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On June 12, 2012 Elinor Ostrom died. She was Distinguished Professor, Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science, and founder of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University (now renamed in honor of her and her husband Vincent, who also passed away this year). Lin served as the President of the American Political Science Association and the Public Choice Society and was the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics (2009). She was an enthusiastic contributor to APLS Annual Meetings—she organized panels, served as a plenary speaker at our 2006 meeting on the IU campus, and gave the keynote address at the 2010 meeting in Bloomington.

Founded in 1980, the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences (APLS) sought to establish biopolitics as a recognized field and to integrate biologically based research methods into mainstream political science. The association's founders established these goals to encourage a generation of scholars and promote the spread of biopolitical knowledge. There was early success when the American Political Science Association (APSA) recognized biopolitics as an organized section. However, this development did not leave an appreciable imprint on the political science profession and the experiment conjoining the two did not last long. The other goal of the founders, to integrate biologically based research methods into mainstream political science, faced more formidable obstacles and still faces challenges, though not without some progress.

By drawing on ideas developed in evolutionary psychology, this article attempts to contribute to improved understanding of ethnic group formation and change. Specifically, the article asks whether and to what degree evolved mental capacities and dispositions, in interaction with human social environments, account for ethnic group formation. The central arguments are that, in recent millennia, evolved reasoning capabilities of humans have led to a revolution in the technologies of human mobility—and that this development has severed the nearly perfect association between social group formation based on functional advantages and social group formation based on perceived kinship. The scale, composition, and durability of contemporary ethnic groups are the consequence of individual tradeoffs in functionality and kinship values.

The ability to cumulate and compare findings from laboratory experiments is impeded by the wide variety of designs employed in these studies and by the different incentive characteristics embedded in those designs. This article attempts to improve potential for comparing findings by proposing variables that specify incentive features of collective action designs. For many designs as seemingly disparate as those in prisoner's dilemma, commons dilemma, and public goods provision games, these specifications should enable different designs to be represented as values along common incentive parameters. With this procedure, the influence of incentives can be assessed and controlled across disparate experimental designs as well as the cumulative influence of other variables (for example, group size and identity, framing, and socioeconomic characteristics of subjects) that provoke collective action behavior. The article also notes the limitations of this procedure and other obstacles to the meaningful cumulation of findings on collective action. The procedure may not, for example, allow easy comparison of findings from experimental designs that have disparate nonlinear returns to cost contributions.

Intro -- Contents -- Preface -- Part I EVOLUTIONARY THEORY AND ETHNIC CONFLICT -- Chapter 1 What Can Evolutionary Theory Say About Ethnic Phenomena? David Goetze and Patrick James -- Chapter 2 The Roots of Ethnic Conflict: An Evolutionary Perspective Gary R. Johnson -- Chapter 3 A Defense and an Extension of Pierre van den Berghe's Theory of Ethnic Nepotism Frank Salter -- Chapter 4 Contributions of Evolutionary Thinking to Theories of Ethnic Conflict and Its Management Marc Howard Ross -- Part II SKEPTICAL VIEWS -- Chapter 5 From Ontology to Analogy: Evolutionary Theories and the Explanation of Ethnic Politics Robert Hislope -- Chapter 6 Primordialism, Evolutionary Theory, and the Timing of Ethnic Conflict: Opportunities and Constraints for Theory and Policy Frank Harvey -- Chapter 7 Evolution, Ethnicity, and Propaganda: Why Negotiating with the Innocent Makes Sense Kristan J. Wheaton -- Part III APPLICATIONS -- Chapter 8 National Identity in the Balkans: Confessionalism to Nationalism Peter Mentzel -- Chapter 9 Regionalism and Evolutionary Theory in the Former Soviet Union: Russian Kaliningrad, 1991- 2000 Joel C. Moses -- Chapter 10 Evolutionary Models, Third-Party Intervention, and Ethnic Conflict: Does Tough Love Really Work? David Carment and Dane Rowlands -- Chapter 11 An Evolutionary Approach Toward the Drafting of Autonomy Agreements: Applying Theory to Reality in the Search for Resolution of Ethnic Conflict Michael Patrick Tkacik -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the Contributors.