The interdisciplinary study of biology and
political science is the application of theories
and methods from the biology toward the scientific
understanding of political behavior.
The field is sometimes called biopolitics,
a term that will be used in this article as
a synonym although it has other, less related
meanings.
More generally, the field has also been called
"politics and the life sciences".
== History ==
The field can be said to originate with the
1968 manifesto of Albert Somit, Towards a
more Biologically Oriented Political Science,
which appeared in the Midwest Journal of Political
Science.
The term "biopolitics" was appropriated for
this area of study by Thomas Thorton, who
used it as the title of his 1970 book.The
Association for Politics and the Life Sciences
was formed in 1981 and exists to study the
field of biopolitics as a subfield of political
science.
APLS owns and publishes an academic peer-reviewed
journal called Politics and the Life Sciences
(PLS).
The journal is edited in the United States
at the University of Maryland, College Park’s
School of Public Policy, in Maryland.By the
late 1990s and since, biopolitics research
has expanded rapidly, especially in the areas
of evolutionary theory, genetics, and neuroscience.The
historical link between biology and politics
on the one hand, and sociological organicism
on the other, is inescapable.
The essential difference here is that the
early modern application of biological ideas
to politics revolved around the idea that
society was a ‘social organism’, whereas
the subject this article describes expressly
sets out to separate the essential logic of
the association of biology to human social
life, from this earlier model.
Hence the emphasis upon ‘politics’, denoting
the primacy of the individual who engages
in social life, as in political behaviour,
underpinned by biological foundations.
In this sense the rise of Biopolitics represents
the replacement of sociological organicism
that had been eradicated by the end of the
Second World War, with an acceptable form
of political organicism.
Some discussion bearing on this point may
be found in Biology and Politics : Recent
Explorations by Albert Somit, 1976, which
is a collection of essays, one brief essay
by William Mackenzie is Biopolitics : A Minority
Viewpoint, in which he talks about the ‘founding
father’ of Biopolitics as being Morley Roberts,
because of his 1938 book of that name.
But Roberts was not using the term in its
modern, politically sanitized sense, but in
the context of society viewed as a true living
being, a social organism.
And in a reply to Somit’s Towards a more
Biologically Oriented Political Science, published
in the same journal, we find Some Questions
about a More Biologically Oriented Political
Science by Jerone Stephens, which sets out
to warn against lurching back into the errors
of previous venturers into the realms of biology
and politics, as in sociological organicism.
== Topics ==
Topics addressed in political science from
these perspectives include: public opinion
and criminal justice attitudes, political
ideology, (e.g. the correlates of biology
and political orientation), origins of party
systems, voting behavior, and warfare.
Debates persist inside the field and out,
regarding genetic and biological determinism.
Important recent surveys of leading research
in biopolitics have been published in the
journals Political Psychology and Science.
== See also ==
Biology and political orientation
Genopolitics
Neuropolitics
Sociobiology
