Met a local professor who writes books on evolution today for lunch. I was a bit nervous and I tend to have trouble knowing when to shut up when I'm nervous, so I talked more than I listened. I think I made a decent impression though and he's going to let me know when he has a class he thinks that might interest me.

Here's our observation for the day:

In law school we had some Russian legal professors visit our university. One thing they commented on was the unusually large number of written laws we have here in the States. Here we are a nation that prides itself on its personal freedoms, yet the laws that govern our behavior are so extensive that one person would could not learn them all in a lifetime. In the Soviet Union far less written rules governed behavior, and yet we considered them a people oppressed. Somalia has no legal system at all, but would any of us trade our lives for theirs?

The evolutionary psychologist sees us as organisms with instincts that govern our behavior in social groups. Just like other primates, we set up simple dominance heirarchies that organize us in small groups of closely related individuals. These social instincts work well enough for the small groups in which they evolved, but not so well for the larger interactive structures that constitute the bulk of social interactions today. The dictator is just the alpha male of a primate tribe on a larger scale.

Written laws then could be a method of channeling our basic instincts into pathways that work more effectively on larger scales. Instead of 'right' being whatever the next highest member in the social heirarchy decides, 'right' becomes the result of a balancing of many different types of interests. By written laws we escape the social dictates of our instincts and open ourselves to a richer set of possibilities.