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 As of this writing the workshop's full schedule1 still shows a hypertext link to his remarks, but the link is no longer active.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

The accumulating scientific evidence — across many disciplines — regarding human evolution and the dualities and complexities of human nature indicates that the core ideological assumptions of both capitalism and socialism are simplistic and ultimately irreconcilable. A biologically grounded approach to social justice enables us to articulate a new ideological paradigm that I call “Fair Shares.” This paradigm consists of three complementary normative principles. First, goods and services should be distributed to each according to his or her basic needs. Second, surpluses beyond the provisioning of our basic needs should be distributed according to merit. And, third, each of us is obliged in return to contribute to the “collective survival enterprise” in accordance with his or her ability. Though none of these three principles is new, in combination they provide a biologically informed middle way between capitalism and socialism. Some of the many issues that are raised by this formulation are also briefly addressed.

Tomonori Morikawa, James E. Hanley, and John Orbell have argued that natural selection leads populations who play Hawk-Dove, a game-theoretic stylization of confrontation, to develop the capacity for various “orders of recognition.” Such an argument requires a model linking game play to the presence or absence of various cognitive mechanisms. Morikawa and colleagues present such a model but, I argue, leave it incomplete, unable to sustain the conclusions they wish to defend. The development of a more fully specified model would significantly assist future studies of cognitive structures related to game play.

Recent peer-reviewed reports of in vitro syntheses of small viruses raise the possibility of misapplying modern biotechnologies to the creation of new smallpox virus, not simply to the malicious manipulation of existing samples. While it would require great effort and significant financing, a smallpox-from-scratch project would seem likely to be feasible, as would some other pathogen-from-scratch projects. Efforts to prevent such work — or, failing prevention, to detect it — might be enhanced in a number of ways.