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Author: Samir Okasha
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192546732
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
Samir Okasha approaches evolutionary biology from a philosophical perspective in Agents and Goals in Evolution, analysing a mode of thinking in biology called agential thinking. He considers how the paradigm case involves treating an evolved organism as if it were an agent pursuing a goal, such as survival or reproduction, and seeing its phenotypic traits as strategies for achieving that goal or furthering its biological interests. As agential thinking deliberately transposes a set of concepts--goals, interests, strategies--from rational human agents and to the biological world more generally, Okasha's enquiry firstly looks at the justification for this: is it mere anthropomorphism, or does it play a genuine intellectual role in the science? From this central question, key points are considered such as: 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 rather than to individual organisms? And how does agential thinking relate to the controversies over fitness-maximization in evolutionary biology? In addition, Okasha examines the relation between the adaptive and the rational by considering whether organisms can validly be treated as agent-like. Should we expect their evolved behaviour to correspond with that 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? All of these important questions are engagingly raised and discussed at length.
Author: Samir Okasha
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192546732
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Get Book Here
Book Description
Samir Okasha approaches evolutionary biology from a philosophical perspective in Agents and Goals in Evolution, analysing a mode of thinking in biology called agential thinking. He considers how the paradigm case involves treating an evolved organism as if it were an agent pursuing a goal, such as survival or reproduction, and seeing its phenotypic traits as strategies for achieving that goal or furthering its biological interests. As agential thinking deliberately transposes a set of concepts--goals, interests, strategies--from rational human agents and to the biological world more generally, Okasha's enquiry firstly looks at the justification for this: is it mere anthropomorphism, or does it play a genuine intellectual role in the science? From this central question, key points are considered such as: 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 rather than to individual organisms? And how does agential thinking relate to the controversies over fitness-maximization in evolutionary biology? In addition, Okasha examines the relation between the adaptive and the rational by considering whether organisms can validly be treated as agent-like. Should we expect their evolved behaviour to correspond with that 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? All of these important questions are engagingly raised and discussed at length.
Author: Michael G. Cordingley
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674972082
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 385
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Book Description
While viruses—the world’s most abundant biological entities—are not technically alive, they invade, replicate, and evolve within living cells. Michael Cordingley goes beyond our familiarity with infections to show how viruses spur evolutionary change in their hosts and shape global ecosystems, from ocean photosynthesis to drug-resistant bacteria.
Author: D. M. Walsh
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107122104
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295
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Book Description
This book argues that evolution arises from the activities of organisms as agents, not from the replication of genes.
Author: Timothy Leary
Publisher: Ronin Publishing
ISBN: 9781579510435
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 196
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Book Description
An encore to Musings on Human Metamorphoses in which Leary delves deeper into his vision of "human future history." He likens human society to that of insect hives and shows how certain evolved evolutionary agents (mutants) are upsetting hive and causing it to evolve. Eventually we will become the aliens. The book describes the struggle between the forces moving into the future and those attempting to stop change. While most people associate Leary solely with LSD and debauchery, this fascinating discourse has little mention of drugs.
Author: Michael Tomasello
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262370212
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 174
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Book Description
A leading developmental psychologist proposes an evolutionary pathway to human psychological agency. Nature cannot build organisms biologically prepared for every contingency they might possibly encounter. Instead, Nature builds some organisms to function as feedback control systems that pursue goals, make informed behavioral decisions about how best to pursue those goals in the current situation, and then monitor behavioral execution for effectiveness. Nature builds psychological agents. In a bold new theoretical proposal, Michael Tomasello advances a typology of the main forms of psychological agency that emerged on the evolutionary pathway to human beings. Tomasello outlines four main types of psychological agency and describes them in evolutionary order of emergence. First was the goal-directed agency of ancient vertebrates, then came the intentional agency of ancient mammals, followed by the rational agency of ancient great apes, ending finally in the socially normative agency of ancient humans. Each new form of psychological organization represented increased complexity in the planning, decision-making, and executive control of behavior. Each also led to new types of experience of the environment and, in some cases, of the organism’s own psychological functioning, leading ultimately to humans’ experience of an objective and normative world that governs all of their thoughts and actions. Together, these proposals constitute a new theoretical framework that both broadens and deepens current approaches in evolutionary psychology.
Author: Stefano Nolfi
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262140706
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 338
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Book Description
An overview of the basic concepts and methodologies of evolutionary robotics, which views robots as autonomous artificial organisms that develop their own skills in close interaction with the environment and without human intervention.
Author: Ngoc Thanh Nguyen
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3540880704
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 333
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Book Description
Intelligent agents have revolutionised the way we do business, we teach, we learn, design systems, and so on. Agent applications are increasingly being developed in - mains as diverse as meteorology, manufacturing, war gaming, UAV mission mana- ment and the evolution of Web [1]. The Web has also has the same effect on our daily life as the intelligent agents. We use Web for information search, shopping, news, communication and so on. We wonder how we lived without Web in the past [2]. The book presents a sample of some of the most innovative research on the use of intelligent agents in the evolution of Web. There are thirteen chapters in the book. Chapters are on theoretical foundations as well as practical applications. We are grateful to the contributors and reviewers for their contribution. We believe that the research reported in the book will encourage researchers to develop the robust human-like intelligent machines for the service of humans. We sincerely thank Springer-Verlag for their editorial support during the prepa- tion of the manuscript. The editors appreciate the resources provided by Wroclaw University of Technology and the University of South Australia to edit this volume.
Author: Aleksander Byrski
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319513885
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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Book Description
This book addresses agent-based computing, concentrating in particular on evolutionary multi-agent systems (EMAS), which have been developed since 1996 at the AGH University of Science and Technology in Cracow, Poland. It provides the relevant background information on and a detailed description of this computing paradigm, along with key experimental results. Readers will benefit from the insightful discussion, which primarily concerns the efficient implementation of computing frameworks for developing EMAS and similar computing systems, as well as a detailed formal model. Theoretical deliberations demonstrating that computing with EMAS always helps to find the optimal solution are also included, rounding out the coverage.
Author: Volker Nannen
Publisher: V. Nannen
ISBN: 9090241019
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 143
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Book Description
Author: Ruhul A. Sarker
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3642134254
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 293
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Book Description
Agent based evolutionary search is an emerging paradigm in computational int- ligence offering the potential to conceptualize and solve a variety of complex problems such as currency trading, production planning, disaster response m- agement, business process management etc. There has been a significant growth in the number of publications related to the development and applications of agent based systems in recent years which has prompted special issues of journals and dedicated sessions in premier conferences. The notion of an agent with its ability to sense, learn and act autonomously - lows the development of a plethora of efficient algorithms to deal with complex problems. This notion of an agent differs significantly from a restrictive definition of a solution in an evolutionary algorithm and opens up the possibility to model and capture emergent behavior of complex systems through a natural age- oriented decomposition of the problem space. While this flexibility of represen- tion offered by agent based systems is widely acknowledged, they need to be - signed for specific purposes capturing the right level of details and description. This edited volume is aimed to provide the readers with a brief background of agent based evolutionary search, recent developments and studies dealing with various levels of information abstraction and applications of agent based evo- tionary systems. There are 12 peer reviewed chapters in this book authored by d- tinguished researchers who have shared their experience and findings spanning across a wide range of applications.
