It is difficult to know how to review an edited volume, especially one that claims to represent an emerging field. Does one review the most intriguing of the 10 field-defining articles, or does one focus on the editorial approach to the emerging field of evolutionary biopolitics? The latter approach has been chosen here, one which requires a stipulation. While I have difficulties with the editors' approach to the field, there can be little doubt that it is one that political science ignores at its peril. The question is whether political scientists will have any idea how to integrate its insights. To use it is not only to know its findings but also to theorize what it means to say that man is a political animal in the sense the editors intend, which is not Aristotle's. In this regard, the editors are not as helpful as they might have been. One might argue that it is too early to integrate the insights of the field, and perhaps that is so, but it is not too early to start thinking about it.

One wishes that a volume that sets itself the task of defining a field had been a little more sophisticated about both the philosophy of science it invokes on its behalf and the classics its contributors criticize. The subjects of these complaints will be considered in turn, but first a comment on the genre. For a number of years, when I was still teaching the scope and method of political study to graduate students, I assigned Frans de Waal's (Reference de Waal2007) Chimpanzee Politics, a fascinating account of the social life of chimpanzees and bonobos, the smaller of the two species of great apes. A single chapter from de Waal's account, filled with stories illustrating the empathic capacity and limits of the bonobo, perhaps the most sympathetic of the apes, was more captivating than any chapter in the book under review. There is a reason, of course, and much of the blame falls upon the genre. Although there are many illustrations of the evolutionary approach, and a chapter devoted to primates, much of the time and attention of the contributing authors is spent explaining “here is how and why this approach is important to political science.” It may be true, but it does not always make for the most fascinating reading.

First, a couple of issues that fall broadly under the category of philosophy of science deserve scrutiny. The editors argue that an advantage of the biological approach is that it may provide an “ontological” foundation for rational actor models, which currently lack such support (p. 4). True enough, but ontology is no more the realm of science than is metaphysics, of which it is an instance. Ontology belongs to the realm of metaphysics, the study of the categories of being that may be said to be fundamental. I had thought it was only in political theory that ontology had become a fancy word for empirical; evidently not. It is, however, worth remembering what it is that biology (or any other genuine social science) is able to provide: statements about the world that may be shown false, and thus have cognitive content (Popper Reference Popper2002). It will be a long time before such statements provide us a firm foundation for anything. Indeed, that is probably not what we should be looking for. We should be looking for our old paradigms (that most frequently cited term in the social sciences) to be overcome by new knowledge, not to be grounded by them. Likely the greatest contribution of the new science of human evolutionary biology will be in telling us when we are wrong, not when we are right.

Certainly, the editors are correct that the charge of “reductionism” directed against a scientific social science, especially one that draws on units of explanation smaller than the individual, such as neurobiology, is specious (p. 8). However, it is worth being clear about what reductionism involves. Reductionism is a commitment of empiricism. It stands as an objection to holism, the claim that groups (whether the group is one of cells constituting the individual or one of individuals) possess emergent properties inexplicable by laws governing the relationships among the relevant individual properties, or by any composition laws that explain what happens when groups of cells or individuals come together. Holism almost always possesses a mystical quality, and is rightly rejected by empiricists (Brodbeck Reference Brodbeck1958).

The issue the editors seem to be struggling with under the mistaken heading of reductionism is actually the much more subtle one of what constitutes an explanation. In the end, the answer must be “that which satisfies.” The problem, at least as I see it, is that some neurobiological explanations fail to satisfy. Even when we are convinced of the truth of facts, such as that in stable hierarchies, high-level males have lower cortisol levels (a biological marker of stress) than lower-status ones, there is something about this explanation that just fails to satisfy (p. 254). Is it because it is about baboons and not men? Is it because so much neurobiological research, unlike evolutionary research, seems to have the quality of barefoot empiricism, that is, lots of interesting facts but no theory (not even a borrowed theory, as rational choice theorists borrowed a theory from microeconomics) to hang them on?

Certainly this is part of it, but for many there will always be an experiential disconnect between hormones and our felt experiences of politics. For example, in one study, a small number of male political partisans were asked to chew gum so that the testosterone in their saliva could be measured as CNN reported the election results in 2008. Those partisans who supported Barack Obama had increased testosterone levels, while John McCain supporters had decreased levels (pp. 261–72). What makes this an unsatisfying study, if indeed you find it unsatisfying, as I do? One might argue that it is an intriguing fact isolated from theory. The other possibility, which is not clearly distinct, is that there is something about the human experience of politics that will never feel adequately explained by testosterone levels, even in the presence of a theory linking these levels to macro-level phenomena. This, however, remains an open question. It may well be that within a generation, explanations of voter preferences in terms of hormones will be as well accepted as explanations of depression in terms of a chemical imbalance in the brain. What people find satisfying is cultural, not timeless.

