‘ “I joined the baboon troop during my twenty-first year. I had never planned
to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I
would become a mountain gorilla.” So begins Robert Sapolsky’s new book, A
Primate’s Memoir, about the time he spent in Kenya’s Serengeti over the
past twenty years, researching the stress levels of a troop of baboons.’

“For these baboons, stress is entirely socially generated, so they
really are good models for us. Study some marginal baboon population in
some dying ecosystem and it would not be anywhere near relevant to making
sense of which middle-aged executive gets heart disease. Our stress is
created by our privileged cocooning from ecological stressors; likewise
these baboons.”

An interview with Sapolsky, a professor of
biology and neurology at Stanford with wide-ranging interests and a MacArthur fellowship,
covers everything from the shadows
colonialism still casts on Africa, to the fallacy of free will, to why he
only rates as a “pathetically low-ranking baboon.”

Includes
excerpts from A Primate’s Memoir. The Atlantic