The replication crisis isn't merely in psychology, old studies, or studies that didn't carefully record their methodology. Eg the review I linked mentions a study from 2006 that didnt replicate in a larger trial. The one about stories involving immorality priming people to use more antiseptic wipes. It's weird to me that someone would write a book and reference that study without mentioning this replication failure. Especially in the context of the many other such failures to replicate for priming.
Theories ought to be backed by experiments that replicate. Maybe describing methodology precisely is hard, but replication is how we know a phenomenon is actually real and not p-hacked or otherwise mistaken (eg by experimenters mis-measuring).
Note that I didn't just read the word "priming" in the book and seize upon it generically. As noted in Ritchie's review, Sapolsky references specific studies which larger trials have failed to replicate (eg the Macbeth Effect where reading stories about unethical behavior made people more likely to grab antiseptic wipes).
True, but Behave was published in 2017! That's ~7 years after people noticed these theories fail to replicate. So it's not that some parts of the book don't stand the test of time, it's that it doesn't accurately represent the state of the science for when it was published.
I read Science Fictions and don't recall politics coming up much. Ironically, his most political point was his defense of the Mertonian norm of universalism from both leftist and rightist critiques. That norm is relevant in this discussion :P. That said, I haven't read his other book.
Politics aside, those theories did fail replication. Forget I mentioned Ritchie at all and the problem remains.
After enjoying Sapolsky's lectures on YouTube (including this one) I began reading his book Behave. I was surprised to see that it refers to theories that fail to replicate (eg priming) as if they were solid theories. Stuart Richie (a psychologist who wrote a book on the replication crisis) enumerates other examples in his review https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/rules-of-behaviour/
Please be wary of this failure to drop unreplicated findings when reading Sapolsky's works.