What struck me most forcefully in Townsend's critique (this issue) was a pattern he observed: A large preponderance of the changes he documented in Sulloway's numeric or graphic descriptions of data resulted in improvements. The later data point was almost always a better fit to Sulloway's predictions than the earlier one. Townsend suggested that further analysis would be appropriate, which made me wonder why he stopped where he did, without doing any statistical tests on his findings. A possible next step would be to calculate the likelihood that the observed proportion of changes in the confirming direction occurred by chance alone.

From a biologist's perspective, social behavior includes any behavior that involves at least two actors. By this definition, social behavior can include aggregation in slime molds, the colony structure of the eusocial insects, or the coordinated efforts of humans across vast distances to successfully land on the moon. The diversity of this range of behavior shares one driving force: natural selection. While natural selection acts at the level of phenotype (e.g., morphology, metabolism, behavior) the ultimate unit of natural selection is the gene contained in DNA-the object of inheritance. The relationship between DNA and social behavior is uncovered in the field of sociogenomics, defined as the mechanistic study of genes, gene products, and gene × gene interaction networks supporting emergent social behaviors.

This article explores long-term issues and problems that have seriously undermined the U.S. Chemical Testing Program established by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Toxic Substances Control Act. This program is meant to gather information needed to protect human health and the environment from damaging exposure to toxic chemicals. Despite seemingly broad and impressive authority under the statute, there are a number of inherent difficulties, as well as substantial political constraints, that impede comprehensive oversight of chemicals in U.S. commerce. The article discusses several approaches that EPA has adopted to overcome statutory and political limitations and increase chemical testing information. The most recent and promising of these efforts has involved international negotiations to harmonize testing approaches with OECD nations and to cooperate on an agenda that will better share the testing burden on an international level.

Written declarations have been identified as one of the most useful tools in determining a nation's potential for a biological warfare capability. Declarations are defined as mandatory reports (provided on a periodic basis) that describe various aspects of a state's biological infrastructure, including both academic and governmental programs. Specifically included are descriptions of facilities, summaries of research projects, and other information considered relevant to making an evaluation of that country's capabilities. Notifications of specific events of interest are also considered as part of the required declaration. As part of the confidence-building measures (CBMs) of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC), between 25 and 30 of the State Parties have been providing written declarations for a number of years. With specific regard to the Iraqi experience, the government of Iraq was required (under the auspices of United Nations Security Council Resolution 687) to provide specific declarations about any and all facilities potentially associated with their biological warfare program. UNSCOM inspectors have the responsibility of verifying the accuracy of the information provided by Iraq in declarations.

Deborah Mathieu's proposal for state intervention in the lives of pregnant substance abusers in order to prevent serious harm to their future children sparked a lively debate in this journal. The present discussion characterizes the three main arguments offered against her proposal as (a) the “uncertainty principle''—the inability to predict which fetuses will be affected, (b) the “father factor”—gender bias with respect to prenatal damage, and (c) “critical periods”—the vulnerability of the embryo/fetus at different times of pregnancy. Each of these arguments is examined in the specific context of fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS). Since the birth of a child with FAS is a virtual certainty if a woman has previously given birth to a child with FAS, since no father has ever sired a child with FAS unless his spouse is an alcoholic, and since the most damaging effects are those associated with exposure throughout and especially late in pregnancy, none of the arguments offered against Mathieu's proposal are relevant in this particularly narrow set of circumstances. While Mathieu's proposal seems pertinent in this situation, her proposal would be even more effective if modified as suggested here.

At the cutting edge of research in biotechnology is the production of special genetically engineered organisms for use in an open, agricultural environment. We argue that the standard approaches to risk assessment and management employed by regulatory agencies are inadequate to the task of properly assessing the advisability of such experiments, as well as the even more significant prospect of widespread commercial use of genetically engineered organisms in agriculture. Given the current lack of sufficient information with which to make competent assessments of the risks involved and the extreme difficulties which are likely to inhibit attempts to gain such information in a timely fashion, we conclude that a compelling case for deliberate release programs has not been made.

Humans exhibit intense attachments to very large groups, sometimes numbering in the millions. The author addresses the question of how inclinations to attach to large groups might have evolved and identifies the problem of collective action and free riding as the central obstacles to overcome. He argues that the nonsubtractibility feature of public goods and the inclusive fitness theory of W. D. Hamilton are key elements in the evolution of sharing behavior in large groups: a source of group attachments. The argument implies that the mix of goods available and produced in past and present environments impacts the configuration of different-sized groups found in human society.

Among the founders of our interdisciplinary field of inquiry, Tom Wiegele was preeminent. He was the catalyst in drawing together in a collegial association the many of us who, from different backgrounds, had come to see the unfolding social implications of advances in the life sciences for both public policy and the study of politics. He possessed a combination of leadership skills in both concepts and organization that is rarely found in academia.

In recent years many scholars in political science have begun to employ the data of the life sciences in their studies. The emerging field of biopolitics is now an identifiable scholarly pursuit. The question now arises as to how that pursuit can and should be taught.

This article describes several courses which I have offered in the past few years in which I have attempted to integrate political philosophy and biopolitics. Course content, along with student and peer reaction are discussed, as are the advantages and disadvantages of interdisciplinary collaboration. This approach is rejected in favor of a design which would begin with a departmental core of courses which would then provide a base for inter-institutional collaboration among students and faculty.