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Almost from its inception, mainstream political science has insisted that, for all practical purposes, human nature, and, hence, political behavior, is shaped by culture. This basic tenet carries with it three corollaries: (1) humans have no innate political tendencies; (2) our political behavior is solely the product of learning and socialization (in short, of nurture); (3) human nature (and, thus, human political behavior) is malleable. This is traditionally referred to as the standard social science model.

Starting in the mid-1960s, this long-dominant paradigm has been challenged by a more biologically oriented approach, usually termed biopolitics. (While others have used the term biopolitics with variant meanings, such as Michel Foucault or Morley Roberts, this entry will use the term in its more restricted sense, to describe the current interest in the relationship between the life sciences and the study of politics, beginning, as is generally accepted, in the 1960s.) Yes, culture is important, its advocates agree, but so are the genetically transmitted behavioral inclinations our species has evolved, as social primates, over literally millions of years. Consequently, they insist, both nature and nurture must be taken into consideration.

From this disagreement on first principles there flow important differences as to how political scientists can most fruitfully study and understand political behavior. A concise examination of these differences may be the most effective way of familiarizing the reader with the key premises on which the biopolitical approach is based. The most important include the following.

Genetic Factors As Behavioral Influences

As mentioned above, mainstream political science dismisses these entirely. From an evolutionary, biopolitical perspective, however, we share quite a few behavioral traits with other social primate species. Among the most politically important of these are: a proclivity for hierarchical social and political structures characterized by dominance and submission (and unequal access to the good things of life); status seeking; aggression; xenophobia; and nepotistic favoritism.

Historical Evidence As A Basis For Predicting Future Behavior

Standard evolutionary theory holds that, barring mutation or some profound environmental change, the behaviors a species has evolved are likely to remain largely unchanged over lengthy periods. Thus, as those in biopolitics see it, when efforts to alter or even prohibit “undesirable” social and political behaviors have been consistently unsuccessful in the past, similar attempts are not likely to be any more effective in the future. They see trying to “change human nature” as analogous to asking a leopard to change its spots.

Having greater faith in the malleability of human nature, mainstream political science is more likely to discount past behavioral patterns. Conceivably, this time the leopard might be induced—or compelled—to alter its coloration. Why, then, not try?

Use Of Primatological Data

If, according to the accepted wisdom, human behavior is shaped almost entirely by culture and socialization, knowledge about other species, no matter how akin to ours, serves no useful purpose. On the other hand, if our genetic legacy often meaningfully influences how we act, the study of closely related species becomes most relevant. For instance, primatologists have used their research on our nearest relatives in the animal kingdom to consider the evolutionary roots of human behavior, from aggression to altruism. Political scientists, for their part, have explicitly explored how an understanding of primates might inform our theorizing about human politics and ethics.

Research Methodology

The study of human behavior from an evolutionary perspective emerged from ethology, a discipline guided by the dictum that, to understand how and why an organism acts as it does, we must study its actual behavior in its natural setting. Both mainstream political science and bio politics accept experiments as a valid means of inquiry. The latter, however, insists the experiment should mirror, to the extent possible, the challenges and environment the subject(s) would encounter under real-life conditions. For this reason, it is skeptical about the validity of experiments in which subjects, human or other, are placed in a patently artificial setting and are asked to perform tasks that lack meaningful consequences. Biopolitics, with its ethologically derived emphasis on actual behavior, sees survey research, by and large, as a research instrument of last resort.

The Formulation Of Public Policy

Here, some examples illustrate how a biological perspective might inform policy choices. Evolutionary change almost always entails a tradeoff. Greater size requires greater caloric intake; speed comes at the cost of endurance; a massive protective carapace or shell leads to lessened mobility. Given their neo-Darwinian orientation, those in biopolitics tend to think less in terms of a “solution” to problems like human “vices” and more in terms of what is to be gained and lost by a particular policy. These trade-offs have not been adequately considered, for example, in the ill-fated Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (which prohibited the sale of alcohol); in the interminible “war on drugs”; or in the consistently futile efforts, literally over the centuries, to prohibit prostitution.

To elaborate on the last example, Michael McGuire and Margaret Gruter examine the almost certain failure of antiprostitution laws. McGuire and Gruter note the value of an evolutionary inquiry:

Both sexes have dispositional tendencies to reproduce, and reproduction-related behavior (e.g., flirting, experimentation with one’s and other’s bodies) begins during adolescence. . . . In effect, both sexes are predisposed and well prepared to engage in sexual behavior. It follows that attempts to control sexual behavior will be only partially successful, a point to which the high frequency of teenage sexual encounters, abortions, and adult extramarital affairs attests. (2003, 35)

Given this, what policy suggestions follow? Because prostitution is unlikely to be completely suppressed given human impulses, then limited legalization may make the most sense. This would call for registration of sex workers, making sure that sexually transmitted diseases are controlled, reducing criminal involvement, bringing the workers into the recognized workforce. Of course, some aspects of prostitution would remain outside the law—such as human trafficking and child prostitution. The authors cite Holland and Nevada as localities where successful regulation has taken place.

Toward The Future

Launched, as noted above, in the mid-1960s, the biology and-politics enterprise received official recognition from the International Political Science Association in 1973 with the creation of the eponymous Research Committee #12. After considerable debate over the wisdom of a separate professional organization, the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences was established in 1980, and the first issue of its journal, Politics and the Life Sciences, was published in 1982.

As yet, to be sure, a sizable majority of political scientists continues to see political behavior as fundamentally, if not exclusively, the product of culture, socialization, and individual experience. Over the past decade or so, however, a neo-Darwinian approach has been fostering a steadily growing amount of research in anthropology, psychology, social psychology, sociology and, most recently, economics. Conceivably, this may eventually be the case in political science, historically quite susceptible to intellectual trends in its sister social sciences.

Bibliography:

Blank, Robert H., and Samuel M. Hines Jr. Biology and Political Science. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Dahl, Robert A. On Democracy. New Haven, Conn.:Yale University Press, 1998.
Degler, Carl. In Search of Human Nature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
De Waal, Frans B. M. Peacemaking among Primates. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989.
McGuire, Michael, and Margaret Gruter. “Prostitution: An Evolutionary Perspective.” In Human Nature and Public Policy: An Evolutionary Approach, edited by Albert Somit and Steven A. Peterson, 29–40. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Piano, Aili, Arch Puddington, and Mark Y. Rosenberg, eds. Freedom in the World 2006. New York: Freedom House, 2006.
Schubert, Glendon, and Roger D. Masters, eds. Primate Politics. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1991.
Somit, Albert, and Steven A. Peterson. Darwinism, Dominance, and Democracy. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997.
“Review Article: Biopolitics after Three Decades—A Balance Sheet.” British Journal of Political Science 28 (1998): 559–571. Vanhanen,Tatu. Democratization. New York: Routledge, 2003.