Evolution of institutional rules: An immune system perspective

This article discusses the evolution of institutional rules, the prescriptions that humans use to shape their collective activities. Four aspects of the rules are discussed: coding, creation, selection, and memory. The immune system provides us a useful metaphor to relate these four aspects into a coherent framework. For each aspect, the relevant dynamics in social systems and immune systems are discussed. Finally, a framework for a computational model to study the evolution of rules is sketched.