On June 29, 2002, President George W. Bush invoked the United States Constitution's Twenty-Fifth Amendment, ratified in 1967. By so doing, he helped focus attention on the amendment's two disability provisions, Sections 3 and 4. Section 3 provides for voluntary transfer of power from the president to the vice president and is wholly dependent on the president's wishes. Section 4 provides for involuntary transfers of power, possibly over the president's objection. This controversial provision allows a vice president, with the assent of a majority of the cabinet, to become acting president. Critics have long argued that the vice president and cabinet officers, since they all owe their positions to the president, may be excessively reluctant to act even when action clearly is warranted. Therefore, some of these critics have proposed that a presidential disability commission be established at the beginning of every administration either to act under Section 4 in place of the cabinet or to provide formal and regular medical assessments so as to press for action in the event of presidential inability. I argue that such proposals are unwise and that their implementation would be counterproductive and even dangerous, both to the presidency and to the nation.

Last February, on Monday the ninth, Lieutenant Colonel George W. Korch, Jr, Ph.D., United States Army, speaking in his capacity as Deputy Director of the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC), Fort Detrick, Maryland, addressed the 2004 Department of Defense Pest Management Workshop, meeting in Florida at the Jacksonville Naval Air Station. He spoke in the Main Ballroom of the River Cove Officers' Club. As of this writing the workshop's full schedule1 still shows a hypertext link to his remarks, but the link is no longer active. While it was active, as late as April, a copy of his remarks, presented as computer slides, could be downloaded to any computer, anywhere. It can still be found, unofficially.2

Some environmental ethicists have proposed that different environmental values lead in principle to different environmental policy preferences. The controversy provoked by Bjørn Lomborg's book, The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001), has provided an opportunity to test this hypothesis in practice for scientists and other technical experts. In analyzing the language of the argument between Lomborg and his critics, I find that environmental scientists participating prominently in the debate fall into one of two camps according to whether their valuations of nature tend to be anthropocentric or nonanthropocentric. I find further that for these scientists moral philosophies correlate both with policy preferences and with interpretations of data. I conclude that unexplored differences in environmental values make important and underappreciated contributions to the politicization of science and to polarization among scientists and other technical experts involved in environmental disputes.

Many international conflicts are recurrent, and many of these are characterized by periods of violence, including wars, that are hard to describe as planned products of rational decision-making. Analysis of these conflicts according to rational-choice international-relations theory or constructivist approaches has been less revealing than might have been hoped. We consider the possibility that emotive causes could better explain, or at least improve the explanation of, observed patterns. We offer three emotive models of recurrent conflict and we outline a method by which the reliability of emotive explanations derived from these models could be tested prospectively.

The accumulating scientific evidence — across many disciplines — regarding human evolution and the dualities and complexities of human nature indicates that the core ideological assumptions of both capitalism and socialism are simplistic and ultimately irreconcilable. A biologically grounded approach to social justice enables us to articulate a new ideological paradigm that I call “Fair Shares.” This paradigm consists of three complementary normative principles. First, goods and services should be distributed to each according to his or her basic needs. Second, surpluses beyond the provisioning of our basic needs should be distributed according to merit. And, third, each of us is obliged in return to contribute to the “collective survival enterprise” in accordance with his or her ability. Though none of these three principles is new, in combination they provide a biologically informed middle way between capitalism and socialism. Some of the many issues that are raised by this formulation are also briefly addressed.

Three romantic strategies are inferred from an evolutionary life-history model of adolescence, in which girls must choose between beginning reproduction and acquiring skills. These strategies differ in the level of commitment sought and in the type of information gathered during relationships. I surveyed 158 heterosexual high school girls in New Mexico. The three strategies, as well as age, sexual maturity, parents' education, and father absence, were used as predictors of romantic relationship duration. Three significant results were obtained using the Cox Proportional Hazards Model. First, girls scoring high in the “committer” scale were less likely to have relationships end than were girls scoring higher on “information-gatherer” scales. Also, Anglo girls and Anglo-Hispanic multi-racial girls were more likely to have a relationship end than were Hispanic girls. Third, girls from a higher socioeconomic background were likely to have longer relationships. The implications of these results are discussed.

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.

The Harrison Symposia are products of the University of Maryland's Harrison Program on the Future Global Agenda. The Program's mission is to promote research, teaching, and public dialogue on ecological security, long-term sustainability, energy and environmental policy, and global governance — and on the ideas that influence them. Editors for the Symposia are Dennis Pirages, the Horace Harrison Professor of International Environmental Politics, and Ken Conca, Director of the Harrison Program. These symposia are to be ongoing discussions; readers are encouraged to submit comments, reactions, and suggestions, including topic suggestions, to the editors.

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.

Evolutionary ethics is a subject that has been debated ever since Darwin's day. The basic issue, in a nutshell, is whether or not human ethical systems can be explained — and justified — in terms of evolutionary principles. In recent years there has been an upsurge of publications devoted to this issue, including many new books (as well as a number of books on Darwinism and religion) and countless journal articles. Indeed, an Internet search using the term “evolutionary ethics” yielded 65,400 citations of various kinds. As this outpouring of publications suggests, there has been a great diversity of views on the subject over the years.

One can see the appeal of evolutionary ethics today. Throughout the Western world, and nowhere more than the United States, individualism is rampant. Some argue that greed is good; too much social and political theory idealizes individual freedom and choice as the highest values. How gratifying it is to learn that greed and selfishness are not natural, or at least not any more natural than cooperation, self-sacrifice, and altruism. Trouble is, most of the truly horrible acts in this world have been committed not by selfish individuals but by ordinary men and women following orders. We must consider whether evolutionary ethics adequately addresses this problem. Can evolutionary ethics discover the sources of resistance to malevolent authority?