This roundtable broadly addresses the application of recent developments in biology, behavior genetics and neuroscience to topics in international relations and security studies. Advances in the life sciences have been applied to topics in political science; most of those applications have been restricted to the realm of voting behavior and public opinion broadly construed[1]. However, several are directly related to topics of greater interest to International Relations scholars, such as strategic decision-making and morality. These contributions have proven enormously provocative and interesting, and have spawned entire new research agendas into the myriad ways in which biology may contribute to human political and social development and behavior. However, up until now, very little of this work has explicitly taken on problems and issues related to the topics that typically preoccupy IR scholars and done so in manner engaging those scholars. Such topics include conflict processes, the formation and maintenance of alliances, the dynamics of intra-group and inter-group aggression, the emergence of status hierarchies, and prospects for trade and cooperation.
