A Coevolutive Hypothesis on the Origin of Law

Human culture is governed by rules that possess the characteristics of normativity. Normativity allows the current consideration of a future and uncertain event. It is a temporal shifting which allows contemporaneous consideration of temporally separate realities. The first part of normativity is what ought to be, which simulates a causal relationship in contexts where a relationship of probability is more convenient. The trust that what ought to be will occur (expectation) is the second part of normativity. In this hypothesis, the identification between representation and reality, in the first cave paintings, caused the emergence of normative thought, making the mechanism of trust - in human brain in the paleolithic age - operative even for simple representations. Representation triggers the mechanism of trust in what ought to be and the mental state of belief (and expectation), which allows cooperation among individuals in situations different from those for which normativity evolved, allowing a more powerful information exchange and a more effective predation, thus an egalitarian division of prey, allowing the expectation to realize and the force of evolution acting at the group level. Law originates in the stabilization mechanism of human societies where the information exchange is not regulated exclusively on a genetic level, but at a normative-symbolic level too, on a quasi egalitarian basis. Thus law has allowed the major transition ensuing the evolution of human culture.