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Books > Science & Mathematics > Science: general issues > Philosophy of science
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Agents and Goals in Evolution (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,652
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Agents and Goals in Evolution (Hardcover)
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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.
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