Law and Biology

Abstract

Ten years ago E.O. Wilson, the Harvard entomologist, wrote a remarkably ambitious book called Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, in which he predicted that the ever-accelerating insights of evolutionary biology would drive a fundamental convergence of the social and natural sciences. This essay is considerably less ambitious. I’d like to report on the rather remarkable inroads into the law, and into the legal academy, made by post-Darwinian evolutionary thinking—thinking that is itself deeply resonant with the now well-entrenched law and economics movement. This resonance is beginning to shed light on the mysteries of human behavior, and therefore on the mysteries of human institutions, including law.