Biology and political science

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".

The field can be said to originate with the 1968 manifesto of Albert Somit 25th October 1919, 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. This transition from a scientific Biopolitics, as in one that truly sees society as a biological phenomenon, and a political Biopolitics which merely acknowledges the inescapable fact that humans possess a biological constitution, nicely illustrates a biological process whereby knowledge is made to conform to the dictates of political power, somewhat in the sense of the philosopher Michel Foucault’s ‘regimes of truth’. Although Foucault did not adopt an overtly organicist model of society as a superorganism, his idea that what passed for truth in society was determined by power acting as a force emanating from the whole of society, to support or engender a ruling political power, is most applicable here. In this case the ‘truth’ which all knowledge must conform to, is that the individual person is the human animal, the end in themselves. And this is why the straightforward idea that society is a superorganism and the individual does not exist as an end in themselves, had to vanish, and did so, while, at the same time, this obvious, literal truth, being so obvious, and having been eradicated, had to be supplanted by some kind of replacement ‘truth’, as in the Biopolitics which this article discusses.

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