Samir Okasha, "Agents and Goals in Evolution" (Oxford UP, 2018)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Aug 9, 2019 · 59m

Evolutionary biologists standardly treat organisms as agents: they have goals and purposes and preferences, and their behaviors and adaptive traits contribute to the achievement of their goals. This explanatory practice brings evolutionary biology into conceptual contact with rational choice theory, which provides models of how people make decisions and act on them. In Agents and Goals in Evolution (Oxford University Press, 2018), Samir Okasha explores the fascinating and complex links between evolutionary biology and rational choice theory, arguing that “agential thinking” in adaptationist…