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At the 1980 APSA meeting in Washington, a group of approximately 25 political scientists and others, out of a much larger network of contributors and sympathizers, agreed to form an Association for Politics and the Life Sciences dedicated to the advancement of an integrated biosocial perspective in our discipline. Although this short article is intended primarily to announce that fact and detail plans for the immediate future, we feel that this might also be an appropriate occasion to review briefly the history and rationale behind this intellectual activity and describe some of the objectives of the Association.The study of the relationship between biology and politics (sometimes called "biobehavioral political science" and sometimes also "biopolitics") drew its initial impetus in the latter 1960s and early 1970s from emergent developments in a number of other disciplines, particularly (a) ethology (the naturalistic study of animal behavior and adaptation), (b) psychophysiology (specifically, efforts to correlate various physiological characteristics and "indicators" with various mental and behavioral states), (c) psychobiology (including neurological and endocrine influences on social behavior), (d) behavior genetics (involving both human and non-human animal research), (e) psychopharmacology (especially the chemical manipulation of behavioral states), (f) sociobiology (the application of modern Darwinian theory to the explanation of social behaviors), and (g) ecology (the study of the relationships between organisms and their environments, which gained visibility when the so-called "environmental crisis" erupted).

Each year we have the honor to publish an article version of the APSA Presidential Address. In the six years we have done this John Ishiyama is the first comparativist whose work we have featured in this capacity. He presently holds an appointment as University Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science at the University of North Texas. John has long been a fixture in the subfield of comparative politics for his contributions on democratization, political parties, and ethnic politics in both the post-Soviet region and Africa. He has also written extensively on teaching, publishing, and assessment in political science. He has published over 150 articles. And while the outlets and subject matter are too diverse to summarize succinctly, we do want to mention that "The Politics of Intercountry Adoption: Explaining Variation in the Legal Requirements of Sub-Saharan African Countries," coauthored with Marijke Breuning, won the 2010 APSA Heinz Eulau Award for Best Journal Article published in Perspectives on Politics during the previous year (2009).

The bad news is that critics of the quantitative movement in policy and political science are right (so far). Widely accepted quantitative models of politics promote cynicism and counter‐productive uses of government power. Mainstream social science provides a perverse basis for policy analysis. The good news is that there is no sound scientific reason for the schism between so called "empirical" and "normative" theories of politics. Traditional theories of politics, which show how government power can be used to serve the public interest, can be quantified and tested as empirical theory. The resulting scientific normative theory provides a constructive foundation for policy analysis.

'Political Science Fiction' edited by Donald M. Hassler and Clyde Wilcox is reviewed. Political Science Fiction edited by Donald M. Hassler and Clyde Wilcox is reviewed.