In February, Stanford history prof Jessica Riskin offered a review — a takedown, really — of primatologist and Stanford professor of neurology, Robert Sapolsky’s book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will (Penguin 2023) at New York Review

Sapolsky insists that denial of free will is science all the way down but Riskin finds that the science framework is shaky:

Finally, unsurprisingly, Sapolsky’s reductive model of human beings carries the same implications as others of its kind. It relegates people to categories by class, biology, and cultural stereotype: the college graduate versus the garbage collector, those with one “flavor” of genes versus those with another, the person from “individualist” America versus the person from a “collectivist” East Asian culture that emphasizes “conformity.” Sapolsky is careful to stress that no single factor—genetic, environmental, cultural, familial—determines these categories, but he’s equally emphatic that the sum of factors fixes them utterly: the garbage collector can’t help but be a garbage collector, nor the conformist East Asian person a conformist. Sapolsky speaks this “incredibly important point” ex cathedra in the name of science, even though, “yeah, no single result or scientific discipline” demonstrates it: “Put all the scientific results together, from all the relevant scientific disciplines, and there’s no room for free will.” Now, is that scientific? To claim that lots of failures to prove something add up to a definitive proof?

Science can’t prove there’s no free will because the question of free will is not a scientific question but a philosophical one. To misrepresent it as a scientific question is a prime example of scientism—extending the claims of science beyond its bounds.

“Turtles All the Way Up,” February 13, 2025

That’s true, of course. We live in strange times that way. Scientists hold forth on free will, adopting a radical physicalist position — but that position undermines logic, reason, and science as well as free will. Meanwhile, people who state obvious science facts, such as that humans are sex binary primate mammals, are opposed by groups claiming to represent science.

Often, it’s not even good science

At Stat Modeling, statistician Andrew Gelman comments,

The interesting angle to me in this story is that it seems that Sapolsky backs up his argument based on unreplicated studies of social priming and the like. I haven’t looked at Sapolsky’s book, but just as an example, here’s a New York Times article he wrote in 2010 where he refers to multiple “brilliant studies” by John Bargh, author of the elderly walking study that later notoriously failed to replicate. It may be that Sapolsky has moved on from Bargh, but if you read that NYT article you’ll see he’s leaning very heavily on the social-priming paradigm.

Indeed this came up on the blog a couple years ago, when we discussed this post by Kevin Mitchell, who wrote:

Gotta hand it to Sapolsky here . . . it’s quite ballsy to uber-confidently assert we do not have “the slightest scrap of agency” and then support that with one discredited social psych study after another . . .

Thinking about it now, though, I have some sympathy for Sapolsky. Sure, he got conned by all that social priming stuff, but a lot of people got conned: the editors of Psychological Science and PNAS; the staff at NPR, Ted, and Freakonomics; Daniel Kahneman, Larry Bartels; . . . indeed, I assume that Bargh etc. themselves were conned, in that they were presumably true believers in their theories. Sapolsky’s a biologist–he’s not a psychologist or a statistician and would have no particular expertise in the theory of social priming (such as it is) or the quality of the evidence behind it. So it would seem unfair of me to expect that that he would’ve escaped this particular mass delusion of academic and public social psychology.

Now it’s 2025 and Sapolsky should know better, but, hey, he’s a busy man and probably does not have the time or energy to rethink his premises. That’s too bad but maybe is to be expected.

“Junk science used to promote arguments against free will,” June 18, 2025

Perhaps the fact that Sapolsky opposes free will somehow makes his viewpoint more “scientific” in the eyes of many than the viewpoint of someone who, with equally good arguments, supports it.

This is one of many areas that shed light on why public trust in science has waned. Too often today, it seems a lot like theatre: It sounds convincing but it not necessarily factually grounded. And the heroes and villains are not necessarily who we might be persuaded to think.

You may also wish to read: A neurosurgeon makes the neuroscience case for free will. Michael Egnor is concerned about the serious social implications of denying free will. Insisting that there is no free will amounts to declaring “I’m a meat robot, so take seriously what I’m saying.” That’s self-refuting nonsense, Dr. Egnor says.

Note: The new book, The Immortal Mind: (Worthy, June 2025), has a chapter on free will, “Free Will Is a Real and Intrinsic Part of the Soul.”