Let me begin by saying that I do appreciate several of the commentators' observations and I shall respond to those below. Before doing so, however, I must add that there are a number of suggestions in the commentaries that seem to me useful only to the extent they reveal the failure of the commentators to read our article carefully, to do a little homework, to grasp some of the points we were making, or all three. I am mindful of the fact that all three commentators are recognized scholars in the more traditional field of comparative politics who may have had little or no contact with the literature of politics and the life sciences. Nor should I assume they would have any familiarity with the substantial literature in anthropology, archaeology, history, and social biology dealing with the evolution of social systems and the origins of the state upon which we have drawn and which has become so familiar to Corning and me that we are sometimes forgetful of the need to provide more examples and references, depending upon the reading audience.