‘Who’ or ‘what’ is the rule of law?

The standard account of the relation between democracy and the rule of law focuses on law’s liberty-enhancing role in constraining official action. This is a faint echo of the complex, constitutive relation between the two. The Greeks used one word – isonomia – to describe both. If democracy is the system in which people have an equal say in determining the rules that govern social life, then the rule of law is simultaneously before, after, concurrent and synonymous with democracy: It contributes to the formation of citizens with the capacity for self-governance, serves as the instrument through which democratic decisions are implemented, functions as one of the central social practices that constitute citizens as equals and addresses the question of how to ensure that government by the people operates for the people. The rule of law has many independently valuable qualities, including impartiality and predictability. But, to valorise the rule of law for its own sake is to fetishize authority. The fundamental values of the rule of law are as the instrument of democratic self-governance and the expression of the equal dignity of all persons. Democracy thus entails the rule of law, but both implicate the yet more comprehensive ideal of equality. Core rule-of-law values require political norms and conditions of equality, generality and comprehensiveness. In a modern, differentiated society, however, the constitutive relation between democracy and the rule of law is fractured and law becomes the agent of authority. Courts in the modern constitutional state have contributed to the decline of rule-of-law values, supporting role specialization through judge-made immunity doctrines that protect officials at all levels. The crisis of police violence against minorities is a symptom of this breakdown. Greater accountability can ameliorate the problem. But an effective solution requires the fair and equal distribution of political power.

Group hunting in harbour porpoises

Cooperative hunting involves individual predators relating in time and space to each other’s actions to more efficiently track down and catch prey. The evolution of advanced cognitive abilities and sociality in animals are strongly associated with cooperative hunting abilities, as has been shown in lions, chimpanzees and dolphins. Much less is known about cooperative hunting in seemingly unsocial animals, such as the harbour porpoise (Phocoena phocoena Linnaeus, 1758). Using drones, we were able to record 159 hunting sequences of porpoises, out of which 95 sequences involved more than one porpoise. To better understand if the harbour porpoises were individually attracted by the fish school or formed an organized hunting strategy, the behaviour of each individual porpoise in relation to the targeted fish school was analysed. The results indicate role specialization, which is considered the most sophisticated form of collaborative hunting and only rarely seen in animals. Our study challenges previous knowledge about harbour porpoises and opens up for the possibility of other seemingly non-social species employing sophisticated collaborative hunting methods.

Evolutionary dynamics drives role specialization in a community of players

The progression of game theory from classical to evolutionary and spatial games provided a powerful means to study cooperation, and enabled a better understanding of general cooperation-promoting mechanisms. However, current standard models assume that at any given point players must choose either cooperation or defection, meaning that regardless of the spatial structure in which they exist, they cannot differentiate between their neighbours and adjust their behaviour accordingly. This is at odds with interactions among organisms in nature who are well capable of behaving differently towards different members of their communities. We account for this natural fact by introducing a new type of player—dubbed link players—who can adjust their behaviour to each individual neighbour. This is in contrast to more common node players whose behaviour affects all neighbours in the same way. We proceed to study cooperation in pure and mixed populations, showing that cooperation peaks at moderately low densities of link players. In such conditions, players naturally specialize in different roles. Node players tend to be either cooperators or defectors, while link players form social insulation between cooperative and defecting clusters by acting both as cooperators and defectors. Such fairly complex processes emerging from a simple model reflect some of the complexities observed in experimental studies on social behaviour in microbes and pave a way for the development of richer game models.

Individual variation behind the evolution of cooperation

Life on Earth has two remarkable properties. The first is variation: even apart from the vast number of extant species, there are considerable differences between individuals within a single species. The second property is cooperation. It is surprising that until recently the interactions between these two properties have rarely been addressed from an evolutionary point of view. Here, I concentrate on how inter-individual differences influence the evolution of cooperation. First, I deal with cases where individuality is maintained by random processes like mutation or phenotypic noise. Second, I examine when differences in state cause differences in behaviour. Finally, I investigate the effects of individual role specialization. Variation can be important in several ways. Increased random variation can change the expectation about cooperativeness of future partners, altering behaviour in a current relationship. Differences in state may serve as a book-keeping mechanism that is necessary for the evolution of reciprocity. If the cost of cooperation can depend on state then strategic regulation of state makes it possible to coerce partners to cooperate. If conditions force individuals to specialize, cooperation becomes more valuable. My review of theoretical models suggests that variation plays an important role in the evolution of cooperation.