Melvin Konner
Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Anthropology
Emory University
The Science of Human Nature: Dark History. Bright Future?
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries some things were done partly in Darwin's name that—despite the fact that it wasn't his fault—no disciple of Darwin can be proud of. That includes the application of the idea of "survival of the fittest" (not his coinage) to "scientific" racism, philosophically "justified" colonial domination, the eugenics movement, racially motivated anti-Semitism, and some of the worst crimes in history. Understandably, by the mid-twentieth century, thoughtful biologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and medical scientists were extremely wary of any applications of biology to human behavior. Yet the advances of evolutionary biology, genetics, and brain research offer the promise of a science of human nature that cannot be ignored or brushed aside because inferior versions of it have led to ethical and legal violations or even atrocities in the past. So how can we think about doing it right this time, turning it to positive ends, and discovering foundations of human nature that may enhance, not just constrain, our ethics and laws?
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Special Panel Presentation & Dicussion
Primate Welfare and the Recent Decision of the IOM
Frans B. M. de Waal
C. H. Candler Professor, Yerkes Primate Center, Emory University
Sarah F. Brosnan
Assistant Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience, Georgia State University
Recently the Institute on Medicine released a recommendation to re-evaluate the use of chimpanzees in research, particularly in the biomedical context. The National Institutes of Health have formed a task force to assess how these recommendations could and should impact research on these great apes. Frans de Waal and Sarah Brosnan will discuss the ethics of studying chimpanzees in captivity in both biomedical and behavioral contexts.
Human Agency and Legal Doctrine
Peter A. Alces
Rollins Professor of Law, The College of William & Mary School of Law
Do neuroscientific insights into human agency challenge the premises of legal doctrine? Legal doctrine -- the contract, tort, and criminal law (as well as amalgams of them) -- proceed from a conception of human agency; it necessarily would be constrained to do so. While the doctrine has remained largely the same, our understanding of the human agent's capacities has evolved: it is not clear that the doctrine, either in form or application, has kept up with that evolution. The object of this presentation is to begin to consider whether that is a problem.
Brain Science and the “Cycle of Violence”
Ted Blumoff
Professor, Mercer University School of Law
Seriously abused and neglected children tend to produce children who abuse and neglect
their own children. The American legal system tends to judge those children who become
violent adult criminals as they exist at the time of the adult crime, thereby avoiding discussions
about how the adult became the accused criminal who stands before the court. The talk I propose
is from a book length manuscript that brings research findings from neuroscience to explain why
the stubborn cycle of abuse has existed for millennia and suggests what can be done in the realms
of law and politics to change this terrible reality. The book ends with a plea for a new
commitment to breaking the cycle, and presents a plan for moving in that direction.
The Evolution of Coordination
Sarah F. Brosnan
Assistant Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience, Language Research Center, Georgia State University
How did coordination among individuals evolve, and how does this inform us about the legal regulation and treatment of coordinated behaviors amongst humans? Humans routinely confront situations that require coordination between individuals, from mundane activities such as planning where to go for dinner to incredibly complicated activities, such as international agreements. How did this ability arise, and what prevents success in those situations in which it breaks down? To understand how this capability has evolved, we have used the methods of experimental economics to test four species of primates (capuchin monkeys, rhesus monkeys, chimpanzees, and humans) on the Assurance Game, and consider what the similarities and differences in their responses suggest for the evolution of coordination.
Neuroimaging of Sacred Values
Gregory S. Berns, M.D., Ph.D.
Director, Center for Neuropolicy, Emory University
Sacred values, such as those associated with religious or ethnic identity, underlie many important individual and group decisions in life, and individuals typically resist attempts to trade-off their sacred values in exchange for material benefits. We utilized an experimental paradigm that used integrity as a proxy for sacredness and which paid real money to induce individuals to sell their personal values. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we found that values that people refused to sell (sacred values) were associated with increased activity in the left temporoparietal junction and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, regions previously associated with semantic rule retrieval. This suggests that sacred values affect behavior through the retrieval and processing of deontic rules and not through a utilitarian evaluation of costs and benefits.
Reciprocate & Punish
Adam Candeub
Professor, Michigan State University College of Law
Is criminal law, perhaps even legal sanction more broadly, a signaling mechanism to reveal a critical mass of “super- reciprocators” within a group? Recent game theoretical models show that reciprocative behavior evolves in groups having a sufficient number of individuals (“super-reciprocators”) for whom punishing free riders has positive utility. (Bowles & Gintis, 2011) This paper proposes that the criminal law—indeed possibly all legal sanction—is a mechanism to signal a critical mass of super-reciprocators. The paper examines the effect of such a signaling effect on existing theoretical models of group selection, as well as some of the proposal’s normative implications.
Applying Evolutionary Theory to Structural and Behavioral Antitrust Analyses
Thomas J. Horton
Assistant Professor & Director of Trial Advocacy, University of South Dakota School of Law
How can evolutionary biology and theory be applied to strengthen and bolster structural and behavioral antitrust analyses? Evolutionary biology and theory provide valuable insights for analyzing structural and behavioral antitrust issues. Applying an evolutionary approach to our antitrust laws and their enforcement will enable us to better protect our long-term economic diversity and innovation opportunities, and reinvigorate our community-based morals and ethics.
