Law as a Recursive Super-Attractor: Subjective Selection, Extended Phenotypes, Gouldian Constraints, and Strategic Stability in Legal Evolution

This conceptual paper develops a bounded legal-evolutionary extension of Manvir Singh's theory of subjective selection and cultural super-attractors. It treats legal ordering as a candidate family of recurrent institutional basins and connects subjective selection with Extended Phenotype Theory, Evolutionary Game Theory, and Gouldian constraints. The paper distinguishes psychological attraction, cultural adoption, strategic stability, institutional persistence, and legal legitimacy; develops the idea of law as a recursive second-order selective architecture; and formulates discriminating predictions, rival explanations, and falsification conditions. Gouldian analysis supplies an anti-adaptationist constraint through exaptation, structural by-products, historical contingency, non-optimality, and a bounded use of punctuated equilibrium. The formulas are explicitly disclosed as AI-assisted heuristic representations and are not presented as calibrated or validated predictive equations.