Birkbeck, University of London
Graduate Student, Law
PhD Finalist
Thesis Title: Emergence of Proto-Law in the Hominoidea
Professor Michelle Everson
Professor Elizabeth Hounsell
About
I obtained the BA in History at Birkbeck College during which I developed enduring interests in the socio-politics of Late Republican and Augustan Rome and in Prussian and German History in the early modern and modern period from the reign of Frederick the Great Elector to the fall of the Berlin Wall (which occurred during the period of my studies). The principal focus of my degree however looked at the history of homosexuality and prostitution in the UK from the beginning of Victoria's reign to the 1980s.
Having started a law degree (LLb) at Birkbeck I had to withdraw due to ill health and decided to pursue a post graduate career instead culminating in the award of the degree of Master of Research in Law. My work for the MRes concentrated on applying a Darwinian approach to various areas of legal study.
These included:
1. Extending Human Rights Law to cover the Great Apes utilising pre-existing UN and other "statements of rights.
2. The application of the naturalistic fallacy with regard to legislating homosexuality.
3. The operation of biological markets as the origins of an economic understanding of the origins of law.
My MRes thesis was titled "Can an Economic-Cladistic Approach to the Evolution of Sociality in Pan suggest a Normative Role for the Adaptive Emergence of Law in
Homo?" and followed a period of fieldwork observations with the captive chimpanzees at the Zoological Society of London's Regent's Park Zoo.
I won the Armitage Smith Prize for my MRes Thesis in 2002.
I became a Scientific Fellow of the Zoological Society of London following my MRes.
I am now currently writing my PhD thesis.
My research focuses on the origins of law as an adaptive,
emergent, recursive behaviour suite within the context of
Darwin’s two principal theories – Natural Selection and Sexual Selection.
I utilise a socio-biological approach with a comparative
and cladistic study of a variety of law or “proto-law” like behaviours found in the trading, social regulation, play and political cultures of all four of the extant non-human great apes.
My research has been conducted observing captive groups
of common chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), bonobos (Pan paniscus), gorillas (Gorilla gorilla) and orang utans (Pongo pygmaeus) and advance the proposition that this provides us with an evolutionary account of the emergence of such behaviours in our own closely related species.
In addition I posit that not only is law an evolutionary emergent behaviour but that it is bound to emerge when life evolves to the stage of truly societal cultures in animals – including our own – species.
The mechanism for this is the need to be able to tell “true
dealers” from frauds in social relationships and from this it
emerges that law is based on the innate ability to deceive in a system where lying as a means to maximising fitness
is a coherent strategy. Law is a counter-strategy to deceit and thus has its origins in lying.
I posit that this should hold true wherever life arises and that as such Law is a universal property that transcends not only our own species but also our own planet. In so doing this research cuts away the mythic origins of law in Homo and dates the emergence of law to at least twenty million years ago rather than the currently accepted 10-15 thousand years.
My PhD has been funded by an ESRC/NERC Joint Studentship. I have also recieved funding during my PhD from:
The London Borough of Tower Hamlets;
The Royal Scottish Corporation;
The Royal British Legion;
The Royal naval Benevolent Fund; and
Birkbeck College.
Fieldwork for my PhD has been performed mainly at Chester Zoo, London Zoo and the Zoologischer Garten Berlin.
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