The Irrelevance of Evolutionary Biology to Sports and Law

One of my favorite college classes was Science B-29, Human Behavioral Biology. This venerable franchise (affectionately nicknamed “Sex” by the undergraduate students), long one of the most popular courses at my college, dealt with primate evolution and explored evolutionary explanations for human behavior. Along with a roommate, I even went so far as to nominate one of the course’s favorite subjects, the Bonobo chimpanzee, as the football team’s mascot. Sadly, the “Angry Pilgrim” was chosen instead.

It was with some interest over the weekend, therefore, that I read blogger Brian Leiter’s new essay, Why Evolutionary Biology is (so far) Irrelevant to Law (available here). Leiter and co-author Michael Weisberg make a thoughtful and persuasive case against the use of human behavioral biology and evolutionary psychology in legal scholarship and legal policy-making. The authors commendably explain the occasional philosophical term of art (e.g., “causal etiology,” “ontological parsimony”), such that even a non-scholarly reader can gain something from the piece.

Here’s a snapshot of their argument: “[E]volutionary biology offers nothing to law—more precisely, it offers nothing to help with questions about legal regulation of behavior . . . . Only systematic misrepresentations or lack of understanding of the relevant biology, together with far reaching analytical and philosophical confusions, have led anyone to think otherwise.”

The idea that evolutionary biology could come to replace economics as the leading “law and ___” movement always struck me as odd, given how much evolutionary biology and selfish gene theory owe to economics. That is to say, I’m not sure evolutionary biology is really all that much of an “alternative” to the reigning interdisciplinary approach to studying and conceptualizing law. Leiter’s essay provides further reasons to doubt the likelihood that any “law and evolution” movement will have legs. This is not to say that genetic science is irrelevant to some pressing legal questions (for example, in putting to rest the notion that race is anything but a social construct, as my colleague Bill Richman argues here), just that evolutionary biology is not sufficiently well developed to offer conclusions about law that have any scientific rigor.

Comments about evolutionary biology occasionally surface in discussions of sports as well. Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder’s remarks about African-American athletes are perhaps the most infamous. More recently, Cubs manager Dusty Baker made his own oddball evolutionary observation about African-American and Latino players and their comparative tolerance for hot weather. For any athlete, coach or player thinking of making a comment speciously asserting an evolutionary explanation for some perceived difference among categories of athletes, Leiter’s essay is good reading. If the career-destroying effects of such comments aren’t enough to deter, Leiter’s essay helps show, on an intellectual level, how little evolutionary biology has to say about current human behavior or how it should be regulated.

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