Cosmological meaning of the gravitational gauge group

It is shown that among the R+beta S^{abc}S_{abc} models, only the one with beta=1/2 has nonvanishing torsion effect in the Robertson--Walker universe filled with a spin fluid, where S_{abc} denotes torsion. Moreover, the torsion effect in that model is found to be able to replace the big-bang singularity by a big bounce. Furthermore, we find that the model can be obtained under a Kaluza--Klein-like ansatz, by assuming that the gravitational gauge group is the de Sitter group.