THE TROUBLE WITH TESTOSTERONE: And Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament. <i> By Robert M. Sapolsky</i> .<i> Scribner: 288 pp., $23</i>

Robert Sapolsky’s essays on “the biology of the human predicament” seduce the reader primarily through the charming, democratic rhetoric of their author and his usually surprising lessons in biology. Presenting himself almost satirically as someone who spends much of his time shooting little needles into baboons, this Stanford University neuroscientist, primatologist and MacArthur Foundation award winner disarms the reader’s fear of and intimidation by the world of biomedical research. But his purpose in these essays is not to popularize science. Rather, it is to do what scientists have been doing well for several centuries--mocking the arrogance of the human mind and knocking its dreams and ideals or, in his view, its pretensions into a corner of uncertainty.

Sapolsky’s amusing titles--”How Big Is Yours?” or “Beelzebub’s SAT Scores” and “The Dangers of Fallen Souffles in the Developing World”--remind us of the kind of quirky metaphors that paleontologist and historian of science Stephen Jay Gould has made a trademark of in his immensely popular essays on natural history. Gould, an ardent student of Darwin and evolution, is very fond of poking fun at human knowledge and science by historicizing it or by showing how ideology has governed some of its procedures and ultimately its findings.

At his best, Sapolsky does a similarly fascinating job of revealing the inherent limitations of science, the points at which tact and value dangerously intersect and the lurking ideology governing both methodology and findings. At the end of the day, Sapolsky’s own epistemological and moral uncertainty leaves us wondering whether we are really reading about the biology of the human predicament or about the human predicament of the biological sciences. He stops short of purely reductive sociobiology by refusing to draw the noose of analogy between ourselves and the rest of the animal kingdom so tight that we become hanged by our monkey tales. But we are left wondering whether biology or nature really has anything at all to tell us about our moral and ethical responsibilities, except through the contemplation of ambiguous discoveries.

Underneath the colorful titles in “The Trouble With Testosterone” are grim stories about the biology and neurophysiology of sexual aggression, neurosis, execution and guilt; cancer, multiple personality and fragmentation of the self; the corruption and pollution of the Third World; and the links between neurosis and religion. Sapolsky’s aim is to level the differences and boundaries we have created between ourselves and our fellow human beings by revealing the biological and psychological sickness to which we are all bound and the common biology that binds us to our ape-like relatives, the baboons. Sapolsky tends to assume evolution rather than give evidence for it or speculate on its paradoxes the way Gould does.

By assuming that genetics and neurochemistry and hormones form the basis of human choices (if, after that, they could in any morally significant way be called choices), Sapolsky hopes to telescope the difference between the schizophrenic and the daydreamer, presumably elevating the humanity of both. We’re all sick in various degrees by dint of a new form of original sin, the inextricable web of biology and sociology that is somehow less degrading than religion in explaining behavior, even though we wonder where will and responsibility come into play. He adheres to that iron law of biological science set forth by Darwin (though he does not name it as such): the law of the conditions of existence, in which no single biological factor can be discussed as causal without deference to infinitely complex environments.

Sapolsky’s democratizing and leveling punch finds its finest delivery in a historical analysis of research on SIDS, sudden infant death syndrome. The essay’s title, “Poverty’s Remains,” refers to the way scientists established a “normal” size for the hypothalamus gland based on examination of human cadavers. Sapolsky reminds us that most cadavers left to science were of homeless, impoverished individuals whose glands had suffered severe atrophy from the stress of living in poverty. Assuming that the “oversized” glands of infants who died from SIDS explained the problem, medical science embarked on gland-reducing radiation treatments that did little more than cause thousands of cases of thyroid cancer. The point is that scientific “fact” about what is normal is deeply dependent upon a wide variety of social and economic assumptions that scientists shouldn’t be too cocksure in overlooking. That is to say, science cannot divorce itself from and elevate itself above socioeconomic factors.

Equally engaging is Sapolsky’s analysis of the complex interaction of biology and sociology in the behavior of animals, an interaction that makes scientific reductionism and biological etiology a very difficult and uncertain matter indeed. Sapolsky is a cautious sociobiologist, tentative about turning any “is” into an “ought.” In the essay “Curious George’s Pharmacy,” Sapolsky explores the phenomenon of chimpanzees ingesting an herbal antidote to cure a parasite ailment. The critical questions remain--How does a chimpanzee “know” that certain kinds of leaves contain the proper curative compound? Do the chimps have intentions? Or do they have instinctive and innate cravings?

