In this article, we scrutinize a policy area in which the Russian government has had to react to negative publicity in the last few years, namely, the doping scandal surrounding the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. This scandal uncovered important aspects of Russia’s vulnerability in the global sports milieu, yet so far, it has remained almost unnoticed in the literature on mega sports events in Russia. Our analysis is premised on the convergence of two types and techniques of control and regulation: anatomopolitics, which presupposes, in Michel Foucault’s interpretation of the term, measures of control over individual bodies, and biopolitics, which refers to policy practices that target and concern the entire population. Their conflation in the Russian context results in a controversial effect: it strengthens relations of hegemony yet also exposes the sovereign power to the regulations of global sports organizations.

Many treatments for infertility require the use of donated gametes or embryos. Arguments have been made that all parties involved (donors, recipients, and children) should have open access to information about one another. The present article reports a survey of attitudes of 77 donors and 327 recipients in the state of Western Australia. Donors and recipients endorsed a register of nonidentifying information, but were less keen on a register of identifying information. They believed that medical personnel should have access to such registers, and that donors and recipients (but not children) should have access to nonidentifying, but not identifying, information. Typically, the sort of information respondents wanted to access pertained to health status and physical characteristics. Overwhelmingly, both donors and recipients saw gamete and embryo donation as more like blood donation than like adoption.

It has been suggested that diseases linked to mutations in mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) might be circumvented by transferring the nucleus from the egg of a woman with a mitochondrial disease to a donor egg from which the nucleus has been removed and discarded. Egg cell nuclear transfer would be a straightforward technique for preventing serious diseases, relying on a procedure used in embryo or somatic cell cloning. It might present a relatively uncontentious setting for the refinement of cloning procedures. Its proposal creates the opportunity to identify categories of germ-line interventions; explore whether ethical issues vary according to the category of germ-line intervention; and craft more precise policy guidelines in which graduated levels of germ-line interventions are recognized.

Few intellectual battles compare in depth of passion or theatrics to the outrage that greeted the publication of Edward O. Wilson's 1975 path-breaking volume, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Within days of publication, opponents organized symposia; wrote critical editorials; picketed in Harvard Square; and, at one meeting, assaulted Wilson with a bucket of cold water before he could deliver his address. Fueling this reaction was Wilson's temerity in asserting that the principles of the new synthetic theory applied no less to humans than to other species—and then to use the penultimate chapter to apply his theory to explaining human mating, aggression, and the development of moral and religious systems. Even some who were sympathetic with sociobiology were taken aback by some of the imperialistic sounding statements made by Wilson and his disciples, like Robert Trivers, who prophesized: “Sooner or later, political science, law, economics, psychology, psychiatry, and anthropology will all be branches of sociobiology.”

An evolutionary perspective, which is currently enjoying a revival in the social sciences, raises the possibility of a major transformation in the study of political development and modernization. It may be desirable to supplement (and in some instances replace) the concept of “political development” with the concept of “political evolution.” Political development may be likened to the biological process of ontogeny. It involves the construction of a viable set of political qua cybernetic processes and structures at any level of social organization, from wolf packs to human families to empires. Political evolution is an aspect of phylogeny. It involves the invention, elaboration, and diffusion of novel political forms of all kinds, only some of which may be more effective, or inclusive, or democratic, etc. Nor are all evolutionary changes necessarily “better” (i.e., more adaptive). Political development is concerned with problems of social engineering, while political evolution is concerned with architectonics—with the emergence of functionally significant political innovations. Political development is always situation-specific, while political evolution is also historical and may include changes that diffuse and become “species-wide.” Political evolution is thus a dimension of the larger process of biological evolution. The emergence of political systems, which long predates the evolution of humankind, constitutes a set of adaptive strategies with significant evolutionary consequences. Political development and political evolution may go hand in hand, but this is not always the case. A particular polity may develop or decay independently of the larger process of political evolution. Among the many theoretical implications of this conceptual reformulation, we briefly address the impact on functionalist theory, modernization theory, social mobilization theory, political economy (positive theory), world systems theory, dependency theory, and contemporary Marxist views.

Theorists have recently argued that use of kin terms in patriotic speech appeals to genetically based predispositions and coefficients of relatedness, thereby moving one-time strangers to do things they might not otherwise do. This study has been designed to investigate the significance of kinship language in The Federalist, a project whose end was to persuade the people of New York to ratify the American Constitution. Three hypotheses were tested and supported. First, a wider variety and larger quantity of kinship language surfaced in patriotic than in nonpatriotic discourse on ratification. Second, kinship terms appear more often in papers that address the blessings one could expect from bonding in a potential union (a new family) and in papers that criticize the Articles of Confederation (the old family) than in the remaining papers that entail mundane descriptions of constitutional particulars. And third, kinship language appears significantly more frequently in the earlier papers of The Federalist than in the later ones, presumably to steal the audience's attention straightaway and thus form a bond among the people, the states, and the new Constitution.

