About the contributors

Robert H. Blank (Ph.D., University of Maryland) is currently a research scholar at the New College of Florida and an adjunct professor at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. Previous academic positions include chair of public policy at Brunel University in West London, associate director of the Program for Biosocial Research at Northern Illinois University, and chair of political science at the University of Idaho. He has held residential fellowships at Vanderbilt University, Stanford University, Indiana University, the Medical University of South Carolina, National Taiwan University and Aarhus University in Denmark. He has taught, lectured, and written widely in the areas of comparative health policy, neuropolicy medical technology assessment, and biomedical policy. Among his 40 books and numerous journal articles are Rationing Medicine (Columbia University Press), Biomedical Policy (Nelson-Hall), The Price of Life (Columbia University Press), Brain Policy (Georgetown University Press), End of Life Decision Making (MIT Press), Intervention in the Brain (MIT Press) and Comparative Health Policy, 4th ed. (Palgrave).

Andrea Bonnicksen (Ph.D., Washington State University) is distinguished research professor and former chair of the Department of Political Science at Northern Illinois University, where she teaches courses in biomedical and biotechnology policy. She is the author of three books, including Crafting a Cloning Policy: From Dolly to Stem Cells (Georgetown University Press, 2002) and In Vitro Fertilization: Building Policy from Laboratories to Legislatures (Columbia University Press, 1989). Her fourth book is Chimeras, Hybrids, and Interspecies Research: Politics and Policymaking. She has published journal articles and book chapters on ethical and policy issues related to embryonic stem cell research, human reproductive cloning, germ-line gene therapy, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, ovum nuclear transfer, human embryo freezing, and other reproductive and genetic technologies.

John M. Friend is currently a degree fellow with the East-West Center and a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science, University of Hawaii at Mānoa, where he focuses on politics and the life sciences, neuropolitics, international security, and contemporary political thought. Friend holds a B.A. in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley and an M.S. in defense and strategic studies from Missouri State University.

Odelia Funke is a political scientist. She has taught courses in political theory and American government at several universities, and also has many years of experience working in public policy for the US federal government. Her published research has focused on topics in political theory and environmental policy. She is currently a manager and senior analyst at the US Environmental Protection Agency. The views of the author are entirely her own and do not in any way represent the US government or Environmental Protection Agency.

Robert E. Gilbert (Ph.D., University of Massachusetts, Amherst) is the Edward W. Brooke Professor of Political Science at Northeastern University. He teaches courses in American politics, focusing especially on the American presidency. He is the author of several award winning books, including The Mortal Presidency: Illness and Anguish in the White House, Managing Crisis: Presidential Disability and the 25 th Amendment, and The Tormented President: Calvin Coolidge, Death and Clinical Depression. He has also published articles in numerous journals in the United States and abroad, including Political Psychology, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Congress and the Presidency, Politics and the Life Sciences, Journal of American Studies, Fordham Law Review, UMKC Law Review, Political Communication and Persuasion and Politics, Culture and Socialization. Gilbert has been awarded Northeastern University’s Excellence in Teaching award and in 2004 was chosen to deliver the annual Robert D. Klein University Lecture. In 1994, he was appointed to the Working Group on Presidential Disability by President Carter and the Bowman Gray School of Medicine. The Working Group met with Presidents Ford and Carter over a two year period and presented its Report and Recommendations to President Clinton at the White House in December 1996.

David Goetze is associate professor of political science at Utah State University. He has served as executive director of the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences for the past nine years. His research focuses on human cooperation and conflict – most recently, on the evolutionary origins of group bonding and the evolved psychology of warfare.

Rebecca J. Hannagan is currently a visiting associate professor of political science and affiliate of the Center for Women, Politics & Policy at Portland State University. She is a 2006 graduate of the University of Nebraska, and her home institution is Northern Illinois University where she is associate professor of political science, faculty associate of women’s studies, and research faculty of the Center for the Study of Family Violence and Sexual Assault. Her research and teaching focuses on the biological underpinnings of political attitudes and behavior with particular emphasis on gender differences. Her research has been published in Political Behavior, Perspectives on Politics, PS: Political Science and Politics, Politics and the Life Sciences, The Journal of Trauma and Dissociation, Sex Roles: A Journal of Research, Biology and Philosophy, and other journals and edited volumes. Hannagan was the principal investigator on a National Science Foundation grant for approximately $95,000, undertaking the study of gender dynamics in local government decision making.

