T he study of politics depends upon a variety of perspectives and approaches. The political informs all aspects of our private and public lives. Understanding power, hierarchy and government requires not only an examination of biological, evolutionary processes but also an examination of cultural norms and power dynamics. In our paper, ‘‘The competing meanings of ‘biopolitics’ in political science: Biological and postmodern approaches to politics,’’ we distinguished between two different uses of the term biopolitics. We pointed to the different meanings and provenances of the term for those political scientists indebted to the life sciences and for those indebted to Foucauldian postmodern hermeneutics. We argued that the scientific biopolitical tradition loses little or nothing in relinquishing the use of the term to postmodernists. In this paper, we begin not by distinguishing the two traditions, as we did in the earlier paper, but rather by recognizing the importance of both approaches to a rich, complex, multifaceted investigation of the political. Both scientific and postmodern biopolitics continue to thrive within the study of politics. As Rebecca Hannagan demonstrates in her response to our piece on biopolitics, scholars adopting a scientific biopolitical approach abound, impacting the discipline of political science. She notes, ‘‘Political psychology has been expanding to encompass biological approaches for some time . . . The logical progression of the subfield is to incorporate the theoretical and methodological advances made in biology, neurobiology and psychology to the study of political attitudes and behaviors.’’ Articles examining the relationship between politics and biology, evolution, genetics, and neuroscience continue to increase their numbers in mainstream political science journals. For example, Peter Hatemi and colleagues recently published a paper in the Journal of Politics that examined the impact of both genetic and environmental variables on political attitudes, and Kevin Smith and colleagues last year published ‘‘Biology, Ideology, and Epistemology: How Do We Know Political Attitudes are Inherited and Why Should We Care?’’ in the American Journal of Political Science. At the same time, the study of politics is incomplete without postmodern approaches to power, context and language. As Amy Fletcher explains in her commentary on our paper, postmodernism teaches us to realize that the meanings we attribute to facts can and do vary according to ideology, culture, standpoint and historical context. We share with Fletcher the conviction that if we throw ourselves off the roof of a building, we doi: 10.2990/32_1_99