Legal evolution presents a theoretical puzzle that neither gene-centered nor multilevel selection frameworks, taken independently, can resolve. This Article argues that legal systems evolve through a hierarchical selection process where the Lamarckian character of cultural transmission, far from collapsing the hierarchy into a single level, generates a partial decoupling between three analytically distinct tiers of evolutionary dynamics. At the micro level, judicial interpretation and doctrinal adjustment operate through Heteronomous Bayesian Updating (HBU), a mechanism of Lamarckian inheritance where legal professionals learn norms by observing institutional reactions rather than substantive outcomes. At the meso level, competition among doctrinal memeplexes produces patterns structurally analogous to species selection as described by Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge: normative bodies originate, persist in stasis, and go extinct, with long-term trends emerging from differential proliferation rates rather than gradual transformation. At the macro level, constitutional architecture generates basins of attraction whose depth, measured by the Constitutional Lock-in Index (CLI), determines the duration of institutional stasis and the threshold for punctuated change. The central contribution is to argue that the apparent tension between Richard Dawkins’ replicator-centered framework and Gould’s hierarchical selection theory dissolves in the domain of cultural evolution, precisely because the Weismann barrier that makes the biological debate intractable does not exist for memes. Legal norms are simultaneously faithful replicators and genuine Darwinian individuals at multiple hierarchical levels. Drawing on Mario Bunge’s systemist ontology, Daniel Dennett’s Design Space, Peter Godfrey-Smith’s criteria for paradigm Darwinian populations, Joseph Henrich’s gene-culture coevolution framework, and Telmo Pievani’s analysis of contingency and exaptation, this Article proposes an integrated model that preserves the explanatory power of Extended Phenotype Theory (EPT) while incorporating the genuine insights of multilevel selection. The model generates three falsifiable predictions supported by preliminary evidence from four jurisdictions. IusSpace, a twelve-dimensional framework for mapping legal evolution previously developed within this research program, provides the environmental constraint topology within which the hierarchical selection operates.
Ignacio Adrián LERER (Tue,) studied this question.