Samir Okasha, "Agents and Goals in Evolution" (Oxford UP, 2018)
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What is the main focus of Samir Okasha’s book “Agents and Goals in Evolution”?
Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdur, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa, and I'm co-host of the channel along with Robert Talise, Alexis McLeod, and Sarah Tyson. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Samir Okasha, professor of philosophy at the University of Bristol. His new book, Agents and Goals in Evolution, is just out from Oxford University Press. 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 from economics, which provides models of how people make decisions and act on them. In his new book, Okasha explores the fascinating and complex links between evolutionary biology and rational choice theory, arguing that agential thinking in adaptationist explanations of non-human organisms is justified by a utility that goes beyond using the concept of function. He also reaches some surprising conclusions that natural selection does not necessarily or even probably lead to the most adapted or fittest traits. And he also considers how and when the idea of utility maximization in economics has its valid analog in the idea of adaptive fitness.
Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Samir. Welcome to New Books in Philosophy. Thank you very
much.
Really excited to be talking about your book, Agents and Goals in Evolution. It's it's really a fascinating exploration of the explanatory relationship between, you know, evolutionary biology and then rational choice theory uh on the other. So before we get into the actual nitty gritty of the book, maybe you can tell us a bit about your own background, uh, you know, as a philosopher. um and how you came to uh to write the book.
Yeah, so I'm a philosopher of science. I did my PhD at Oxford University uh finishing in nineteen ninety eight. My interests straddle Traditional analytic philosophy. And philosophy of science with a particular focus on evolutionary biology, though I've also always had an interest in economics and rational choice. Um and for a long time I've tried to sort of o operate in live a sort of dual life between being an analytic philosopher on the one hand and uh discussing foundational questions in science, in particular in evolutionary biology, on the other. The book was a long time in the making, probably twelve twelve years or so, um and grew out of my previous book that was entitled Evolution and the Levels of Selection uh that I published in two thousand and six.
Um it was m well, we'll we'll get into the d the detail in a moment.
Okay, so so one of the the first, you know, concepts that you introduce is this idea of agential thinking, right? That an organism uh in evolution in biology is treated as an agent, uh, with goals, um, towards which its, you know, behaviors and its traits somehow, you know, per conduce in some way. So can you explain a bit about the overall structure of the book, what you're trying to do?
Yeah, so the I mean the book is what you might call an exercise in philosophical anthropology, um, in the sense that what I'm doing is looking At a practice that I see in the science, in the the science in question being evolutionary biology, that I find philosophically interesting, and standing back and saying, Why why do people think and talk this way? Um so what what I claim is that there is a mode of thinking and of talking and of reasoning in evolutionary biology that I dub agential thinking, an expression I actually borrowed from Peter Godfrey Smith. Um, that involves the deliberate transposition of concepts and descriptors that we usually apply to human agents, to rational human agents. such as purpose, belief, wants, desires, interests, that sort of thing, to organisms that we know don't really have those um
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main focus of Samir Okasha’s book “Agents and Goals in Evolution”?
0:07–10:18
2
How does Okasha define “agential thinking” and why do biologists use it?
10:18–17:17
3
What are the two types of agential thinking (type 1 and type 2) and how do they differ?
17:17–26:14
4
Why does Okasha argue that natural selection does not always produce the most adapted traits?
26:14–40:50
5
What is the “unity of purpose” requirement for treating an organism as an agent?
40:50–58:15
Speakers
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