Darwinism, dominance, and democracy: a reaffirmation.

Albert Somit is Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at Southern Illinois University. He has taught at New York University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, and the Naval War College, and has held Senior Fellowships at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study and Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has served as Executive Vice President at SUNY/Buffalo and as President at Southern Illinois University. Since the early 1960s, his major interest has been in the possible infl uence of biological factors (genetic and other) on political and social behavior. He was a founding member of the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences and founder (and Chair) of the International Political Science Associationʼs Research Committee #12 (Biology and Politics). Among his publications are The Development of American Political Science (Allyn and Bacon, 1967), Biology and Politics (Mouton, 1976), Hierarchy and Democracy (Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), The Victorious Incumbent (Dartmouth, 1994), and, with Steven A. Peterson, The Dynamics of Evolution (Cornell University Press, 1992), Birth Order and Political Behavior (University Press of America, 1996), Darwinism, Dominance, and Democracy (Praeger, 1997) and, most recently, Human Nature and Public Policy: An Evolutionary Approach (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Steven A. Peterson is Director of the School of Public Affairs at Penn State Harrisburg and Professor of Politics and Public Affairs. Before that, he taught at Alfred University. He is Chair of the Council of the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences and Vice President and Secretary of Research Committee #12 of the International Political Science Association. He has served as President of the New York State Political Science Association and the Northeastern Political Science Association. His research interests include biopolitics, American politics, public opinion and voting behavior, and public policy (AIDS policy and education policy). Among his authored or coauthored books (in addition to those noted above) are Political Behavior: Patterns in Everyday Life (Sage, 1990), The World of the Policy Analyst (Chatham House, 1997), and State and Local Politics (McGraw-Hill, 1994). Correspondence should be addressed to School of Public Affairs, Penn State Harrisburg, 777 W. Harrisburg Pike, Middletown, PA 17057, USA (e-mail: sap12@psu.edu). Corning correctly reports in his commentary (2000), we contend that “the most important reason for the rarity of democracy is that evolution has endowed our species, as it has other primates, with a predisposition for hierarchically structured social and political systems” (1997:1). In short, we argue that Homo sapiens has a “genetic bias” toward authoritarian political societies characterized by hierarchy, dominance, and submission. But that is not our thesis in full. Obviously, despite this inherent bias, democracies do occasionally arise. To explain that happy reality, we immediately go on to say that two things make this possible. First (and here we trod familiar ground), there must be a “unique concatenation of economic, social, historical and political ʻfacilitating factors” (Somit and Peterson, 1997:4). For the second “necessary, though not suffi cient condition,” we turn to evolutionary theory—and given Corningʼs opening criticism, we think it important to cite the statement in full: