I haven't read Sapolsky's book, Behave, but the chapter topics you suggest sound fascinating, and I'll be on the lookout! I read his rebuke to the free will camp, Determined: Life Without Free Will. I sense that he covers some of the same ground in both books. Even if you don't fully buy into his argument that we lack free will, you end up agreeing that we surely aren't the authors of our behavior as we would think. A few key ideas from the great Stanford professor courtesy of Google Gemini:

The Core Thesis: Time Horizons 

Any given behavior is the result of cascading influences playing across different time scales:

Seconds to Milliseconds Before: What is happening in your brain right now? Sapolsky focuses on the interplay between the amygdala (fear and aggression) and the frontal cortex (logic, impulse control, and long-term planning).

Hours to Days Before: What is your hormonal state? Hormones like testosterone and oxytocin don't cause behavior; rather, they heighten your sensitivity to environmental triggers.

Months to Years Before: Your experiences and environment. This explores neuroplasticity, how your brain rewires itself through trauma, stress, and learning, as well as the slow maturation of the frontal cortex, which is not fully developed until age twenty-five.

Centuries to Millennia Before: The evolutionary and cultural background. Sapolsky details how the cultural backgrounds (e.g. individualistic vs. collectivistic societies) and ancestral ecologies (e.g., nomadic herders vs. agriculturalists) shape the foundational rules of societies. 

Back to Peter the T : I'm not saying we are automatons, but I've come to realize that I've been pushed and pulled in various directions all my life for a whole host of biological, cultural, and surely evolutionary reasons. The concepts of "Praise" and "Blame" merit reflection, and probably require serious reevaluation.

Peter the T.