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Synopsis
Samir Okasha offers a philosophical perspective on evolutionary biology in Agents and Goals in Evolution. His focus is on "agential thinking", which is a mode of thought commonly employed in evolutionary biology. The paradigm case of agential thinking involves treating an evolved organism as if it were an agent pursuing a goal, such as survival or reproduction, and treating its phenotypic traits as strategies for achieving that goal, or furthering its
biological interests.
Agential thinking involves deliberately transposing a set of concepts - goals, interests, strategies - from rational human agents to the biological world more generally. Okasha's enquiry begins by asking whether this is justified. Is agential thinking mere anthropomorphism, or does it play a genuine intellectual role in the science? This central question leads Okasha to a series of further questions. How do we identify the "goal" that evolved organisms will behave as if they are trying to
achieve? Can agential thinking ever be applied to groups or genes, rather than to individual organisms? And how does agential thinking relate to the controversies over fitness-maximization in evolutionary biology?
In the final third of the book, Okasha examines the relation between the adaptive and the rational. If organisms can validly be treated as agent-like, for the purposes of evolutionary analysis, should we expect that their evolved behaviour will correspond to the behaviour of rational agents as codified in the theory of rational choice? If so, does this mean that the fitness-maximizing paradigm of the evolutionary biologist can be mapped directly to the utility-maximizing paradigm of the
rational choice theorist? Okasha explores these questions using an inter-disciplinary methodology that draws on philosophy of science, evolutionary biology and economics. New & Used
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What Reviewers Are Saying
Okasha provides a convincing and valuable analysis of a particular, some might say peculiar, way of doing science. Both biologists and philosophers will have much to gain from reading this book. * J. Arvid Agren, The Quarterly Review of Biology * Agents and Goals in Evolution is essential reading for philosophers and biologists interested in subjects where reference to agency occurs, including fitness optimization, kin selection, and social evolution. It also touches on the relation between rationality and evolution, which could make it of interest to scholars working outside evolutionary biology but seeking to understand the appeal to evolution in different scientific fields. * Adrian Stencel, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences * Samir Okasha's 2018 book might well become the consensus classic text for biologists to fall back on when they find themselves unable to resist both function talk and agent talk in the course of their inquiries and explanations. It covers the ground with admirable clarity, caution and scholarship, delving in detail into the formal work by Hamilton, Maynard Smith, Grafen, Trivers and others, while also considering a wealth of theoretical and empirical research in
behavioral ecology, cognitive ethology, economics and psychology. * Daniel C. Dennett, Metascience * His book is thought-provoking, and it provides an excellent entry point into an interesting multidisciplinary literature. I will certainly make use of it in the future as a reference work. * Andy Gardner, Metascience * remarkably well argued and deep for a book that covers so much ground. Okasha clarifies and organizes many formerly disparate ways of using agential thinking in biology, discussing grand ideas with extraordinary clarity and subtly. * Hannah Rubin, Metascience * I have barely scratched the surface here of the many subtle, rich and illuminating points made in this book. Anyone with a serious interest in the foundations of evolutionary theory and the nature of evolutionary explanation will get a lot out of it, whatever their disciplinary background. * Jonathan Birch, Mind *
behavioral ecology, cognitive ethology, economics and psychology. * Daniel C. Dennett, Metascience * His book is thought-prov