Business as usual, government as usual, and perhaps even protest as usual are not giving us the progress needed to achieve sustainable development. Let's see if we can't work together to find better paths forward.

Group violence, despite much study, remains enigmatic. Its forms are numerous, its proximate causes myriad, and the interrelation of its forms and proximate causes poorly understood. We review its evolution, including preadaptations and selected propensities, and its putative environmental and psychological triggers. We then reconsider one of its forms, ethnoreligious violence, in light of recent discoveries in the behavioral and brain sciences. We find ethnoreligious violence to be characterized by identity fusion and by manipulation of religious traditions, symbols, and systems. We conclude by examining the confluence of causes and characteristics before and during Yugoslavia’s wars of disintegration.

In June/July 1994, I was fortunate in having been selected by the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) to be the chief inspector (CI) of one of the most interesting inspections conducted by the commission, namely UNSCOM 84/BW6. This particular inspection was fascinating because of its complexity—the team not only conducted inspections of Iraqi biological research and production facilities, it also excavated a site that UNSCOM surmised might contain materials from Iraq's former BW program. As such, this inspection was the first time that UNSCOM collected environmental samples for analysis. In this paper I discuss my experiences during this inspection and comment on the effectiveness of sampling and analysis as a verification measure.

Launched during the heydays of the copying machine and the U.S. sunshine laws and surrounded by controversy from its inception, genetic engineering may be the best documented technology ever to emerge from a laboratory. This essay draws on the pages that flowed forth from formal policy arenas as well as from less accessible places to examine the rise and fall of genetic engineering controls in the United States and Britain. The general argument developed here is that the settling of the issues raised by this field was achieved not through the resolution of technical problems but rather through the exertion of social interests—notably those of national governments, transnational corporations, genetic engineering firms, scientists, and sectors of the public. A synthesis of methods of analysis drawn from critiques of pluralism and from Foucault's analysis of the relation between power and discursive practice is used to assess the relative effects of these interests.

How might a liberal democratic community best regulate human genetic engineering? Relevant debates widely deploy the usually undefined term “human dignity.” Its indeterminacy in meaning and use renders it useless as a guiding principle. In this article, I reject the human genome as somehow invested with a moral status, a position I call “genetic essentialism.” I explain why a critique of genetic essentialism is not a strawman and argue against defining human rights in terms of genetic essentialism. As an alternative, I propose dignity as the decisional autonomy of future persons, held in trust by the current generation. I show why a future person could be expected to have an interest in decisional autonomy and how popular deliberation, combined with expert medical and bioethical opinion, could generate principled agreement on how the decisional autonomy of future persons might be configured at the point of genetic engineering.

This essay represents a continuing update of the biopolitics bibliography (see Somit et aI., 1980; Peterson et al., 1982). We have recorded 93 items in our enumeration of biopolitical works which appeared in 1982. In this total are 1 book, 3 master's theses or doctoral dissertations, 30 published articles, monographs, or chapters in books, 49 conference papers, and 10 short commentaries (book reviews are not included in our tally).

Advances in embryology, genetics, and regenerative medicine regularly attract attention from scientists, scholars, journalists, and policymakers, yet implications of these advances may be broader than commonly supposed. Laboratories culturing human embryos, editing human genes, and creating human-animal chimeras have been working along lines that are now becoming intertwined. Embryogenic methods are weaving traditional in vivo and in vitro distinctions into a new “in vivitro” (in life in glass) fabric. These and other methods known to be in use or thought to be in development promise soon to bring society to startling choices and discomfiting predicaments, all in a global effort to supply reliably rejuvenating stem cells, to grow immunologically nonprovocative replacement organs, and to prevent, treat, cure, or even someday eradicate diseases having genetic or epigenetic mechanisms. With humanity’s human-engineering era now begun, procedural prohibitions, funding restrictions, institutional controls, and transparency rules are proving ineffective, and business incentives are migrating into the most basic life-sciences inquiries, wherein lie huge biomedical potentials and bioethical risks. Rights, health, and heritage are coming into play with bioethical presumptions and formal protections urgently needing reassessment.

