ABSTRACT
As noted in chapter 1, there are critical and fundamental implications of the life sciences for public policy. Like the study of political behaviour, however, political scientists who specialise in public policy have largely ignored biological factors and, except for some areas of environmental policy, have been conspicuously absent from the scholarly, and public, debate over biologically-based issues. This chapter first discusses the failure of conventional policy making models to account for biological influences. Despite their differences, these models assume that decisions are a product of environmental determinants.
