God's Idea - No Punishment

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In hunter-gatherers all over the planet, the God or gods they make up have no interest in human activities. It's not until you get people living in large settlements and societies where people can interact anonymously that you start inventing what are called moralizing gods. Gods who are watching, gods who know who've been good for goodness sake. No punishment because as soon as you get to a range where you have a society where people can get away with stuff with anonymity, you've got to invent supernatural forces of constraint. And that's incredibly important in terms of making sense of like the values we have about why are we here on earth? We use sinful or not or beautiful or

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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