Sapolsky’s polemical answer to us and his colleagues: neither. Rather, “the social dimension makes a critical difference.” A rat or a monkey that seems better after eating something might be an example to other members of the group to imitate the behavior. This tends to limit the idea of the intuitive genius of any creature and make any form of progress a social process for rats, monkeys and, by extension, human beings. Sapolsky thus becomes the scientist who satirizes science for picturing the monkey investigator as genius rather than as the socially dependent haphazard experimenter. And he enjoys adding the letters he received from the scientists at whom he has poked some fun.

Studying baboons in Kenya has also led Sapolsky to challenge certain Western notions of progress, yet he is also wary of the complexities of any kind of definite moral perspective. In a touching essay on a Kenyan friend, a tourist lodge manager who died of hypertension, Sapolsky observes that the somewhat romantic myth that Africans have better adaptive biological mechanisms than their Western counterparts is not true, especially when it comes to the changes brought by capitalism: “. . . They all take their newly minted Western occupations and responsibilities immensely seriously in a place where nothing much ever works, and they haven’t a clue how to cope.”

Is Sapolsky against Westernization? No. But nothing can be gained without paying for it. Baboons, he shows in another essay, benefit from the food sources to be found in an increasing number of Western garbage dumps. Are garbage dumps, ironically, a blessing? To some degree they are, but they also bring with them an enormous increase in fatal diseases among the creatures who benefit from them. What value can be ascribed to this development? An ambiguous one at best. To Sapolsky, Africa becomes another example of the hazards of a romantic ideology of an Eden lost or one that possibly can be created. Baboons tell us something about hierarchy and aggression but also about the inexplicable existence of lone adventurers in all ranges of existence.

Sapolsky is even better at using science as a demythologizing force in the book’s title essay, “The Trouble With Testosterone.” Rather than believing that testosterone is the cause of aggression, Sapolsky argues convincingly that sociology and biology should not be considered competing causes but, rather, ones that work together in boundless interactions. Testosterone levels will not tell you which primate is going to be aggressive. Testosterone does not cause aggression but can alter or increase the environmental triggers to aggression. “The more social experience an individual had being aggressive prior to castration the more likely that behavior persists sans cojones. Social conditioning can more than make up for the hormone.” The question of what causes “aggression” remains something of a mystery, and Sapolsky quietly does damage to certain kinds of feminism and certain more recent approaches to criminal justice. Sapolsky admits that this may be “biology for the bleeding heart liberal” but sticks to his conviction that biological reductionism has just as much political and moral edge lurking behind its alleged objectivity.

What is particularly puzzling about Sapolsky’s book, given his tendency to confound reductionism and warn of the lurking values in any assessment of “fact,” is the lengthy concluding essay, “Circling the Blanket for God,” in which the author cashes in on his earlier announcement that he is both a liberal and an atheist. After refusing to reduce aggression to a gene, Sapolsky spends about 40 pages trying to show that religious behavior is a form of obsessive compulsive disorder that may not be caused by a gene but certainly has behind it a gene that can be triggered by certain environmental factors. He has it in for the priestly class who start these religions and rituals to assuage the psychological disorders of would-be followers. Religion or religious behavior--Sapolsky cannot distinguish between the two--becomes a form of psychotherapy for a neurological disorder. The biologist as moralizing liberal unveils himself and follows his own logic to the end: Is not his own atheism--not the mere agnosticism of a Darwin or Huxley--itself as much derived from neuropsychological factors as is someone’s faith? This gesture is welcome in so far as it makes the high ministry of science just as susceptible to the sins of the flock. But Sapolsky’s evidence for religion as a form of neurosis seems very thin and derived in piecemeal fashion from a variety of anthropologists and psychologists, including Freud, whose own science seems to have withered under recent scrutiny and left us with little more than a highly skillful and often cruel moralizer and ideologue.

Why not leave the etiology of religion in the same state of uncertainty as he does other behaviors? Sapolsky comes just short of recognizing that science as he practices it really leaves us in the same position as Job before a vast and incomprehensible God who belittles his assumptions and procedures or as Adam and Eve, who, after being dispossessed of an Eden of certainty and privilege through the pursuit of knowledge, recognized that they, as do all other creatures, inherit the same dust. If that isn’t old religion, what is?