Taking Care of a Water Buffalo

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I just saw a video online one of these nature videos where a lion a lion as female lion was hunting and was able to separate out a newborn water buffalo from the pack. But then rather than snacking on it and finishing off its prey the lioness adopted it and started taking care of it. The idea was well maybe she had just lost her own cubs and her maternal instincts overwhelmed her hunger instincts so that's a paradigm for how you know we can switch back and forth between different ways of conceptualizing others even within the constraints of our biological responses yeah because if you work hard enough you could find the commonalities.

A common argument against free will is that human behavior is not freely chosen, but rather determined by a number of factors. So what are those factors, anyway? There’s no one better equipped to answer this question than Robert Sapolsky, a leading psychoneurobiologist who has studied human behavior from a variety of angles. In this conversation we follow the path Sapolsky sets out in his bestselling book Behave, where he examines the influences on our behavior from a variety of timescales, from the very short (signals from the amygdala) to the quite ancient (genetic factors tracing back tens of thousands of years and more). It’s a dizzying tour that helps us understand the complexity of human action.

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Robert Sapolsky received his Ph.D. in neuroendocrinology from Rockefeller University. He is currently the John and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor of Biology, Neurology, and Neurosurgery at Stanford University. His awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, the McGovern Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Wonderfest’s Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization.

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