Bio-legal history and gene-culture co-evolutionary theory

It has been suggested that the legal features of any legal system will reflect specific features of evolved, species-typical, human brain design, thus offering the possibility of developing a broad and systematic bio-legal history (Jones 2001). I will argue that in order to construct such a bio-legal history of, in my case, contract law, one has to be able to give a plausible evolutionary account for both the behavior that is supposed to be regulated and the regulating behavior itself. Rather than focusing exclusively on the indeed likely universal aspects of the regulated behavior, this universality has to be connected more explicitly with the cultural diversity encountered in the world's legal systems. Approaching regulating behavior in general as an evolutionary puzzling form of human large-scale cooperation, gene-culture co-evolutionary theory and the related concept of cultural group selection promise to go a long way in providing this necessary connection