Authors Like Robert Sapolsky

Charles Darwin

English · On the Origin of Species (1859), The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)

The Expression of the Emotions began as a chapter of The Descent of Man (1871) and grew into a book of its own. In it Darwin argued that humans and animals express feelings through the same movements because they share ancestors, and he illustrated it with photographs of actors, babies and children, despite his publisher’s warning about the cost.

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Jane Goodall

English · In the Shadow of Man (1971), Through a Window (1990)

Goodall began studying the chimpanzees of Gombe, in Tanzania, on 14 July 1960, and saw them fishing for termites with grass stalks, which challenged the idea that only humans made tools. She also documented the Gombe Chimpanzee War of 1974 to 1978. Her 2013 book Seeds of Hope was withdrawn over plagiarism concerns and reissued in 2014 with revisions and endnotes. She died on 1 October 2025, aged 91.

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Frans de Waal

Dutch-American · Chimpanzee Politics (1982), The Age of Empathy (2009), Mama’s Last Hug (2019)

De Waal was born in ’s-Hertogenbosch in 1948. In 1975 he began a six-year study of the chimpanzee colony at Arnhem Zoo, then the largest in captivity, which became Chimpanzee Politics. His use of the word ‘reconciliation’ for reunions after fights was challenged at first and later accepted. He died in 2024.

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy

American · Mother Nature (1999), Mothers and Others (2009), Father Time (2024)

Hrdy was born in Dallas in 1946. Studying langur monkeys at Mount Abu in India, she found that males killed infants only when they entered a troop from outside, and proposed that this brought the mothers back into fertility sooner; the idea was highly controversial and is now widely accepted. Father Time (2024) turns to men and babies.

Richard Wrangham

English · Demonic Males (1996), Catching Fire (2009), The Goodness Paradox (2019)

Wrangham, born in 1948, co-directs the Kibale Chimpanzee Project in Uganda. Demonic Males, written with Dale Peterson, looks for the origins of human violence in apes and divided reviewers; Catching Fire argues that cooking made us human, a hypothesis some anthropologists dispute.

Daniel Kahneman

Israeli-American · Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), Noise (2021)

Kahneman was born in Tel Aviv in 1934 and, with Amos Tversky, built the research on heuristics and biases; he shared the 2002 Nobel prize in economics. Thinking, Fast and Slow summarises that work for general readers, and Noise was written with Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein. He died in March 2024.

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Mary Roach

American · Stiff (2003), Gulp (2013), Replaceable You (2025)

Roach was born in 1959. Each of her books takes one strange corner of science, from human cadavers in Stiff to digestion in Gulp and soldiers’ bodies in Grunt (2016); her newest, Replaceable You, is about human anatomy.

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Ed Yong

British-American · I Contain Multitudes (2016), An Immense World (2022)

Yong was born in Malaysia in 1981 and moved to Britain at 13. At The Atlantic his reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. An Immense World is about how other animals perceive the world; I Contain Multitudes is about the microbes that live with us.

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Kevin Mitchell

Dublin-based neuroscientist · Free Agents (2023)

Mitchell is a neurobiologist and geneticist at Trinity College Dublin. Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will appeared the same year as Determined and argues the opposite: that a self with real causal power emerges from the brain’s processing of information, able to reflect on and revise its own goals.

Daniel Dennett

American · Elbow Room (1984), Consciousness Explained (1991), Freedom Evolves (2003)

Dennett, born in Boston in 1942, was a philosopher and cognitive scientist and a confirmed compatibilist: he held that a free will worth wanting, in the words of Elbow Room’s subtitle, fits a world governed by causes. His other books include Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995). He died in April 2024.