During his first term as President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower suffered several serious illnesses. Particularly important was the massive heart attack he experienced in the fall of 1955. Drawing on primary sources as well as prior scholarship, this article analyzes varying interpretations of Eisenhower's 1955 medical treatment in light of his previous illnesses and their management. It explores the handling of public disclosure by the White House, by Eisenhower himself, and by his medical team. And it reconsiders Republican strategists' efforts to allay public concerns about the President's health. Current understanding is called into question in several respects. Although it sharpened speculation about his fitness and willingness to run in the 1956 presidential campaign, the 1955 heart attack made Eisenhower more likely, rather than less likely, to run. Although often sick, and in several instances critically so, Eisenhower was clearly the dominant player — intentionally “behind the scenes” — both in the management of his illnesses and in the health-perceptual aspects of his drive toward a second term. These findings should lead us to a better reading of Eisenhower as a president and to a better appreciation of health's linkage to legacy in presidential politics.

Public Goods can be seen as one important way in which societies sustain themselves over time. These are part of the puzzle of the development of political order. Public goods like the rule of law are non-substractable and non-excludable. For economists the classic textbook examples are national defense and police protection. In this paper I argue that religiosity can function like police protection, a means of sustaining order through fear of punishment from a transcendent source. As a means of reducing defection from social norms it has a role to play as a public good. But religion cannot at the same time be seen as the source of such norms or dissention will undermine the very order that punishment seems to reinforce.

Holistic Darwinism is a candidate name for a major paradigm shift that is currently underway in evolutionary biology and related disciplines. Important developments include (1) a growing appreciation for the fact that evolution is a multilevel process, from genes to ecosystems, and that interdependent coevolution is a ubiquitous phenomenon in nature; (2) a revitalization of group selection theory, which was banned (prematurely) from evolutionary biology over 30 years ago (groups may in fact be important evolutionary units); (3) a growing respect for the fact that the genome is not a “bean bag” (in biologist Ernst Mayr's caricature), much less a gladiatorial arena for competing selfish genes, but a complex, interdependent, cooperating system; (4) an increased recognition that symbiosis is an important phenomenon in nature and that symbiogenesis is a major source of innovation in evolution; (5) an array of new, more advanced game theory models, which support the growing evidence that cooperation is commonplace in nature and not a rare exception; (6) new research and theoretical work that stresses the role of nurture in evolution, including developmental processes, phenotypic plasticity, social information transfer (culture), and especially the role of behavioral innovations as pacemakers of evolutionary change (e.g., niche construction theory, which is concerned with the active role of organisms in shaping the evolutionary process, and gene-culture coevolution theory, which relates especially to the dynamics of human evolution); (7) and, not least, a broad effort to account for the evolution of biological complexity — from major transition theory to the “Synergism Hypothesis.” Here I will briefly review these developments and will present a case for the proposition that this paradigm shift has profound implications for the social sciences, including specifically political theory, economic theory, and political science as a discipline. Interdependent superorganisms, it turns out, have played a major role in evolution — from eukaryotes to complex human societies.

The use of chemical and biological weapons on the battlefield is considered by most commentators — and by international law — as more abhorrent than the use of nearly all other weapons, including ones meant either to kill secretly or to kill terribly, as do fire or burial alive. I ask why this is so. I explore this question through the study of imagery patterns in Western literature and campaigns against food contamination and environmental pollution. I find that the norm against chemical and biological weapons builds upon a taboo against poisons, a prohibition widely accepted in military manuals as distinguishing soldierly conduct from criminal conduct, especially those forms of conduct made criminal by the employment of treachery, invisibility, and transformation.

Conventionally, flags are explained as symbols of group solidarity that achieve force through ritual processes. Alternatively, flags may be seen as symbols with positive or negative associations derived from our experiences with physical space. While this article accepts these interpretations, it also argues that they need to be augmented. Flag meaning is not entirely a social or linguistic construction because there is a link between flag displays and our inherent predispositions to cues about social rank. Our evolved social intelligence makes us sensitive to the topographic features of flag displays that signal relationships of dominance and subordination.

The ethologically oriented method of social analysis developed by Edward Westermarck is applied to the subjects of charitable behavior, the welfare ethic, and the link between them. Westermarck dealt with these topics, but not in the depth he accorded the subjects of incest aversion, the incest prohibition, and the connection between them. Westermarck's approach to analyzing incest behavior and regulating institutions is also useful in the case of charitableness and the welfare ethic. Westermarck would have analyzed the welfare ethic as an institution derived from human nature — secundam naturam — in addition to an authoritative discipliner of behavior as proposed by Freud. Evidence is presented that this is the case with the welfare ethic in modern societies. This evidence includes the sensitivity of welfare to ethnic diversity. The latter decreases public altruism, whether expressed as charitableness to beggars, national charities, or public goods. The parochial leaning of charity and the welfare ethic is allowed for by Westermarck's empirically grounded ethics. Despite the passage of nearly a century, Edward Westermarck can still be an instructive guide to the biosociological enterprise. This continuing relevance shows what could have been, and can still be, done with the conceptual tools offered by an evolutionarily informed sociology.

Absent from most analyses of political news are detailed assessments of the candidates' nonverbal behavior, which has been shown experimentally to have considerable persuasive influence. Unlike attractiveness and other relatively stable aspects of appearance, facial displays are highly variable and reveal important moment-to-moment information about the emitter's internal state. In this paper we argue that facial displays are influential elements within political news and examine the character of televised candidate displays over four presidential election cycles. The analysis considers coverage of major party nominees shown during the general elections of 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 on the major broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC). To motivate our hypotheses, we draw on the biopolitics literature that has identified three classes of displays relevant to the study of nonverbal political behavior: happiness/reassurance, anger/threat, and fear/evasion. The analysis focuses on the relationship between the display types shown in election coverage, the context in which the displays are shown, and candidate standings in the polls.

IQ and Global Inequality is a sequel to the authors' earlier IQ and the Wealth of Nations wherein they argued that “… national differences in intelligence are an important factor contributing to differences in national wealth and rates of economic growth” (p. 2). Or, later more precisely stated, that “… national IQ is the single most powerful explanatory variable, but because the explained part of the variation does not rise higher than 40–60 percent, this explanation leaves room for other explanatory factors”(p. 13). Not surprisingly, even so qualified, this thesis triggered a “mixed reception.” As the authors relate with refreshing candor, some of the reviewers denounced them for “jumping to conclusions,” took issue with their “relatively weak statistical evidence and dubious presumptions,” found the study “neither methodologically nor theoretically convincing,” and dismissed the evidence as “virtually meaningless” (p. 3).