Abstract
The contribution of biology to a better understanding of human legal behavior seems severely limited for three reasons: (1) Since laws are cognitive constructs of the human mind which must be verbalized to become effective, man is the only species in which legal behavior can be studied. All inferences from animal behavior studies and from evolutionary considerations are highly speculative with respect to human legal behavior. (2) In the ontogenetic development of human behavior there is adaptation of the behavior to the environment, including culture. There seems no reliable procedure to factor out their relative contribution, particularly since genetic adaptation can be easily phenocopied. Therefore it is only rarely possible to separate a ‘biological’ component of human behavior from a ‘cultural’ one. (3) Most theories pertaining to the evolution of behavior in animals (and more so in man) are ‘weak’ theories with some retrodictive but little predictive power; they allow us to define probable modes for behavioral averages but say little about the behavior of individuals, which is at issue in legal considerations.
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