The biopsychosocial model remains a key paradigm for healthcare, despite widely recognised scientific and philosophical shortcomings. Here we report on recent updates integrating evolutionary theory with the biopsychosocial model to provide a more comprehensive and scientifically complete approach to understanding the multiple relevant levels of causation of medical and psychiatric problems.

In 1909, Italian zoologist Daniele Rosa (1857–1944) proposed a radical new evolutionary theory: hologenesis, or simultaneous, pan-terrestrial creation and evolution driven primarily by internal factors. Hologenesis was widely ignored or rejected outside Italy, but Swiss-French anthropologist George Montandon (1879–1944) eagerly embraced and developed the theory. An ambitious careerist, Montandon’s deep investment in an obscure and unpopular theory is puzzling. Today, Montandon is best known for his virulent antisemitism and active collaboration with the Nazi occupation of France at the end of his career. By that point, however, he had quietly moved away from hologenesis. This shift has gone unnoticed or been left unexplained in existing research. This article reexamines Montandon’s theoretical outlook and reasons for championing Rosa’s forgotten theory. It argues that while Montandon’s adoption of hologenesis arose from a complex blend of scientific and personal factors, his previously overlooked early fieldwork with the Ainu played a key role. In contrast, hologenesis did not inform Montandon’s later public antisemitism.

Predictive adaptive responses (PARs) are a form of developmental plasticity in which the developmental response to an environmental cue experienced early in life is delayed and yet, at the same time, the induced phenotype anticipates (i.e., is completely developed before) exposure to the eventual environmental state predicted by the cue, in which the phenotype is adaptive. We model this sequence of events to discover, under various assumptions concerning the cost of development, what lengths of delay, developmental time, and anticipation are optimal. We find that in many scenarios modeled, development of the induced phenotype should be completed at the exact same time that the environmental exposure relevant to the induced phenotype begins: that is, in contrast to our observed cases of PARs, there should be no anticipation. Moreover, unless slow development is costly, development should commence immediately after the cue: there should be no delay. Thus, PARs, which normally have non-zero delays and/or anticipation, are highly unusual. Importantly, the exceptions to these predictions of zero delays and anticipation occurred when developmental time was fixed and delaying development was increasingly costly. We suggest, therefore, that PARs will only evolve under three kinds of circumstances: (i) there are strong timing constraints on the cue and the environmental status, (ii) delaying development is costly, and development time is either fixed or slow development is costly, or (iii) when the period between the cue and the eventual environmental change is variable and the cost of not completing development before the change is high. These predictions are empirically testable.

Smokeless tobacco use among Indian women is increasing despite prevention efforts. Evolutionary theories suggest that reproductive-aged women should be more concerned about immediate threats to reproduction than threats to survival occurring late in life. This study therefore compared an anti-tobacco intervention that emphasized near-term reproductive harms to one involving general harms occurring later in life. Scheduled Tribal women (N = 92) from Karnataka, India participated in this study. At baseline, women reported tobacco use and knowledge of harms, provided a saliva sample to assess use, and randomly viewed either a general harms presentation (GHP) or reproductive harms presentation (RHP). At followup, women reported their use, knowledge of harms and intentions to quit, and provided another saliva sample. At baseline, participants were aware of general harms but not reproductive harms. Both interventions increased knowledge of harms. Women in the RHP condition did not list more harms than women in the GHP condition, however, and the RHP was not more effective in reducing tobacco use than the GHP. In the RHP condition fetal health was particularly salient. In the GHP condition, oral health was highly salient, aligning with the local disease ecology and research on tobacco use and attractiveness.

In the United States, women have long held the right to vote and can participate fully in the political process, and yet they are underrepresented at all levels of elected office. Worldwide, men’s dominance in the realm of politics has also been the norm. To date, scholars have focused on supply-side and demand-side explanations of women’s underrepresentation but differences in how men and women assess electoral risk (the risk involved in seeking political office) are not fully explained. To fill this gap, I explore how evolutionary theory offers insights into gendered differences in political ambition and the evaluation of electoral risk. Using the framework of life-history theory, I hypothesize that both cognitive and environmental factors in human evolution, particularly as they relate to sexual selection and social roles, have shaped the psychology of ambition in gendered ways affecting contemporary politics. Cognitive risk-assessment mechanisms evolving in the hominid line came to be expressed differently in females and males, in women and men. These gendered expressions plausibly reflect differentiable environmental pressures in the past and may help explain behaviors in and barriers to women’s electoral political activity in the present. If so, then the success of efforts to increase such activity — or, regressively, to suppress it — may be better understood.

This article develops a theoretical framework for biopolitical science as a science of political animals. This science moves through three levels of deep political history: the universal political history of the species, the cultural political history of the group, and the individual political history of animals in the group. To illustrate the particular application of biopolitical science, this essay shows how this science would help us to understand Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863.

This research uses evolutionary theory to evaluate followers' preferences for physically formidable leaders and to identify conditions that stimulate those preferences. It employs a population-based survey experiment (N ≥ 760), which offers the advantages to internal validity of experiments and external validity of a highly heterogeneous sample drawn from a nationally representative subject pool. The theoretical argument proffered here is followers tend to prefer leaders with greater physical formidability because of evolutionary adaptations derived from humans' violent ancestral environment. In this environment, individuals who allied with and ultimately followed physically powerful partners were more likely to acquire and retain important resources necessary for survival and reproduction because the presence of the physically powerful partner cued opponents to avoid a challenge for the resources or risk a costly confrontation. This argument suggests and the results indicate that threatening (war) and nonthreatening (peace, cooperation, and control) stimuli differentially motivate preferences for physically formidable leaders. In particular, the findings suggest threatening conditions lead to preferences for leaders with more powerful physical attributes, both anthropometric (i.e., weight, height, and body mass index) and perceptual (i.e., attributes of being “physically imposing or intimidating” and “physically strong”). Overall, this research offers a theoretical framework from which to understand this otherwise seemingly irrational phenomenon. Further, it advances the emerging but long-neglected investigation of biological effects on political behavior and has implications for a fundamental process in democratic society, leader selection.

The Darwinian logic of evolution occurring via the mechanisms of variation, selection and retention provides a possible theoretical framework from which to further develop the dynamic capabilities view. Presently, criticized for lacking a theoretical foundation and featuring a degree of confusion concerning how it aligns with the resource-based view, the dynamic capabilities view would benefit from greater clarity concerning its assumptions, theoretical base and the development of a series of testable predictions. We test elements of a potential Darwinian style framework through variation-focused hypotheses using panel data for 190 Australian service firms. Our results highlight the importance of market development as a basis for variation, however, the impact of dynamic capabilities upon a likely antecedent of selection was not clear and highlighted a nuanced relationship between capability development, market development and sales growth in an small-and-medium-sized enterprise environment. We conclude that applying a Darwinian lens to the dynamic capabilities view is challenging without longer time series data and additional measures, but such an approach remains theoretically attractive and further investigation may help clarify how we conceptualize the relationship between the dynamic capabilities view and resource-based view.