ABSTRACT
Several important future requirements are necessary for biopolitics to establish itself firmly as an innovative orientation in the discipline. Researchers who have worked in the area known as biopolitics have been interested in several aspects of the life sciences. The most prominent among these are ethology, evolutionary studies including population biology, and what might very loosely be referred to as physiology. Ethology has given us many useful organizing concepts including territoriality, bonding, imprinting, dominance, and ritualized behavior. Ethology has the powerful advantage that many of its insights have grown out of a comparative perspective on animal social behavior. Population biology has proved to be a rich source of information on evolution, and at least one political scientist has focused almost exclusively on the evolutionary perspective in his work. Physiologically oriented work has adopted perspectives from subspecialties that have focused, for example, on nutrition, health, neurology, psychophysiology, and medicine.
