This volume includes many of Kim Sterelny's previously published papers on philosophy of biology and the evolution of cognition and agency. Two of these papers are co-authored, one with Philip Kitcher and the other with Kelly Smith and Mike Dickison. The volume also includes a comprehensive introduction and two other previously unpublished pieces, one on ecology and one on the evolution of agency. In the first two parts of the book Sterelny weighs in on almost all the important debates in philosophy of biology and makes substantial contributions to many of these debates. The reason for the apparent detour into various debates about the nature of evolution is that Sterelny wants to lay out his view of the evolutionary process in general before applying it to the special case of the evolution of agency and cognition. In the final part of the book, Sterelny introduces some of his original views on the evolution of agency and cognition. This part of the book serves as background and an introduction to issues further developed in his forthcoming book on the evolution of agency.

The papers collected here trace several important changes in Sterelny's views. For example, while Sterelny still wants to defend a version of gene-selectionism, he has backed away from the view of gene-selectionism he and Kitcher defended, which failed to sufficiently acknowledge the important role of non-genetic inheritance. This shift in view has been stimulated by Sterelny's close critical examination and response to the work of developmental systems theorists such as Russell Gray, Paul Griffiths and Susan Oyama. While Sterelny still ascribes genes a “very special role” in development, he now acknowledges the importance of a “raucous and motley crowd of squabbling replicators” (79). On the new view “replicators are devices with developmental biofunctions” (66) and so DNA counts, but so do micro-organism symbionts that parents are adapted to pass onto their offspring. Critical examination of the work of group selectionists and others in the units of selection debate has moved Sterelny to admit to some promiscuity with respect to interactors as well. He argues that both groups and species are interactors in two separate papers included in the volume.

The final part of Sterelny's book begins with a critical response to Peter Godfrey-Smith's (Reference Godfrey-Smith1996) work on the evolution of cognition. Sterelny adopts Godfrey-Smith's hypothesis that the “function of cognition is to fit organisms to a specific kind of complex environment” (181). Sterelny introduces new conceptual machinery in order to expand the range of application of Godfrey-Smith's hypothesis. His several aims here include finding a principled way for establishing what kind of organisms rely on representations as opposed to stimulus-bound responses to their environment and resolving debates about the scope and applicability of the social intelligence hypothesis about the origin of higher cognition. Sterelny's view is that representation arises in situations in which organisms have to deal with what he calls an “informational translucent environment.” Such environments contain “resources, dangers and allies that map in complex ways onto physical signals [an organism] can detect” (264). A stimulus-bound response to such an environment would not be adaptive. Obvious cases of organisms with or without the requisite representations abound: nematodes lack them and chimps have them. The difficult questions face investigators working between these extremes. Sterelny's deliberations issue in many useful conceptual resources for animal behavior researchers confronting these difficult questions.

In his Preface, Sterelny says that he intends his essays to vindicate the following metaphilosophy: “we should think of all philosophy as part of the same project as the natural sciences, but a discipline concerned with the more theoretically obscure elements of those sciences [….] and as playing an integrative role within them” (xiv). The papers collected here are all densely argued and Sterelny supports his argumentation with good use of an immense array of carefully selected examples from biology. David Reference Hull, Earman and NortonHull (1989) made a “plea for real examples” in philosophy of biology and philosophy more generally, and Sterelny has answered the plea by setting us new standards in the use of examples in argument. He draws from a wide range of areas of biology and displays detailed knowledge of the cases in question. Sterelny's collection certainly provides the vindication he intended.