这是一本偶尔在斯坦福校园书店买的书，20美刀，最新的非虚幻类型的科学家的最新年度作品。在亚马逊的书评上，本书的差评中有的说：“这本书就像一个讲义，有些东西相当的重复和学术”。

读完了这本书，发现它的epilogue(后记）确实相当的精彩，摘抄并翻译一下：

Epilogue

• Brains and culture coevolves.
  -- 大脑和风俗共同进化（互为推动）。

• Genes are't about inevitabilities; they're about potentials and vulnerabilities. And they don't determine anything on their own. Gene/environment interactions are everywhere. Evolution is most consequential when altering regulations of genes, rather than genes themselves.
  -- 基因的影响不是不变性；它们决定潜力和脆弱性。而且它们不是唯一的决定因素。基因和环境的互动无处不在。当演化改变限制基因的因素时，它的影响比改变基因本身更深远。

• We implicitly divide the world into Us and Them, and prefer the former. We are easily manipulated, even subliminally and within seconds, as to who counts as each.
  -- 我们内心将世界分成“我们”和“他们”，而且喜欢前者。在谁是“我们”，谁是“他们”的范围上，我们可以被轻易的摆弄，而且瞬间义无反顾地相信。

• The homunculus has no clothes.
  -- 人类没有衣服。

• Many of our best moments of morality and compassion have roots far deeper and older than being mere products of human civilization.
  -- 我们许多道德和同情的最佳时刻的根源远远深刻, 而不仅仅是人类文明的产物。

• Often we’re more about the anticipation and pursuit of pleasure than about the experience of it.
  — 通常相比体验幸福快乐，我们更加沉浸在对它的期许和追逐中。（被满足的快乐已经不是快乐）

• When humans invented socioeconomic status, they invented a way to subordinate like nothing that hierarchical primates had ever seen before.
  — 当人类发明了社会经济地位，他们也就发明一种臣服的方法。这是以前的等级分明的猿类从来不曾经历的。

• Be dubious about someone who suggests that other types of people are like little crawly, infectious things.
  — 当有人一直强调其它类型的人都是吓人和带有传染性，那就要格外小心了。

• Biologically, intense love and intense hate aren’t opposites. The opposit of each is indifference.
  -- 从生物的角度说，强烈的爱和强烈的恨并不是对立的。它们两个的对立面都是冷漠。

• Our worst behaviors, ones we condemn and punish, are the products of our biology. But don't forget that the same applies to our best behaviors.
  -- 我们最差的行为，我们谴责和惩罚的，是我们作为生物的产物。但是，也别忘了我们最好的行为也同样如此。

• It's great if your frontal cortex lets you avoid temptation, allowing you to do the harder, better thing. But it's usually more effective if doing that better thing has become so automatic that it isn't hard. And it's often easier to avoid temptation with distraction and reppraisal rather than willpower.

• While it's cool that there's so much plasticity in the brain, it's no surprice--it has to work that way.

• Childhood adversity can scar everything from our DNA to our cultures, and effects can be lifelong, even multigenerationa. However, more adverse consequences can be reversed than used to be thought. But the longer you wait to intervence, the harder it will be.

• Things that seem morally obvious and intuitive now wern't necessarily so in the past; may started with nonconforming reasoning.

• Repeatedly, biological factors (e.g. hormonse) don't so much cause a behavior as modulated and sensitize, lowering thresolds for environmental stimuli to cause it.

• Cognition and affect always interact. What's interesting is when one dominants.

• Genes has different effects in different enviroments; a hormone can make you nicer or crummier, depending on your values; we haven't evolved to be "selfish" or "altruistic" or anything else -- we've evolved to be particular ways in particular settings. Context, context, context.

• Adolescence shows us that the most interesting part of the brain evolved to be shaped minimally by genes and maximally by experience; that's how we learn - context, context, context.

• Arbitrary boundaries on continua can be helpful. But never forget that they are arbitary.

• Often we're more about the anticipation and pursuit of pleasure than about the experience of it.

• You can't understand aggression without understanding fear (and what the amygdala has to do with both).

• We aren't chimps, and we aren't bonobos. We're not a classic pair bonding species or a tournament species. We're evolved to be somewhere in between in these and other categories that are clearcut in other animals. It makes us a much more malleable and resilient species. It also make our social lives much more confusing and messy, filled with imperfection and wrong turns.

• The homunculus has no clothes.

• While traditional normadic hunter-gatherer life over hundreds of thousands of years might have been a little on the borning side, it certainl wasn't ceaselessly bloody. In the years since most humans abandoned a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, we've obvisouly invented many things. One of most interesting and challenging is social systems where we can be surronded by strangers and can act anonymously.

• Saying a biological system works "well" is a value-free assessment; it can take discipline, hard work, willpower to accomplish either something wondrous or something appaling. "Doing the right thing" is always context dependent.

• It's not great if someone believes it's okay for people to do some horrible, damaging act. But more of the world's misery arises from people who, of course, oppose that horrible act... but cit some particular circumstances that should make them exceptions. The road to hell is paved with rationalization.

• The certainty with which we act now might seem ghastly not only to future generations but to our future selves as well.

• Neither the capacity for fancy, rarefied moral reasoning nor for feeling great empathy necessarily translates into actually doing something difficult, brave and compassionate.

• People kill and are willing to be killed for symbolic sacred values. Negotiations can make peace with Them; understanding and respecting the intensity of their sacred values can make lasting peace.

• We are constantly being shaped by seemingly irrlevant stimuli, subliminal information, and internal forces we don't know a thing about.

• Individuals no more exceptional than the rest of us provides stunning examples our finest moments as humans.

Two last thoughts

• Finally, you don't have to choose between being scientific and being compassionate.