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In order to deepen our understanding of contemporary social structures, we must often trace their distant origins in our evolutionary past. The origins of two structures are analyzed here. Both religion and collective ascription are shaped in part by a common imperative to access rewarding emotional arousal release protected by a special set of arouser screening rules. Only certain enhanced arousers with an attractive ratio of contrast values to access costs can regularly tap these emotional reservoirs. In these two cases, it is the larger social group context that must supply the enhancements. The result is that some group processes are marked by emotional dynamics deeply rooted in the pursuit of these extraordinary arousers.

Purpose – This chapter contributes to comparative biopolitics and reviews primatological literature, especially about our nearest relatives, the Great Apes.

Design/methodology/approach – Biopolitics in this chapter means evolutionarily informed political science, with emphasis on power relations. I review the literature on intrasexual and intersexual dominance interactions among individuals and competitive and/or agonistic interactions among groups in the Great Apes (Hominidae, formerly Pongidae): orangutan (Pongo with two species and three subspecies), gorilla (Gorilla with four subspecies), bonobo (Pan paniscus), and common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes with four subspecies). In the final section I present some (speculative) thoughts on Pan prior or the modern human ancestor.

Findings – Not only Man is a political animal.

Originality/value – Impartial, objective, and as complete as possible review of the literature for the students of (comparative) politics, ethology, and psychology.

In this chapter, I use the term “biopolitics” to mean evolutionarily informed political science. Politics has been characterized as “Who gets what, when, and how” (Lasswell, 1936), but rather than about material possessions, politics is understood to be about power, more specifically about collective power, especially differential group power competition, hierarchy and stratification in power distribution, and the universal struggle to enhance power, and to maintain or challenge/destroy this status quo. Politics “should be found in any system of nature in which conflicts of interest exist among cooperating organic units” (Johnson, 1995, p. 279). My main focus will be competitive intergroup relations in monkeys and apes, or as I (van der Dennen, 1995) called it “intergroup agonistic behavior” (IAB). I also briefly treat interindividual and intercoalitionary agonistic behavior when relevant.

This chapter provides a critical focus on the relationship between masculinities and widespread forms of interpersonal violence. The chapter begins by discussing the contribution of second wave feminist criminology in securing disciplinary attention to the study of gender and its relation to crime, and how the growth and maturation of theory and research on specific masculinities and crime followed logically from this feminist work. As part of this development, examination of masculine perpetrated violence initially commenced with Messerschmidt’s (1993) influential account of masculinities and crime in his book of the same name, and was further expanded through a range of historical and contemporary criminological studies on masculinities and interpersonal violence. The authors discuss the origins and history of critical masculinities theory, its relation to social understandings of interpersonal violence, and how these have shaped criminological research interest and findings. Masculinities are linked intricately with struggles for social power that occur between men and women and among different men, but they vary and intersect importantly with other dimensions of inequality. The authors utilise this conception of masculinities to discuss research on various forms of interpersonal violence, from men’s physical and sexual violence against girls and women, attacks on sexual minorities, violence between/among boys and men, and to the ambiguities of gender, sexualities, and violence by girls, women and men.

This study is a comparison of male and female delinquent behaviors utilizing a large sample in a test of social control theory.

A sample of 8,363 adolescent 10th graders was drawn from the U.S. National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS). The sample consisted of 3,774 males and 4,589 females. This work utilized logistic regression and ordinary least squares to determine whether adolescent behaviors such as smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, using marijuana, and other delinquent behaviors are linked to weak social bonds.

The findings of this study provide limited substantiation of social control theory for both sexes. Females who were found to have strong social bonds were less likely to engage in delinquent behaviors than males. For both sexes, the strongest element of the social bond was the element of belief.

These results may be specific to the United States.

Understanding contributing factors to adolescent substance use and delinquency will assist in developing social policy that will support families.

This study provides insight into the differentiated nature of the social bond for males and females. Knowing that belief is an integral component in determining the strength of the social bond will aid in the development of social policies.

