Editor's Note. In this engaging talk given last February on a particularly cold and blustery day at Texas Tech University, Professor Gad Saad of Concordia University discusses his work in the area of evolutionary consumption. In making the case for understanding consumerism from a Darwinian perspective, Saad addresses several key tenets from his books The Consuming Instinct and The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption. In particular, Saad argues that: (1) many consumption acts can be mapped onto four key Darwinian modules (survival, mating, kin selection, and reciprocal altruism); and, (2) cultural products such as song lyrics and movie plotlines are fossils of the human mind that highlight a shared, biologically based human nature. In this wide-ranging inquiry, Saad summarizes several of his other empirical works, including the effects of conspicuous consumption on men's testosterone levels and how the ovulatory cycle in the human female influences consumption. Overall, Professor Saad contends that an infusion of evolutionary and biologically based perspectives into the discipline of consumer behavior and related government regulatory policies yields myriad benefits, notably greater consilience, more effective practices, an ethos of interdisciplinarity, and methodological pluralism.

Building on a growing body of research suggesting that political attitudes are part of broader individual and biological orientations, we test whether the detection of the hormone androstenone is predictive of political attitudes. The particular social chemical analyzed in this study is androstenone, a nonandrogenic steroid found in the sweat and saliva of many mammals, including humans. A primary reason for scholarly interest in odor detection is that it varies so dramatically from person to person. Using participants’ self-reported perceptions of androstenone intensity, together with a battery of survey items testing social and political preferences and orientations, this research supports the idea that perceptions of androstenone intensity relate to political orientations—most notably, preferences for social order—lending further support to theories positing the influence of underlying biological traits on sociopolitical attitudes and behaviors.

Biotechnology is an evolving policy issue involving a wide variety of federal and state policymakers. While most public and scholarly attention has been focused at the national level, a good deal of state policymaking activity regarding biotechnology has already taken place. The biotechnology issue is not a single, well-defined policy issue but rather a cluster of related issues and concerns. This analysis identifies eight facets of the biotechnology policy issue that have surfaced during congressional debate, committee hearings, and public discussions. This eight-fold characterization of biotechnology development is used to describe recent congressional and state legislative activity affecting biotechnology. Both the complexity and multifaceted nature of the biotechnology issue, and the manner with which it has been dealt by federal and state policymakers, have contributed to the dynamic nature of federalism surrounding this issue.

Advances in embryology, genetics, and regenerative medicine regularly attract attention from scientists, scholars, journalists, and policymakers, yet implications of these advances may be broader than commonly supposed. Laboratories culturing human embryos, editing human genes, and creating human-animal chimeras have been working along lines that are now becoming intertwined. Embryogenic methods are weaving traditional in vivo and in vitro distinctions into a new “in vivitro” (in life in glass) fabric. These and other methods known to be in use or thought to be in development promise soon to bring society to startling choices and discomfiting predicaments, all in a global effort to supply reliably rejuvenating stem cells, to grow immunologically nonprovocative replacement organs, and to prevent, treat, cure, or even someday eradicate diseases having genetic or epigenetic mechanisms. With humanity’s human-engineering era now begun, procedural prohibitions, funding restrictions, institutional controls, and transparency rules are proving ineffective, and business incentives are migrating into the most basic life-sciences inquiries, wherein lie huge biomedical potentials and bioethical risks. Rights, health, and heritage are coming into play with bioethical presumptions and formal protections urgently needing reassessment.

Much research in social studies of science addresses scientists' interpretative flexibility in the construction of scientific knowledge. This flexibility is readily visible among different scientists' competing knowledge-claims as well as in their accounts across different social settings. This article illustrates this process and discusses some of its implications through a case study of descriptions of acid rain in published scientific papers and Congressional testimony. As acid rain was flexibly reconstructed in Congressional testimony, its meanings and implications for control legislation became more contested. Some descriptions of acid rain that were intended to usefully clarify the phenomenon actually contributed to an impression of scientific uncertainty, and thereby further polarized debate.

