Frank Salter

    Frank K. Salter is a political ethologist with the Max Plank Institute for Human Physiology (Andechs) and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Urban Ethology (Vienna). He began studying political phenomena from a biological perspective in Australia, continuing in Germany in collaboration with Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Wulf Schiefenhovel, and Karl Grammer. The results of his research on social power in command hierarchies were summarized in the monograph Emotion in command: A naturalistic study of institutional dominance (OUP 1995). Research now focuses on ethnic solidarity and competition, and his main findings will be soon published in a monograph On Genetic Interests. He is an editor of the books Ethnic Conflict and Indoctrination: Altruism and Identity in Evolutionary Perspective (1998; with Eibl-Eibesfeldt) and Risky Transactions: Trust, Kinship, and Ethnicity (2002). Dr. Salter is secretary of the International Society for Human Ethology. He is the founder of the series of schools on human ethology held in Russia and Eastern Europe that began in 2001, and included Novosibirsk in 2002. In 2002 he was the international organizer of the 2nd Summer School on Human Ethology (Puschino near Moscow) and the 1st Siberian Indian Summer School on Human Ethology (Novosibirsk). His summer school lectures in 2002 were: (1) The ethology of command and obedience; (2) Social technology theory: Culture and instinct, and (3) Social technology and ethnic conflict.

    The preliminary title of his lecture in Novosibirsk in September 2003 is: Genetic interests: Theory, strategies, and ethics