Bioconstitutional Politics: Toward an Interdisciplinary Paradigm

Abstract

This article integrates theory and data culled from two largely unrelated subdisciplines—biopolitics and constitutional politics—to provide a “bioconstitutional” overview of power relationships among Homo sapiens. That overview features three aspects of constitutional configuration: (1) the biopsychological, evidence of which is drawn chiefly from neuroscience, primatology, biochemistry, and championship chess play; (2) the biosocial, evidence of which is drawn chiefly from gene-culture coevolutionary analysis, anthropology, social psychology, jurisprudence, and political science; (3) the biopolicy aspect, evidence of which is drawn exclusively from the American scene, most particularly Supreme Court decision making involving reproductive choice and governmental constraints on gene-cloning. Constitutionalism is conceived as a thought-action field theory, whose values are not only dynamic and functional, but also both politically influential and subject to political influence. Bioconstitutionalism supplies the requisite life science context for these patterns, and itself presents notable feedback features as humans acquire greater capacity to order their adaptive strategies through biological intervention programs.