It will, in any case, require a theory that is a deductively interrelated set of propositions that make interesting and unexpected predictions, that is, which have cognitive content. Those who want to do social science should be held to the standards of science. This means that they should make interesting predictions about something important that can be shown wrong, and that these predictions should serve to increase our confidence in a larger theory about how the world of voting, or whatever, works. At least this is what I learned from Karl Popper, and it seems worth remembering that the goal is not the apparatus and appearance of science but bold conjectures and rigorous refutations about the world. One chapter, “The Mind-Body Connection,” tells you how to set up your own biophysiology laboratory for twenty thousand dollars. But first, you ought to know what you want to do with it besides get a grant (pp. 231, 243).

A second issue open to criticism is the editors' treatment of the classics. The classics do not deserve our respect because they are old and venerable. The respect they deserve is to be understood. The editors say (p. 19) that

Whatever else one may say about Aristotle's account of virtue (arete, άρετή), one can hardly claim that it lacks a unifying account of why virtue exists or should exist and how it fits into the larger scheme of things. One might not agree with Aristotle, but his argument runs something like this: Humans seek to be happy (eudaimon). This is not just a human characteristic but part of the goal-oriented, or teleological, structure of the universe. Unfortunately, humans are not very good at seeking their own happiness, tending toward excess, occasionally toward deficiency. In their upbringing, it is terribly important to develop the good habit of seeking the mean between excess and deficiency. Eventually this habit will become part of a noble character, and this noble character will seek its telos, (or goal) as efficiently as possible. Such a character can be called virtuous when seeking the mean has become pleasant. In developing this argument, Aristotle lays out the education most likely to develop good character, the subject of his Nichomachean Ethics, and the polity, or political order, most likely to support good character among its citizens, the subject of his Politics. In other works such as the Poetics, he discusses the art most likely to develop good character, as well as the risks life poses to it. In his Metaphysics, he locates his account of the good for man within an account of the larger cosmological order. Whatever else Aristotle fails to do, he does not “lack a unifying theory.” I could make a similar argument about Hobbes or Rousseau, but doing so is unnecessary.

What the editors seem to mean with the claim that Aristotle, among other classic authors, lacks a unifying theory of human needs and desires is that Aristotle fails to approach “human preference structures” from a “biological and evolutionary perspective that incorporates our past development and immediate ancestry as precursors to explaining our current political preferences” (p. 19). Although one might argue that Aristotle had his own (by now outmoded) biological and evolutionary perspective, the simplest thing to say is that the classics did not approach politics as the contributors to this book do. True enough, but we know this. There is no need to trivialize and dismiss the classics, from which we learn something quite different, in order to claim that modern biology and evolution have a contribution to make.

This is particularly ironic in a book whose title is drawn from an empirical claim made by Aristotle, an empirical claim that is by no means given, an empirical claim that is by no means settled by the studies in this book. It might be worthwhile, amid all the empirical data gathering, to reflect about what it means for humans to be political animals. In the end, this is where the editors let us down most. Evolutionary biology is not just a field. If it is to be taken seriously in the long run, it will lead to a set of claims about how the social world is put together. The claims would run something like the following.

The claim that man is a political animal is not the same as saying that man is a social animal, as Hannah Arendt (The Human Condition, Reference Arendt1958) reminds us. To be a political animal, one concludes from reading Hatemi and McDermott's volume, is to be homo hierarchicus. In one way or another, most of the chapters in the volume, particularly those on evolution and politics, but also the chapter on “Hormones and Politics,” are concerned with the forces that work to maintain stable hierarchies, from families to nations. These forces seem to run deeper than previously imagined, but not so deep that they cannot be upset. Everything that was explained in books employing “environmental” models, such as Ted Gurr's (Reference Gurr2011) classic Why Men Rebel, remains to be explained and enriched by evolutionary and neurobiological models. As the editors rightly point out at the beginning, there is no inherent conflict between these approaches (p. 3).

The state of the field, as represented by the book under review, can best be defined as driven by methodology and instrumentation, resulting in interesting but isolated empirical observations. Against this claim it might be argued that these “isolated empirical observations” are not isolated at all, but come together to form the field of evolutionary biopolitics. But a field is not a substitute for a theory, or the fields of psychoanalysis and art appreciation would be hard sciences. Perhaps this way of putting it is too demanding, but an undertaking that claims to be a science should be judged like one. Sound empirical data exist for someone to begin to turn the volume's field of study into a theory. The work begs to be done, and from the results presented here it is almost time.