69 min listen
Samir Okasha, "Agents and Goals in Evolution" (Oxford UP, 2018)
Samir Okasha, "Agents and Goals in Evolution" (Oxford UP, 2018)
ratings:
Length:
60 minutes
Released:
Aug 9, 2019
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
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 explanations of nonhuman organisms is justified by providing explanatory purchase that goes beyond using the concept of function. He also argues how natural selection does not necessarily or even probably lead to the most adapted (or fittest) traits, and considers how and when the idea of utility maximization in economics has its valid analogue in the idea of adaptive fitness.
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Released:
Aug 9, 2019
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
Helen Steward, “A Metaphysics for Freedom” (Oxford UP, 2012): The basic problem of free will is quite simple to pose: do we ever act freely? One of the traditional “no” answers comes from the idea that we live in a deterministic universe, such that everything that happens had to happen given the initial condition... by New Books in Philosophy