With sing. concord. The interaction between politics and biology; spec. (a) politically motivated intervention in the growth or development of a population; (b) the use of biological science to explain human social or political behaviour; (c) environmental policy.

This issue of Politics and the Life Sciences includes an article, ten commentaries, and three responses on the subject of birth order and rebelliousness, focusing in particular on Frank Sulloway's Born to Rebel (1996, 1997). Extraordinary events have surrounded the publication of this roundtable, including threats of legal action, accusations of misconduct, letters to university officials, termination of the journal's publishing contract, and an almost five-year delay in publication. This editorial reviews these events and goes on to assess Frank Sulloway's responses (published in this issue), as well as parts of Born to Rebel. It also reports the results of a replication of Sulloway's study of Reformation martyrs. The replication generated markedly different data than those reported by Sulloway. Data from an expanded sample were also inconsistent with the relationship that Sulloway reported finding between birth order and religious commitment among Reformation martyrs. The editorial supports the suggestion by Frederic Townsend that an independent review of Born to Rebel would be appropriate. It concludes with a call for establishment of a multidisciplinary legal defense fund that would reduce the likelihood that legal threats can succeed in stifling research and publication in the natural and social sciences.

Tom Wiegele was a class act. Tall, white-haired, distinguished, thoughtful, and, above all, principled, he appeared too good to be true. Tom exemplified that precious and, it sometimes seems, increasingly rare combination, a gentleman and a scholar.

The Principle of Competitive Exclusion, first articulated by Gause in 1934, states that two species or populations cannot inhabit the same niche: one will consistently out-compete the other. Of four possible outcomes, the logistic equations that describe such interaction present only one possibility for coexistence, that being when the density-dependent mechanisms of one population become activated before intergroup competition eliminates the other. In applying Gause's Principle as an explanatory model to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this research explores the present bantustanization of the West Bank as a logical outcome of interspecific competition, but sees the competition coefficients of the equations as the key factors in promoting a stable equilibrium.

Montana recently joined Oregon and Washington as the only states in the nation to legalize the choice among terminally ill adults to hasten death by self-administering a lethal dose of drugs prescribed by a physician. Unlike Oregon and Washington, however, Montana's legalization of physician aid in dying (PAID) resulted not from public consideration of a statewide initiative, but from the judicial resolution of a lawsuit, Baxter v. Montana. As originally conceived, a trial judge reasoned that the unenumerated right to PAID is embraced by enumerated state constitutional rights to privacy and dignity. On appeal, Montana's supreme court jettisoned this construct, and, in its place, fashioned a legal home for PAID out of state homicide, consent defense, and end-of-life statutes. Central to this court's statutory rendering is the finding that state law, allowing terminally ill Montanans sustained by life support to withdraw such treatment and die, discriminates against terminally ill Montanans not sustained by life support who seek death; these classes are similar, the justices reckoned, entitling both to choose death. This analysis examines Montana's courting of PAID, offering textual examination of state trial and appellate court opinions, an accounting of legal strategies advanced in amici curiae briefs, and commentary about the problems and prospects with Baxter's holding. I argue, ultimately, that the equality principles statutorily conceived in Baxter (1) could be parroted in the vast majority of states that both criminalize assisted suicide and enumerate constitutional equal protection guarantees, and (2) could replace sub silentio the equal protection paradigm applied to “physician-assisted suicide” by the United States Supreme Court in its landmark Vacco v. Quill ruling.

This article examines how disease salience influences attitudes toward two types of humanitarian aid: sending foreign aid and housing refugees. Some have argued that disease salience increases levels of out-group prejudice through what is referred to as the behavioral immune system (BIS), and this increase in out-group prejudice works to shape policy attitudes. However, an alternative mechanism that may explain the effects of disease salience is contamination fear, which would suggest there is no group bias in the effects of disease threat. Existing work largely interprets opposition to policies that assist out-groups as evidence of out-group prejudice. We suggest it is necessary to separate measures of out-group animosity from opinions toward specific policies to determine whether increased out-group prejudice rather than fear of contamination is the mechanism by which disease salience impacts policy attitudes. Across two experiments, disease salience is shown to significantly decrease support for humanitarian aid, but only in the form of refugee support. Furthermore, there is converging evidence to suggest that any influence of disease salience on aid attitudes is not caused by a corresponding increase in xenophobia. We suggest that the mechanism by which disease threat influences policy attitudes is a general fear of contamination rather than xenophobia. These findings go against an important hypothesized mechanism of the BIS and have critical implications for the relationship between disease salience and attitudes toward transnational policies involving humanitarian aid.

Knowledge of evolutionary influences on patterns of human mating, social interactions, and differential health is increasing, yet these insights have rarely been applied to historical analyses of human population dynamics. The genetic and evolutionary forces behind biases in interethnic mating and in the health of individuals of different ethnic groups in Latin America and the Caribbean since the European colonization of America are still largely ignored. We discuss how historical and contemporary sociocultural interactions and practices are strongly influenced by population-level evolutionary forces. Specifically, we discuss the historical implications of functional (de facto) polygyny, sex-biased admixture, and assortative mating in Latin America. We propose that these three evolutionary mechanisms influenced mating patterns, shaping the genetic and cultural landscape across Latin America and the Caribbean. Further, we discuss how genetic differences between the original populations that migrated at different times into Latin America contributed to their accommodation to and survival in the different local ecologies and interethnic interactions. Relevant medical and social implications follow from the genetic and cultural changes reviewed.

My contribution differs in several aspects from the others in this symposium. To begin, instead of addressing a specific element of future Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) verification operations, I have been asked for my unique “Canadian” perspective on the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) inspections in which I have participated, and some of the lessons that I have come away with after having been a member of four inspections in 1994 and 1995.