Tom Wiegele was a class act. Tall, white-haired, distinguished, thoughtful, and, above all, principled, he appeared too good to be true. Tom exemplified that precious and, it sometimes seems, increasingly rare combination, a gentleman and a scholar.

The Principle of Competitive Exclusion, first articulated by Gause in 1934, states that two species or populations cannot inhabit the same niche: one will consistently out-compete the other. Of four possible outcomes, the logistic equations that describe such interaction present only one possibility for coexistence, that being when the density-dependent mechanisms of one population become activated before intergroup competition eliminates the other. In applying Gause's Principle as an explanatory model to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this research explores the present bantustanization of the West Bank as a logical outcome of interspecific competition, but sees the competition coefficients of the equations as the key factors in promoting a stable equilibrium.

This essay represents our latest annual update of the biopolitical literature and of related developments (see also Somit et al., 1980; Peterson, Somit, and Slagter, 1982; Peterson, Somit, and Brown, 1983; Peterson and Somit, 1984). Our count for 1984 is 78 items: 3 monographs or books (Axelrod, 1984; Blank 1984f; Vanhanen, 1984a), 13 articles, 2 chapters in a book, 44 conference papers, 16 review essays, commentaries, etc., and 0 master's theses or Ph.D. dissertations.

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.

Under the ongoing monitoring and verification (OMV) program mandated by Security Council Resolution 715, the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM) has installed more than a hundred remote-controlled video cameras at Iraqi “dual-capable” facilities—that is, facilities that have legitimate commercial applications but that could also be misused to produce nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons and long-range ballistic missiles. Since January 1995, these cameras have collected optical data for analysis at UNSCOM's Baghdad Monitoring and Verification Center, located on the third floor of the former Canal Hotel (Smith, 1994).

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.

This article examines how disease salience influences attitudes toward two types of humanitarian aid: sending foreign aid and housing refugees. Some have argued that disease salience increases levels of out-group prejudice through what is referred to as the behavioral immune system (BIS), and this increase in out-group prejudice works to shape policy attitudes. However, an alternative mechanism that may explain the effects of disease salience is contamination fear, which would suggest there is no group bias in the effects of disease threat. Existing work largely interprets opposition to policies that assist out-groups as evidence of out-group prejudice. We suggest it is necessary to separate measures of out-group animosity from opinions toward specific policies to determine whether increased out-group prejudice rather than fear of contamination is the mechanism by which disease salience impacts policy attitudes. Across two experiments, disease salience is shown to significantly decrease support for humanitarian aid, but only in the form of refugee support. Furthermore, there is converging evidence to suggest that any influence of disease salience on aid attitudes is not caused by a corresponding increase in xenophobia. We suggest that the mechanism by which disease threat influences policy attitudes is a general fear of contamination rather than xenophobia. These findings go against an important hypothesized mechanism of the BIS and have critical implications for the relationship between disease salience and attitudes toward transnational policies involving humanitarian aid.

The use of chemical and biological weapons on the battlefield is considered by most commentators — and by international law — as more abhorrent than the use of nearly all other weapons, including ones meant either to kill secretly or to kill terribly, as do fire or burial alive. I ask why this is so. I explore this question through the study of imagery patterns in Western literature and campaigns against food contamination and environmental pollution. I find that the norm against chemical and biological weapons builds upon a taboo against poisons, a prohibition widely accepted in military manuals as distinguishing soldierly conduct from criminal conduct, especially those forms of conduct made criminal by the employment of treachery, invisibility, and transformation.

Recent research contends that the behavioral immune system, operating largely outside conscious awareness, motivates individuals to exhibit higher levels of prejudice toward unfamiliar out-groups. This research finds that individual variance in disgust sensitivity correlates with support for political policies that facilitate the avoidance of out-groups. We were interested in developing less intrusive indicators of disgust sensitivity via olfactory measures (i.e., ratings of disgusting odors) and behavioral measures (e.g., willingness to touch disgusting objects) and studying the association between measures of disgust sensitivity and in-group bias among children and adults. We submitted a registered report to conduct this research and received an in-principle acceptance. Unfortunately, unforeseen events impaired our data collection, leaving us with a limited sample (nchildren = 32, nadults = 29) and reducing our ability to draw reliable conclusions from our results. In this essay, we describe our motivation and plan of research, the events that made completing the research impossible, and our preliminary results. In doing so, we hope to offer support for studying the effects of the behavioral immune system, even in ways that we did not originally plan. We conclude with a reflection on the value of registered reports for advancing science.

With sing. concord. The interaction between politics and biology; spec. (a) politically motivated intervention in the growth or development of a population; (b) the use of biological science to explain human social or political behaviour; (c) environmental policy.

When Julius Caesar was stabbed, 23 times, on the Ides of March, at least one of the daggers is supposed to have gone into his groin. He wasn't the last Roman to have his privates attacked. And he wasn't the last primate. In competition for sexual access, gonads are occasionally targeted: canine incisions in monkey and ape scrota are not uncommon; and rumors had a number of Roman emperors—from Caligula and Nero, to Galba, Vitellius, Domitian, Commodus, Caracalla, Elagabalus, to Balbinus, Pupienus and Valerian over the course of the third century crisis—done in with their genitals at risk, or with their genitals cut off.