Abstract
Evolutionary biology – or, more precisely, two (purported) applications of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, namely, evolutionary psychology and what has been called human behavioral biology – is on the cusp of becoming the new rage among legal scholars looking for interdisciplinary insights into the law. We argue that as the actual science stands today, evolutionary biology offers nothing to help with questions about legal regulation of behavior. Only systematic misrepresentations or lack of understanding of the relevant biology, together with far-reaching analytical and philosophical confusions, have led anyone to think otherwise. Evolutionary accounts are etiological accounts of how a trait evolved. We argue that an account of causal etiology could be relevant to law if (1) the account of causal etiology is scientifically well-confirmed, and (2) there is an explanation of how the well-confirmed etiology bears on questions of development (what we call the Environmental Gap Objection). We then show that the accounts of causal etiology that might be relevant are not remotely well-confirmed by scientific standards. We argue, in particular, that (a) evolutionary psychology is not entitled to assume selectionist accounts of human behaviors, (b) the assumptions necessary for the selectionist accounts to be true are not warranted by standard criteria for theory choice, and (c) only confusions about levels of explanation of human behavior create the appearance that understanding the biology of behavior is important. We also note that no response to the Environmental Gap Objection has been proffered. In the concluding section of the article, we turn directly to the work of Owen Jones, a leading proponent of the relevance of evolutionary biology to law, and show that he does not come to terms with any of the fundamental problems identified in this article.
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Earlier versions of this article were presented to the Law & Economics Workshop at the University of Illinois College of Law, and to faculty workshops at the law schools at Florida State University, George Mason University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, and the University of Texas at Austin. The authors also thank David Buller, David J. Herring, Mark Kirkpatrick, Matt Lister, Tania Lombrozo, William Sage, Sahotra Sarkar, Deena Skolnick Weisberg, Paul Sniegowski, Wendy Wagner and an anonymous referee for this journal for helpful comments and insights.
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Leiter, B., Weisberg, M. Why Evolutionary Biology Is (So Far) Irrelevant To Legal Regulation. Law and Philos 29, 31–74 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10982-009-9049-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10982-009-9049-y