Convergent Institutional Evolution: Organized Crime as Natural Experiment for the Extended Phenotype Theory of Law

Why do criminal organizations separated by centuries, continents, and cultures independently develop the same institutional trajectory: genuine provision of dispute resolution and property protection, followed by parasitic capture and extraction? This paper argues that the transcultural convergence of organized crime constitutes a natural experiment for Extended Phenotype Theory (EPT) as applied to legal institutions. Drawing on econometric studies of the Sicilian Mafia (Dimico et al. 2017; Buonanno et al. 2015; Bandiera 2003), comparative analyses of Russian violent entrepreneurship (Volkov 2002), Japanese Yakuza governance (Hill 2003; Milhaupt and West 2000), Hong Kong Triads (Wang 2023; Chu 2000), California prison gangs (Skarbek 2014), Latin American criminal governance (Lessing 2021; Arjona 2016), and London gang governance (Campana 2025), I identify seven independent cases exhibiting functional convergence. The paper reinterprets the five transition mechanisms documented in the literature (time-horizon shortening, threat endogenization, progressive monopolization, active institutional deficit perpetuation, and state-criminal collusion) as predictions derivable from replicator dynamics within the EPT framework. It proposes that the honest-signal degradation that transforms protectors into parasites in criminal organizations operates through the same mechanism that degrades signal quality in formalized legal systems, connecting the Coalitional Intelligence Hypothesis (Egeland et al. 2026) to institutional rigidity as measured by the Constitutional Lock-in Index. Three falsifiable predictions distinguish this framework from existing accounts. The analysis suggests that organized crime does not merely fill governance vacuums; it recapitulates, in observable time scales, the evolutionary dynamics that produced formal legal institutions over millennia.