The one counterexample I’ve heard - though I can’t recall where so I’m happy to be informed about this further - is that Euclidean geometry, despite being incorrect, is more effective than non-Euclidean geometry in some engineering and architecture. In one instance Sapolsky documents how it was discovered that neurons don’t actually touch each other, and the debate was about investigating this reality rather than writing 20 page papers proving that they behave ‘as if’ they do touch each other. The history of science is filled with examples where realism was valued as an end in itself: the shape of atoms the Copernican theory of the solar system and, as Sapolsky details, countless examples from biology.

Theories with unrealistic assumptions but good predictive power are necessary when we don’t know how things work ,but when we find out how things work and it isn’t the same as the theory that means the theory is wrong. Science is about understanding how things work and building theories that match that understanding as well as having predictive power. The idea it is appropriate to build theories about the economy based on armchair reasoning rather than on close observation of how firms, consumers and governments actually work has always struck me as pseudo-scientific nonsense. This is not a review, just a place to collect a few of the key things the book make me think about, and as a warning they do not follow a coherent narrative - each subsection is basically self-contained. At 700 pages it is one of the few such books which deserves its length (another recent example being Adam Tooze’s Crashed). Behave: the Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert Sapolsky is one of those books that has clarified my thinking on a lot of issues - some obvious, like biological determinism others less obvious, like the role of science.

Behave sapolsky book