger for novelty is something fundamentally daft, rash, and enriching that we share with our whole taxonomic order.

The danger of Olympian knowledge is that you then look down upon things from an Olympian height, and from that telescoped distance, things seem equivalent.

“burking,” named for William Burke, the aging resurrectionist who pioneered the charming practice of luring beggars into his home for a charitable meal, then strangling them for a quick sell to the anatomists. Although such indiscretions were generally overlooked...

Be really certain before you ever pronounce something to be the norm, because at that instant, you have now made it supremely difficult to ever again look at an exception to that supposed norm and to see it objectively.

testosterone isn’t causing aggression, it’s exaggerating the aggression that’s already there.

It’s not causing aggression, it’s exaggerating the preexisting pattern of it, exaggerating the response to environmental triggers of aggression.

Drop out of the rat race and go back to the carpentry you’ve always been good at, or maybe answer that headhunter’s phone call and interview with some other company in the business. Get a hobby, do some regular exercise to let the steam out. Make sure you have someone to talk to—a spouse, a significant other, a friend, a therapist, a circle of people in the same business who’d understand; just make sure you’re not carrying this burden alone.

“Life is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”

The purpose of science is not to cure us of our sense of mystery and wonder, but to constantly reinvent and reinvigorate it.

Also, the whole thing where a bunch of scientists were writing each other letters with quoted research papers and all that jazz was so hilarious. Bunch of nerds.