Ben Waber reviewed Evolution of Agency
An Interesting Tour through Animal Decision Making
3 stars
Despite the title, this book is primarily about how different animals make decisions. Viewed through this lens, it's an interesting review of how different classes of animals behave and choose different courses of action. Tomasello does hypothesize an awful lot about "agency," but strangely doesn't really define what he means by the term until the final chapter, and as far a evolution is concerned offers literally zero supporting evidence for how this characterization developed. Beyond that, the sections on neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science are woefully out of date (protip: don't unironically cite cognitive science papers from the 50s). There are at least a lot of pointers to interesting studies to read more about
Despite the title, this book is primarily about how different animals make decisions. Viewed through this lens, it's an interesting review of how different classes of animals behave and choose different courses of action. Tomasello does hypothesize an awful lot about "agency," but strangely doesn't really define what he means by the term until the final chapter, and as far a evolution is concerned offers literally zero supporting evidence for how this characterization developed. Beyond that, the sections on neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science are woefully out of date (protip: don't unironically cite cognitive science papers from the 50s). There are at least a lot of pointers to interesting studies to read more about