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When entrepreneurs create new ventures, they struggle with making consequential decisions under severe restrictions such as tight deadlines, limited resources, and lack of information. Making challenging decisions inherently requires creativity as entrepreneurs improvise and work around the limitations they face. Under these conditions, entrepreneurs resort to their heuristics and biases instead of rational decision models. Entrepreneurs employ – sometimes for better and sometimes for worse – a myriad of rule-setting heuristics and experience-based biases to navigate the difficult path between novelty and utility. In this chapter, the authors answer Shepherd, Williams, and Patzelt’s (2015) call for research into how entrepreneurs leverage heuristics and biases in decision-making and the benefits they gain as a result. The authors explore how entrepreneurs introduce heuristics and biases at different stages of their decision-making process using a qualitative study of 21 new ventures. The results attest to entrepreneurs’ ingenuity and creativity in managing complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty.

Aristotle's Politics provides an example of what a biopolitical science might look like. Three key elements stand out: (1) an account of political structure as a multilevel society including kin and non-kin relationships; (2) an account of the human species that includes comparison with other social species that are capable of coordinated action; and (3) an emphasis on the human capacity to understand and communicate moral rules. Over the last 50 years, a number of research programs in evolutionary anthropology have provided the basis for a biopolitical science that maps onto the elements above. Schultz, Opie, and Atkinson describe the trajectory of human evolution from solitary to a pair bonded, familial species. Michael Tomasello's two-step account of the evolution of human cooperation shows how the ancestral humans went from merely gregarious to genuinely political animals. Christopher Boehm shows how the human capacity for moral emotions and decision making by consensus developed. Richard Wrangham provides evidence that the suppression of reactive aggression by ancestral human societies resulted in a self-domesticated species, a process that enhanced the human capacity for cooperation and communication. Bernard Chapais argued that the emergence of pair bonding among ancestral humans laid the foundation for both consanguineal and affinal kinship structures. That these bodies of research hold together can best be seen when they are viewed in light of Aristotle's biopolitical science.

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.