The Evolution of Endowment Effects in Chimpanzees: The Role of Situational Variables
Owen Jones
Professor of Law & Biological Sciences, Vanderbilt University
Sarah F. Brosnan
Assistant Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience, Georgia State University
Can developing and testing evolutionary hypotheses increase the legal system’s ability to understand and anticipate endowment effects in humans? Evolutionary analysis suggests that the endowment effect, a cognitive bias shared by humans and chimpanzees, will vary as a function of context. We predicted that objects lacking inherent value would elicit a stronger endowment effect when they had immediate instrumental value as a tool, compared to when they did not. We found that the endowment effect for these tools existed only when they were useful, showing that the effect varies as a function of context-specific utility.
Legal N-Grams? A Simple Approach to Track the ‘Evolution’ of Legal Language
Daniel Martin Katz
Assistant Professor of Law, Michigan State University
Julie Seaman
Associate Professor of Law, Emory University
Adam Candeub
Professor, Michigan State University College of Law
How can development in computational linguistics be leveraged to better understand the evolution of the law and legal language? In this talk, we highlight the potential of n-grams as a vehicle to explore the ‘evolution’ of the law and legal language. Using the full text corpus of decisions of the United States Supreme Court (1791-2005), we explore the n-gram space, offer some initial results based upon our calculations and highlight the beta version of our n-gram search interface.
The Brain-Incorporated Body of Law
Richard W. Murrow, M.D.
Clinical Associate Professor of Neurology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Gail A. Murrow
Master of Laws in Legal Theory, Independent research of intersections between neuroscience and law
We provide a neuroscientific theory of law comprised of three hypotheses:
first, we propose that the neural mechanisms of empathy are the natural source of the theoretical “sense of equality”; second, we propose that such mechanisms best activate in response to social categories and groups that are “implicitly associated,” in psychological terms, with “humans” or conspecifics; and, third, we propose that the symbolism of the human body deeply embedded in the language and concept of law plays a role in the neuronal associative learning of subject implicit associations.
Evolution of Cooperation in a Legal-Normative Environment, a Game-Theoretic Model
Francesco Romeo
Associate Professor, Dipartimento di Diritto Romano, Storia e Teoria del Diritto 'F. De Martino', Università Federico II, Napoli, Italy
Legal normativity allows to perform in the mind a future and uncertain behavior or event as if it were present and, in this regard, legal-normativity could be thought as a temporal shifting which allows contemporaneous consideration of temporally detached realities. The two components of legal normativity are: the 'ought to be' conceived as the statement of the fulfilling of a future and uncertain event, assessed with a likelihood instead of a casual relation, and the mental state of trust in the occurrence of the 'ought to be'. General game-theoretic methods are applied and special attention is paid to the conditions for evolving a cooperative behavior without maximizing the individual fitness in a legal-normative environment.
Alternative Dispute Resolution and the Cosmic Conflict
Ryan Smith
Law student, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
How might evolutionary principles explain the global rise of alternative dispute resolution programs? Research indicates alternative dispute resolution (ADR) programs have been incorporated into legal systems with increasing frequency since the Pound Conference in 1976, and the growth has been rapid, uniform and global. Many have suggested ADR growth may be attributed to the putative efficiency benefits ADR processes provide relative to the litigation process. However, an analysis of the issue within the context of new research in a variety of fields related to evolutionary principles, particularly Wilson and Wilson's writings on "group selection theory", indicates ADR growth may be perceived more accurately as arising from humanity's tendency toward greater cooperation as an evolutionary adaptive strategy.
Human Biology and the Distinct Treatment of Biotechnology Patents
Andrew W. Torrance
Professor of Law and Docking Faculty Scholar, University of Kansas
Are patent applications claiming biotechnological inventions treated differently during patent prosecution than patent applications claiming inventions not involving aspects of living organisms? To investigate differential legal treatment of patents claiming biotechnological and non-biotechnological inventions, it would be helpful to compare the prosecution of these two classes of patents. Using a new source of patent prosecution data – the most comprehensive assembled to date – this study compares the prosecution of biotechnology and non-biotechnology patent applications across many characteristics, including types of claim rejections, application pendency times, and outcomes of appeals to the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences. This study concludes by suggesting several possible explanations, including those drawn from neurobiology, evolutionary theory, and the nature of biotechnology itself, for the observed differences in patent prosecution treatment between biotechnological and non-biotechnological inventions
Feeling at Home: Law, Cognitive Science, and Narrative
Lea B. Vaughn
Professor of Law, University of Washington School of Law
Given the pervasiveness of narrative in the law, did law, in part, grow out of an adaptive use of narrative for maintaining social order? What is the “how” and “why” of law’s affinity for narrative? This paper considers theories and accounts from cognitive as well as evolutionary psychology to address “how” narrative helps us to learn and use the law as well as “why” we prefer to use stories in teaching and in practice. It concludes that our culture, and perhaps our genetic make-up, predisposes us to use stories as a way to both comprehend and transmit the law.
