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Genes are rarely about inevitability, especially when it comes to humans, the brain, or behavior. They're about vulnerability, propensities, tendencies.

Robert M. Sapolsky

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Robert M. Sapolsky
Especially
Propensities
Brain
Propensity
Comes
Inevitability
Humans
Vulnerability
Genes
Tendencies
Rarely
Behavior

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If you care about your longevity and health, be a socially affiliated baboon who is better than high-ranking ones at walking away from provocations.
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Most people who do a lot of exercise, particularly in the form of competitive athletics, have unneurotic, extraverted, optimistic personalities to begin with. (Marathon runners are exceptions to this.)
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Essentially, we humans live well enough and long enough, and are smart enough, to generate all sorts of stressful events purely in our heads.
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Oxytocin is lauded for how it promotes warmth, generosity, social bonding, cooperation, trust, and compassion.
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The regulation of genes is often more interesting than the genes themselves, and it's the environment that regulates genes.
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We're getting along so well I trust you so much for this one second that I'm going to let you yank on me.
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If a rat is a good model for your emotional life, you're in big trouble.
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We live well enough to have the luxury to get ourselves sick with purely social, psychological stress.
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Perhaps most excitingly, we are uncovering the brain basis of our behaviors - normal, abnormal and in-between. We are mapping a neurobiology of what makes us us.
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We are just another primate but a very confused, malleable one.
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Importantly, rather than promoting aggression, testosterone promotes whatever is needed to maintain status when challenged.
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What happened in the milliseconds before a behavior to cause it? That's in the neurobiological realm.
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It's great to have a buff frontal cortex to do that harder thing - for example, help a person in need rather buy some useless, shiny gee-gaw.
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Genes are important for understanding our behavior. Incredibly important - after all, they code for every protein pertinent to brain function, endocrinology, etc.
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We all seek out stress. We hate the wrong kinds of stress but when it's the right kind, we love it - we pay good money to be stressed by a scary movie, a roller coaster ride, a challenging puzzle.
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Get it wrong, and we call it a cult. Get it right, in the right time and the right place, and maybe, for the next few millennia, people won't have to go to work on your birthday.
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I love science, and it pains me to think that so many are terrified of the subject or feel that choosing science means you cannot also choose compassion, or the arts, or be awed by nature. Science is not meant to cure us of mystery, but to reinvent and reinvigorate it.
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An open mind is a prerequisite to an open heart.
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But often, it's easier to resist temptation with distraction, or to be so inculcated in doing the right thing that it's automatic, outside the frontal cortex's portfolio - Then it isn't the harder thing, it's the only thing you can do.
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...I might continue to believe that there is no god even if it were proved that there is. A religious friend of mine once remarked that the concept of god is useful, because you can berate god during the bad times. But it is clear to me that I don't need to believe there is a god in order to berate him.
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