Editor's Note. In this engaging talk given last February on a particularly cold and blustery day at Texas Tech University, Professor Gad Saad of Concordia University discusses his work in the area of evolutionary consumption. In making the case for understanding consumerism from a Darwinian perspective, Saad addresses several key tenets from his books The Consuming Instinct and The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption. In particular, Saad argues that: (1) many consumption acts can be mapped onto four key Darwinian modules (survival, mating, kin selection, and reciprocal altruism); and, (2) cultural products such as song lyrics and movie plotlines are fossils of the human mind that highlight a shared, biologically based human nature. In this wide-ranging inquiry, Saad summarizes several of his other empirical works, including the effects of conspicuous consumption on men's testosterone levels and how the ovulatory cycle in the human female influences consumption. Overall, Professor Saad contends that an infusion of evolutionary and biologically based perspectives into the discipline of consumer behavior and related government regulatory policies yields myriad benefits, notably greater consilience, more effective practices, an ethos of interdisciplinarity, and methodological pluralism.

Before his death in 2002, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould elaborated a large and inclusive theory of life's change. In this essay I concentrate on the aspects of Gould's vast theory that have the most direct political relevance. I briefly discuss his views on the philosophy of science. I examine the way he combined political values and methodology in a seamless, critical analysis of intelligence-testing and sociobiology. I concentrate most extensively on the impact his “punctuated equilibria” concept has made on contemporary political analysis, and I demonstrate that in their appropriation of this concept political scientists have violated the rules that Gould himself articulated for its use. In closing, I consider the possibility that a comprehensive theory of life, a theory that must include political values, might approach traditional questions of political thought more satisfyingly than has conventional philosophy.

Biotechnology is an evolving policy issue involving a wide variety of federal and state policymakers. While most public and scholarly attention has been focused at the national level, a good deal of state policymaking activity regarding biotechnology has already taken place. The biotechnology issue is not a single, well-defined policy issue but rather a cluster of related issues and concerns. This analysis identifies eight facets of the biotechnology policy issue that have surfaced during congressional debate, committee hearings, and public discussions. This eight-fold characterization of biotechnology development is used to describe recent congressional and state legislative activity affecting biotechnology. Both the complexity and multifaceted nature of the biotechnology issue, and the manner with which it has been dealt by federal and state policymakers, have contributed to the dynamic nature of federalism surrounding this issue.

Research in recent decades has shown that although conventional fisheries management strategies such as fishing seasons, size limits, or gear restrictions can provide sufficient biological protection to fisheries stocks, they do not necessarily lead to satisfactory social or economic outcomes. In their stead, the merits and shortcomings of a variety of alternate management systems, including individual transferable quotas, have been proposed, implemented, and analyzed. Few investigations, however, have examined actual fishers' preferences for different management systems. Integrating results from a mail survey of North Carolina commercial fishers with their individual harvest histories and sociodemographic profiles shows that economic and cultural variables both play a significant role in management system preference. The analysis introduces the use of the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI), a measure of investment diversity, as a measure of diversity in fisheries harvests and demonstrates an association with management preferences. Social and family factors are also notable indicators.

Definitions being critical to systematic analysis, aggression is here defined as intentional injury to person or damage to property. The issue of consciousness of intent is considered. No claim is made that either conscious or unconscious aggression is necessarily wrongful, but that it is elicited with respect to the frustration of a variety of organically based physical and mental needs. Physiology has made progress toward understanding the two-way interaction between vertebrates and their environment, so that we have good hunches that aggressive behavior varies as a function of the level of several endocrines and of electrical charge in several parts of the brain. Suggestions are made for improving the utility of some basic political theory to physiological research and vice versa, so that social science can move beyond the speculations of the 18th century philosophers and can use some very relevant physiological findings.