I would like to thank all of the scholars who wrote commentaries on my essay “The Human Genome Diversity Project: Ethical Problems and Solutions.” I welcome the criticism and have learned a great deal from such thoughtful analysis and commentary. Since I am replying to comments about my paper, I am in the unique position of having the last word (at least temporarily!). Since I now have the opportunity to learn from criticism, I reserve the right to modify my position or change my views.

This special issue considers the relationship of the life sciences to both public policy and public administration. This makes sense because the bureaucratic process and public administration are deeply involved in the policy process and the development of substantive public policy. The two subjects are intertwined. And a biological perspective can illuminate many aspects of both. That is the focus of this issue.

Biopolitics can be taught as a curriculum, a “free standing course,” or as a component of mainstream political science courses. This essay contends that the free standing course is the most difficult of the three to do well. The problem lies in how to organize such a course. To introduce students to (a) biology, (b) politics, and (c) the union of the two, is asking a great deal of one course.

Laboratory research studying behavior in the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) game is consistent with the commonplace perception that social exchange is risky. Although they often do cooperate, people also often defect. Thus, the decision to enter a PD game with a stranger, about whom one has no good basis for predicting behavior, is a bet on cooperation. Many investigators have explored a range of cognitive processes and individual differences putatively bearing on the choice to enter such games, but few have asked how people perceive, assess, and respond to social risk in general. That is what we ask here. From the well known finding that people are risk-averse in the domain of gains and risk-tolerant in the domain of losses, we predict that, with game incentives constant, people will be more willing to enter social relationships when game payoffs are framed as losses than when they are framed as gains. We tested this prediction in a student population playing PD games. Results strongly supported the prediction, suggesting that human sociality may have evolved more as a defensive response to the possibility of loss than as an opportunistic attempt to capture gain.

Proponents of xenotransplantation hope that it will provide organs to fill the gap between the demand for and supply of organs for transplant. The scientific obstacles to transplanting animal organs into humans are daunting, as are the moral, political, and policy issues. Among them are concerns about animal rights and welfare, patient acceptance and informed consent, and broader public health issues, such as the cost-efficient deployment of scarce resources and the risk of disease in third parties. The latter is, in my view, the most immediately urgent issue. Pigs, the current animal of choice, carry many bacterial and viral pathogens, and it is currently impossible to assess the risk of disease to human populations. Because of this risk, a moratorium on xenotransplantation is necessary to protect public health; it is also questionable whether the technology, if successful, would be the most cost-effective way to promote health.

In the past quarter century, the concept of culture has undergone change as evolutionary scientists have come to include social behavior in their purview. Evolutionary psychology is the newest field to concern itself with culture by claiming that most specific human behaviors are generated by minds specifically designed for these behaviors—and not from a general-purpose mind—as a result of adaptations made during the Pleistocene. Thus, mental behaviors are explained as having formed independently of cultural learning. In defending the concept, however, the leading proponents practically slough off culture as significant in human affairs. I argue that they have neglected the powerful explanatory statement of Darwin regarding at least one general-purpose adaptation of social animals, namely, the instinct for sociability, a position supported by recent neurological studies. Expanding the Darwinian concept, modern research shows that (1) the human brain was selected for sociability, which explains the origin and strength of culture, as well as its variability; (2) the development of complex culture in a pre-human primate initiated the two-and-one-half million-year evolution to modern humans; and (3) there are political contributions to cultural evolution that rest on the nature of groups (competitive and cooperative).

The Nuffield Council on Bioethics (NCoB) published its latest major report, Human Tissue: Ethical and Legal Issues on April 20, 1995. The news item in Nature described the NCoB as “widely seen as the United Kingdom's national bioethics council” (vol. 374:665). This is exactly what the trustees of the Nuffield Foundation had in mind when they established the council in July 1991.