Although we may be pessimistic (with good reason) about contemporary politics, especially as it effects the prospects for the survival of the human species in the long run, we can be more optimistic about the study of politics from a life science perspective. Certainly the two are related. Becoming optimistic about the former may depend in part upon the further development of biopolitics and of the biobehaviorial and life sciences generally.

That men and women differ in their degree of access to and control of political power has long been a significant aspect of political life. Political socialization research has tended to locate the origin of these differences exclusively in the learning process—whereby boys and girls are differentially equipped with the skills and interests necessary for participation as adults (Weissberg, 1974; Dawson, Prewitt, and Dawson, 1977) or children internalize norms of appropriate gender role behavior that are then activated during thE! adult years (Sapiro, 1977; Jennings and Niemi, 1981). Gender is undoubtedly a social and personal construct, but it is also based in biological sex differences—genetic, morphological, and physiological. Biological factors are a potential area of investigation that has remained relatively unexplored, in part because many political scientists have been reluctant to borrow as liberally trorn tne life sciences as they have from their sister social sciences (Schubert, 1976). The emerging field of biopolitics might have provided a corrective to what has been called elsewhere the “oversocialized concept of man” (Wrong, 1961). However, the concern of many politically conscious individuals with the issue of sexist scholarship has rendered biological sex differences a suspect category. Arguing that scientific discourse does not take place in a political vacuum, many feminists have concluded that the introduction of biological variables can only be detrimental to women because scientific practice reflects popular prejudices.

Baer and Bositis's openness in taking biology seriously is welcome and refreshing. For good reasons and bad, social scientists, including those who see themselves as feminist, have suppressed consideration of biological realities. They have tended, implicitly, to accept the notion of tabula rasa-that “blank” creature waiting to be written on by the organized forces of society-that underlies so much political theorizing in the West. As the philosopher Mary Midgley points out in her fascinating book, Beast terpretive account of human thought and action that aims for understanding and probes meaning.) The method understood as scientific, and the authors implicitly endorse it, is one that may broadly be called methodological individualism. One builds from certain rock-bottom particulars- adding them up, or relating them to one another- and the sum of these particulars is one's explanation of a given phenomenon. “Science,” says Hobbes, “is the knowledge of consequences and the dependence of one fact upon another.” I Baer and Bositis implicitly endorse this model, despite the fact that natural sclentists long ago gave up on this understanding of causality. So-although they are absolutely correct to argue that “psychological” explanation alone will not serve, nor will social learning arguments-the particular way in which they draw biology into the picture simply affixes it to the multi-causal scene as another variable or set of variables to be concatenated with many others.

There is nothing unique in a call for increased attention to the policy dimensions of biological developments. Almost two decades ago, Caldwell (1964:2) urged a “policy synthesis of scientific knowledge and ethical values” in response to the public policy questions raised 1JY the “explosion of biomedical knowledge and technology.” Despite similar exhortations intermittently since that time, Somit and Peterson (1979) conclude that political scientists have yet to give adequate attention to the public policy implications of biological issues. Wiegele, too, (1979: 151) sees the need for “some students of biopolitics to become interested in the political policy relevance of certain aspects of the life sciences” but sees only a few scholars interested in pursuing such an endeavor at this time.