The accumulating scientific evidence — across many disciplines — regarding human evolution and the dualities and complexities of human nature indicates that the core ideological assumptions of both capitalism and socialism are simplistic and ultimately irreconcilable. A biologically grounded approach to social justice enables us to articulate a new ideological paradigm that I call “Fair Shares.” This paradigm consists of three complementary normative principles. First, goods and services should be distributed to each according to his or her basic needs. Second, surpluses beyond the provisioning of our basic needs should be distributed according to merit. And, third, each of us is obliged in return to contribute to the “collective survival enterprise” in accordance with his or her ability. Though none of these three principles is new, in combination they provide a biologically informed middle way between capitalism and socialism. Some of the many issues that are raised by this formulation are also briefly addressed.

In order to honor Tom Wiegele on the occasion of his retirement, we planned to carry in this issue a profile of his career and his contributions to our field. As the journal's founding editor and the association's founding executive director, Tom's extraordinary accomplishments deserved to be publicly applauded. We are all greatly saddened that Tom's sudden death from an aneurysm on August 9, 1991, just two days after a retirement celebration, has converted our profile into a tribute in memoriam. We share with Tom's family, his friends, his students, and his other colleagues our sorrow and our sense of loss over his premature passing.

Definitions being critical to systematic analysis, aggression is here defined as intentional injury to person or damage to property. The issue of consciousness of intent is considered. No claim is made that either conscious or unconscious aggression is necessarily wrongful, but that it is elicited with respect to the frustration of a variety of organically based physical and mental needs. Physiology has made progress toward understanding the two-way interaction between vertebrates and their environment, so that we have good hunches that aggressive behavior varies as a function of the level of several endocrines and of electrical charge in several parts of the brain. Suggestions are made for improving the utility of some basic political theory to physiological research and vice versa, so that social science can move beyond the speculations of the 18th century philosophers and can use some very relevant physiological findings.

This article examines the development of generic cancer risk assessment guidelines, or cancer policy, from 1976-1984. Risk assessment is considered the objective determination of the degree of risk from a substance. Risk management is the subjective determination of acceptable risk. However, uncertainties in the scientific foundations of cancer policy necessitate risk assessment inference choices, for example, over appropriate dose-response extrapolation models. Those choices are only partially scientific; they are also partially political. There is, as a result, an inevitable mixture of facts and values in cancer policy. The article explores ten inference controversies and evaluates how nine cancer policy documents resolved those controversies. It then traces the course of cancer policy development, showing how the Carter and Reagan administrations produced policies with difference emphases and considers several major challenges to cancer policy. The article then provides several justifications for cancer policy in the face of those challenges. It suggests, in the conclusion, that the controversies are unlikely to be resolved by science alone and politics will continue to influence the content of cancer policies.

That men and women differ in their degree of access to and control of political power has long been a significant aspect of political life. Political socialization research has tended to locate the origin of these differences exclusively in the learning process—whereby boys and girls are differentially equipped with the skills and interests necessary for participation as adults (Weissberg, 1974; Dawson, Prewitt, and Dawson, 1977) or children internalize norms of appropriate gender role behavior that are then activated during thE! adult years (Sapiro, 1977; Jennings and Niemi, 1981). Gender is undoubtedly a social and personal construct, but it is also based in biological sex differences—genetic, morphological, and physiological. Biological factors are a potential area of investigation that has remained relatively unexplored, in part because many political scientists have been reluctant to borrow as liberally trorn tne life sciences as they have from their sister social sciences (Schubert, 1976). The emerging field of biopolitics might have provided a corrective to what has been called elsewhere the “oversocialized concept of man” (Wrong, 1961). However, the concern of many politically conscious individuals with the issue of sexist scholarship has rendered biological sex differences a suspect category. Arguing that scientific discourse does not take place in a political vacuum, many feminists have concluded that the introduction of biological variables can only be detrimental to women because scientific practice reflects popular prejudices.

The Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) is widely regarded as a treaty whose provisions are difficult to verify because of the paucity of measures to verify compliance within the treaty framework and the nature of the weapons themselves. Advances in biotechnology and their effect on the perceived military utility of biological weapons have focused international attention on this issue. This article examines the concepts of “adequate” and “effective” verification and argues that the treaty falls under the definition of adequate verification in the United States. For other countries, however, the lack of verification measures is of greater concern. The article describes measures that should be added to the BWC to detect violations and promote compliance with the treaty. These include improved methods of resolving allegations of noncompliance, increased reporting requirements for activities permitted under the treaty, greater openness in biological research, and inspections of laboratories and other facilities.