Being neither a biologist nor an expert on biopolitics, it is with considerable reluctance that I venture into the vast and intimidating domain mapped out in Arnhart's learned article. My own knowledge of the field is limited to what an interested observer is likely to have absorbed, admittedly in more or less random fashion, by reading the popular journals and engaging in occasional debate with scientists, some of them sociobiologists. Here as elsewhere, one cannot help being struck by the enormous difficulties that the growth of scientific specialization and the revelation of hitherto unsuspected links between disciplines once thought to be relatively independent of each other have created, not only for the amateur but for scientists themselves. It says something about our present situation that many of the terms employed as a matter of course by Arnhart and others-sociobiology, bioethics, biopolitics, biomedics, and the like-are not to be found in any dictionary that is more than ten or fifteen years old.