Political Science and the Life Sciences

Abstract

At the 1980 APSA meeting in Washington, a group of approximately 25 political scientists and others, out of a much larger network of contributors and sympathizers, agreed to form an Association for Politics and the Life Sciences dedicated to the advancement of an integrated biosocial perspective in our discipline. Although this short article is intended primarily to announce that fact and detail plans for the immediate future, we feel that this might also be an appropriate occasion to review briefly the history and rationale behind this intellectual activity and describe some of the objectives of the Association.The study of the relationship between biology and politics (sometimes called “biobehavioral political science” and sometimes also “biopolitics”) drew its initial impetus in the latter 1960s and early 1970s from emergent developments in a number of other disciplines, particularly (a) ethology (the naturalistic study of animal behavior and adaptation), (b) psychophysiology (specifically, efforts to correlate various physiological characteristics and “indicators” with various mental and behavioral states), (c) psychobiology (including neurological and endocrine influences on social behavior), (d) behavior genetics (involving both human and non-human animal research), (e) psychopharmacology (especially the chemical manipulation of behavioral states), (f) sociobiology (the application of modern Darwinian theory to the explanation of social behaviors), and (g) ecology (the study of the relationships between organisms and their environments, which gained visibility when the so-called “environmental crisis” erupted).