Species conservation via the Endangered Species Act is highly politicized, yet few data have been gathered to illustrate the relationship of political party affiliation to species conservation perspectives. We conducted a nationwide public opinion survey and found that Democrats value species conservation more highly than do Republicans, and that Democrats are also more strongly supportive of the Endangered Species Act. Republicans place higher value on property rights than do Democrats, but members of both parties value economic growth as highly as wildlife conservation. The results imply that the Democratic propensity to value species conservation reflects a biocentric perspective that does not bode well for practical conservation efforts. Species conservation will depend upon the success of academicians and progressive political leaders in educating students and members of all parties about the fundamental conflict between economic growth and wildlife conservation.

Kennewick Man, an early Holocene (9,000 years old) skeleton found in Washington State in 1996, has been a lightening rod for political discussion. Due to his alleged Caucasoid features, Kennewick Man controversially called into question who first peopled the Americas. A projectile point lodged in his hip also catapulted him to celebrity status. Spared the quick (within ninety days after an inquiry) repatriation typically required under the 1990 federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), Kennewick Man was fully examined by a team of scientists chosen by the government who were forbidden to discuss their findings. Although the team concluded that Kennewick Man has cranial features associated with both Caucasoids and modern Native Americans, he is considered mainly to resemble modern Japanese Ainu, Polynesians, and Southeast Asians, as are other early Amerindian finds. Despite the resolution of early controversies, Kennewick Man continues as a symbol of the ideology of repatriation. In this article, I review the evidence for my belief that, taken to an extreme, the demand to bury aboriginal skeletons, not only in America but also around the world, poses a potentially serious impediment to scientific enquiry.

In 1998, the Sierra Club membership voted in a contentious referendum to refrain from including restriction of U.S. immigration as part of its official club population policy. Club proponents of immigration reduction had declared the problem was simply the environmental impact of greater numbers of people; however, they failed to distinguish themselves from groups with much broader immigration-reduction agendas, leaving themselves open to charges of racism. The club faction calling for the exclusion of immigration issues from the policy, on the other hand, failed to acknowledge the demographic reality of the contribution of immigration (30%) to the growth of the U.S. population. As a result, current club policy is not credible, as it calls for a reduction in the U.S. population but ignores immigration. The Sierra Club's complex organizational structure and open, democratic political process make it particularly vulnerable to internal conflict during periods of changing perspectives within the organization.

Many treatments for infertility require the use of donated gametes or embryos. Arguments have been made that all parties involved (donors, recipients, and children) should have open access to information about one another. The present article reports a survey of attitudes of 77 donors and 327 recipients in the state of Western Australia. Donors and recipients endorsed a register of nonidentifying information, but were less keen on a register of identifying information. They believed that medical personnel should have access to such registers, and that donors and recipients (but not children) should have access to nonidentifying, but not identifying, information. Typically, the sort of information respondents wanted to access pertained to health status and physical characteristics. Overwhelmingly, both donors and recipients saw gamete and embryo donation as more like blood donation than like adoption.

The age of puberty in many populations has declined steeply over recent centuries and may be declining still. Consequently, today's children tend to experience the hormonal stresses of rapid development at younger ages than did their ancestors, around whose later, if not more gradual, maturation traditional behavioral expectations formed. Little has been made of this “rush to puberty” outside the life sciences. This article reviews its historical documentation, scholarly appreciation, epidemiological correlations, putative physiological and environmental explanations, sociological implications, and largely latent politics.

This paper integrates several different but mutually consistent evolutionary approaches to ethnicity: genetic similarity theory, social identity theory, individualism/collectivism, an evolved racial/ethnic human kinds module, and rational choice mechanisms relying on domain general cognitive mechanisms. These theories are consistent with each other, and together they illustrate the interplay of evolved cognitive and motivational systems with mechanisms of rational choice that are able to choose adaptive strategies in uncertain, novel environments.

Biomedical research is a success by any standard. It has led to treatments and preventive practices that have caused rates of death from the major killers—heart disease, cancer, and stroke—to decline steadily over the past few decades (National Center for Health Statistics, 2002: Table 30). Hundreds of new drugs have been approved over the past decade (U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 2002), and another 1000 potential drugs are under development (Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, 2002). The past year alone has seen breakthroughs in understanding afflictions as diverse as sickle cell anemia, tuberculosis, breast cancer, Alzheimer's disease, depression, and substance abuse.

Twenty-five years ago, in November 1976, a physician misunderstood a cassette-tape providing continuing education for family practitioners to say that the rare neurological complication called Guillain-Barré syndrome could be a side effect of flu vaccines. When a recently vaccinated patient developed the syndrome, the physician alerted public officials and thereby started the process that ultimately ended the government campaign to immunize all Americans against swine flu. The physician was right, but for the wrong reasons, as Neustadt and Fineberg point out in the introduction to the 1983 edition of their classic case study of the swine flu episode (1983:xxv).