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Purpose – This chapter focuses on the role evolution has played in our development of politics and public policy and reviews the theoretical approaches and studies of the last decade that address biopolitics and evolution, such as the “gene-culture co-evolution theory.”

Design/methodology/approach – In this chapter some of these theoretical developments will be reviewed, including what has been called the “Synergism Hypothesis,” with particular emphasis on what is relevant for understanding the role of politics and public policy in the evolutionary process.

Findings – A new, multileveled paradigm has emerged in evolutionary biology during the past decade, one which emphasizes the role of cooperative phenomena in the evolution of complexity over time, including the evolution of socially organized species such as humankind. I refer to it as “Holistic Darwinism.”

Practical implications – This study develops an understanding of the complicated relationship between human biology and the role of evolution in shaping politics and public policy.

Originality/value – This study addresses several existing biopolitical concepts and presents new explanations and terminology for its understanding.

Purpose – This chapter makes sense of the volume and suggests avenues for future research.

Design/methodology/approach – This chapter reflects upon some of the challenges facing biology and politics; it offers two case studies of areas calling for more research and discussion.

Findings – Some evolutionary theorists criticize religion. In the process, they undermine the ability to reach out to religious people about the value of evolutionary theory. Two case studies – group selection and genetic bases of political behavior – are examined to illustrate ongoing issues that call for further attention

Biology and Politics (or Biopolitics) has been a part of the political science firmament since the 1960s. Over time, it has become less an odd outlier in the discipline and more a tolerated (and sometimes respected) part of the enterprise. After about 50 years of existence, this is a proper time to reflect on where biopolitics has been, where it is now, and where it might go as an academic endeavor. Indeed, some have said that the best step would for biopolitics to no longer be seen as a special, narrow part of political science – but a part of every field in the discipline, integrated into the larger world of the study of politics.

This essay introduces the first translation of Schumpeter’s article Entrepreneur, originally published in 1928. We describe the background of Entrepreneur and use new archival sources to situate the article in time. Entrepreneur marks a transition of Schumpeter’s conception of entrepreneurship that took place between 1911 and 1926. Entrepreneur also contains Schumpeter’s most profound vision on economic selection, a vision that Schumpeter never elaborated further. We consider the most important implications of the new material in Entrepreneur and the reasons for the apparent shift in Schumpeter’s thought.

Within the last two decades, entrepreneurship education has become institutionalized in Germany. It is offered as a stand-alone program or as part of a business degree, combining academic knowledge, practical skills, and personal development to enhance the entrepreneurial success of university graduates. While entrepreneurship education has experienced similar growth worldwide, its emergence in Germany is closely tied to the country’s political and economic developments. The significance of entrepreneurship education for a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem and contemporary economic policy has been instrumental in advancing its academic recognition. This chapter provides a historical analysis of the academization of entrepreneurship in Germany. It explores the recursive and often idiosyncratic processes involving state and financial institutions, companies, and universities that have created, respecified, and mutually reinforced a subdiscipline and field of study. Academic entrepreneurship knowledge successively not only became relevant for starting a business but also for employment within the entrepreneurial infrastructure and beyond. This chapter follows a chronological order, highlighting three key stages in the academization of entrepreneurship education. First, the academic, financial, and political roots (I) of entrepreneurship up until the 1970s. Second, it explores the transformation (II) of entrepreneurship into a viable policy alternative and the challenges faced in establishing complementary research and education in higher education institutions during the 1980s. Finally, it sketches the institutionalization (III) of entrepreneurship as a central driver of government economic policy, allowing for the late bloom of entrepreneurship education and research at universities around the turn of the millennium.

Evolutionary developmental biology is a highly variable scientific innovation because researchers can adapt their involvement in the innovation to the opportunities provided by their environment. On the basis of comparative case studies in four countries, we link epistemic properties of research tasks to three types of necessary protected space, and identify the necessary and facilitating conditions for building them. We found that the variability of research tasks made contributing to evolutionary developmental biology possible under most sets of authority relations. However, even the least demanding research depends on its acceptance as legitimate innovation by the scientific community and of purely basic research by state policy and research organisations. The latter condition is shown to become precarious.

Networks are by now popular inter-organizational coordination modes. However, there is still much to know regarding how networks are governed and how their governance develops and changes through time.

This paper addresses the research question how does the governance form of networks develops over time by empirically studying the European telecommunications regulatory network using a case study approach.

We find that the network’s governance system is determined by the dialectical tension between network members (National Regulatory Agencies) and an external very influential body (the European Commission).

This tension unifies the group in the classic external conflict–internal cohesion fashion. We also identify a second dialectical tension internal to the network among its members. The tensions are triggered by evaluations carried out by an external actor (the European Commission). In general, the process observed confirms the propositions that predict a formalizing of the governance as the network grows older.

This research is based on a single case, a broader analysis of other regulatory networks among network industries at the European Union level will help researchers to establish a more comprehensive picture on the development of the governance form of this specific subset of goal-directed networks.

The employment of metaphors, originating from either inter- or intra-discipline borrowing, can be fruitful if one specifies correctly the type of resemblance which the metaphor is intended to reveal. After a discussion of the role of metaphors, the chapter identifies four types: the nominal, heterologous, homologous, and unificational. An ‘identificational slip’ is committed when the employed metaphor is intended to reveal one type of resemblance which evidence does not support.