I think it is fair to say that synergy is an idea whose time has finally come. It seems that every week another new example of synergy is reported in some scientific journal, and articles about synergy are nowadays routinely accepted for publication in various disciplines. This was certainly not the case 30 years ago. Back then using the term “synergy” in a journal submission was an almost certain kiss of death. I speak from personal experience. So times have changed. However, the theory proposed in my 1983 book, The Synergism Hypothesis: A Theory of Progressive Evolution^ has had a more complex journey, and herein lies a bit of intellectual history and some lessons about the culture and politics of science.

This article discusses the contingencies and complexities of CRISPR. It outlines key problems regarding off-target effects and replication of experimental work that are important to consider in light of CRISPR’s touted ease of use and diffusion. In light of literature on the sociotechnical dimensions of the life sciences and biotechnology and literature on former bioweapons programs, this article argues that we need more detailed empirical case studies of the social and technical factors shaping CRISPR and related gene-editing techniques in order to better understand how they may be different from other advances in biotechnology — or whether similar features remain. This information will be critical to better inform intelligence practitioners and policymakers about the security implications of new gene-editing techniques.

Research suggests that people can accurately predict the political affiliations of others using only information extracted from the face. It is less clear from this research, however, what particular facial physiological processes or features communicate such information. Using a model of emotion developed in psychology that treats emotional expressivity as an individual-level trait, this article provides a theoretical account of why emotional expressivity may provide reliable signals of political orientation, and it tests the theory in four empirical studies. We find statistically significant liberal/conservative differences in self-reported emotional expressivity, in facial emotional expressivity measured physiologically, in the perceived emotional expressivity and ideology of political elites, and in an experiment that finds that more emotionally expressive faces are perceived as more liberal.

Languages are territorial. They tend to occupy homogeneous, well bounded areas. When they do not, they lessen their chances of survival, especially if they are languages of minority groups. Reaching beyond the usual sociological causes of this phenomenon, this article searches the neurophysiological and the psychological literature for explanation of the tendency of closed, equalitarian systems with a high density of communication to move toward unilingualism. The search is guided by the questions: are bilinguals less brain-lateralized than unilinguals? Are different languages stored in different “containers” in the bilingual memory? Are the reaction times for coding and encoding slower in a second language than in a dominant language, slower in multilingual compared to unilingual settings? What are the psychological costs and benefits of bilingualism?

The hypothesis that the bilingual brain is different from the unilingual brain is not supported by the literature, but some fascinating studies keep the question open. Only two sets of findings emerge to offer likely explanations of language territoriality: the findings that measure the declining level of performance in a second as compared to a first language when the complexity of the task is increased, and the findings that show multilingual communication to be less efficient, due to interferences and delayed reaction times, than the same communication in a single language.

Kennewick Man, an early Holocene (9,000 years old) skeleton found in Washington State in 1996, has been a lightening rod for political discussion. Due to his alleged Caucasoid features, Kennewick Man controversially called into question who first peopled the Americas. A projectile point lodged in his hip also catapulted him to celebrity status. Spared the quick (within ninety days after an inquiry) repatriation typically required under the 1990 federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), Kennewick Man was fully examined by a team of scientists chosen by the government who were forbidden to discuss their findings. Although the team concluded that Kennewick Man has cranial features associated with both Caucasoids and modern Native Americans, he is considered mainly to resemble modern Japanese Ainu, Polynesians, and Southeast Asians, as are other early Amerindian finds. Despite the resolution of early controversies, Kennewick Man continues as a symbol of the ideology of repatriation. In this article, I review the evidence for my belief that, taken to an extreme, the demand to bury aboriginal skeletons, not only in America but also around the world, poses a potentially serious impediment to scientific enquiry.

Last February, on Monday the ninth, Lieutenant Colonel George W. Korch, Jr, Ph.D., United States Army, speaking in his capacity as Deputy Director of the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC), Fort Detrick, Maryland, addressed the 2004 Department of Defense Pest Management Workshop, meeting in Florida at the Jacksonville Naval Air Station. He spoke in the Main Ballroom of the River Cove Officers' Club. As of this writing the workshop's full schedule1 still shows a hypertext link to his remarks, but the link is no longer active. While it was active, as late as April, a copy of his remarks, presented as computer slides, could be downloaded to any computer, anywhere. It can still be found, unofficially.2