Milton Lodge is a distinguished university professor of political science and co-director of the Political Science Department’s Laboratory for Political Research. In addition to disciplinary recognition – he was president of the Midwest Political Science Association in 1999–2000, an Obermann Fellow at the University of Iowa’s Center for Advanced Studies in 1991, and a senior fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Science in 2003–2004. Lodge served as a Senior Fulbright Scholar at the Central University of Nepal in Kathmandu in 2001–2002. Professor Lodge is widely recognized as a founding father of political psychology, as witnessed by being awarded in 2005 the Harold Lasswell Award in recognition of his “distinguished scientific lifetime contribution to the study of political psychology.”

Michael Bang Petersen is an associate professor at the Department of Political Science, Aarhus University in Denmark. His research focuses on the psychology of public opinion formation and draws on theories and insights from evolutionary psychology and neuroscience. He is affiliated with the Center for Evolutionary Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara and has published in journals such as Journal of Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly, European Journal of Political Research, and Journal of Cognition and Culture.

Steven A. Peterson is director of the School of Public Affairs and professor of politics and public affairs at Penn State Harrisburg. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the State University of New York at Buffalo. His areas of research interest include American politics, public opinion and voting behavior, biology and politics, and public policy (AIDS policy and education policy). He has authored or co-authored (or co-edited) over 20 books, among which are Darwinism, Dominance, and Democracy, The Failure of Democratic Nation Building: Ideology Meets Evolution, Political Behavior: Patterns in Everyday Life, The World of the Policy Analyst, and over 100 publications. He has served as president of the New York State Political Science Association and the Northeastern Political Science Association. He has served as an officer in the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences (APLS) and Research Committee #12 (Biology and Politics) of the International Political Science Association.

Albert Somit is distinguished professor emeritus at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, where he served as president. He also was executive vice president at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he is professor emeritus. He has been a pioneer in biopolitics and is the founder of Research Committee #12 (Biology and Politics) of the International Political Science Association, for which he currently serves as president. He has published extensively in the history of political science, the politics of the elderly, and, of course, biopolitics. Among his major works in biopolitics are Biology and Politics; Darwinism, Dominance, and Democracy; Human Nature and Public Policy.

Bradley A. Thayer is a professor of political science at Utah State University. He is the author of numerous works in biopolitics and international relations, including Darwin and International Relations: On the Evolutionary Origins of War and Ethnic Conflict. He has served as a consultant to the U.S. government, including the Department of Defense.

Johan M. G. van der Dennen studied behavioral sciences at the University of Groningen, and is at present senior researcher at the Section Political Science of the Department of Legal Theory, formerly the Polemological (Peace Research) Institute, University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He has published extensively on all aspects of human and animal aggression, sexual violence, neuro- and psychopathology of human violence, political violence, theories of war causation, macroquantitative research on contemporary wars, ethnocentrism, and the politics of peace and war in preindustrial societies. In 1995 he published his dissertation The Origin of War: The Evolution of a Male-Coalitional Reproductive Strategy, an evolutionary analysis of the origin of intergroup violence in humans and animals.

Tatu Vanhanen is emeritus professor of political science of the University of Tampere, Finland, and currently a visiting researcher at the Department of Political and Economic Studies, University of Helsinki. He became Doctor of Social Sciences at the University of Tampere in 1968 and has held positions at the University of Jyväskylä, the University of Tampere, and the University of Helsinki. Among his books are The Process of Democratization: A Comparative Study of 147 States, 1980–88 (1990), On the Evolutionary Roots of Politics (1992), Prospects of Democracy: A Study of 172 Countries (1997), Ethnic Conflicts Explained by Ethnic Nepotism (1999), IQ and the Wealth of Nations (co-author, 2002), Democratization: A Comparative Analysis of 170 Countries (2003), IQ and Global Inequality (co-author, 2006), The Limits of Democratization: Climate, Intelligence, and Resource Distribution (2009). Intellience: A Unifying Construct for the Social Sciences (co-author, 2012), and Ethnic Conflicts: Their Biological Roots in Ethnic Nepotism (2012).