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".

History
The field can be said to originate with the 1968 manifesto of Albert Somit, 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.

Topics
Topics addressed in political science from these perspectives include: public opinion and criminal justice attitudes, political ideology, (e.g. the correlates of biology and political orientation), voting behavior, and warfare. Debates persist inside the field and out, regarding genetic and biological determinism. Important recent surveys of leading research in biopolitics have been published in the journals Political Psychology and Science.