This study assessed the marital quality of older men and women in first marriages and remarriages, examining gender differences within first marriages and remarriages, and marriage order differences for men and women separately.

The study employed nationally representative survey data for 1,243 married adults, aged 62–91, from Wave II of the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP), conducted in 2010–2011. Marital quality was assessed with six positive relationship dimensions and two negative ones.

Descriptive data revealed mean ratings above scale midpoints on all positive dimensions of marital quality, and mean ratings generally below the midpoints on the negative dimensions for men and women in both first marriages and remarriages. Multivariate analyses indicated an overall stronger influence of gender than marriage order on marital quality for this sample of older adults. In both first marriages and remarriages, men reported more favorable perceptions of marriage across several positive dimensions (e.g., emotional satisfaction, physical pleasure), though they also reported more spousal criticism than did women. Within gender groups, marriage order was not associated with any of the dimensions of marital quality that were assessed.

This study demonstrates that marriage order does not have a significant influence on the marital quality of older adults today, but that long-standing gender differences in marital quality hold across marriage order. These findings are critical given the increasingly diverse marital histories of individuals entering old age in the early 21st century, and the importance of a positive, supportive marriage for older adults’ well-being.

Most well-known conceptualizations of sex, gender and sexuality privilege one version or another of a Western European or North American bi-polar paradigm. However, such a focus ignores the ethnographic evidence for a larger range of sex–gender–sexuality constructs. This paper outlines parameters for known variations in cultural constructs of sex–gender–sexuality systems, and raises questions about contemporary trends in understanding sex, gender and sexuality. As a first step, and because the data are more plentiful, I focus on variations in cultural constructions of sex, gender and sexuality relevant to physiological males, leaving a thorough exploration of constructions relevant to physiological females for another paper. The contemporary spread of Western cultural hegemony, as well as some opposition to that model, has categorized many indigenous, multi-polar sex–gender–sexuality systems as either in need of modernization or simply not quite civilized. The result is a loss, not only of knowledge about human plasticity in this area, but also a loss of cultural flexibility in organizing and dealing with human biocultural variation.

This paper shows how a shorter fecundity horizon for females (a biological constraint) leads to age and educational disparities between husbands and wives. Empirical support is based on data from a natural experiment commencing before and ending after China’s 1980 one-child law. The results indicate that fertility in China declined by about 1.2–1.4 births per woman as a result of China’s anti-natalist policies. Concomitantly spousal age and educational differences narrowed by approximately 0.5–1.0 and 1.0–1.6 years, respectively. These decreases in the typical husband’s age and educational advantages are important in explaining the division of labor in the home, often given as a cause for the gender wage gap. Indeed, as fertility declined, which has been the historical trend in most developed countries, husband-wife age and educational differences diminished leading to less division of labor in the home and a smaller gender wage disparity. Unlike other models of division of labor in the home which rely on innately endogenous factors, this paper’s theory is based on an exogenous biological constraint.

The purpose is to theorize and empirically estimate the impact of the gendered nature of the offender-victim dyad and crime type on time to arrest.

Predictions regarding the impact of gendered offender-victim dyads and crime type on time to arrest are constructed by extending role congruity theory and tested using data from the FBI's National Incident-Based Reporting System across five crime types using dyadic-based event history methods.

The authors find strong empirical support that role expectations derived from the gender composition of offender-victim dyads and the masculinity of the crime type affect time to clearance.

This research is the first to theorize and empirically test the relative impact of role congruency and the relational nature of the offender-victim dyad in the adjudication process. Furthermore, the research shows that the construction of “normal crime” can be enhanced by applying a gendered and relational approach, based on social psychological theory, which is predictive of crime clearance.

Future research is required to validate the results for crimes where law enforcement has less discretion and are feminine typed.

The results imply that by accounting for the expectations generated by gender roles when applied to offender-victim dyads a casual mechanism is established that better organizes previously inconsistent results with respect to the impact of gender on time to clearance. Thus, the authors' utilization of role congruity theory of gender provides a more consistent explanation for inequalities in time to clearance that may be fruitful for evaluating other steps in the adjudication process.