Review of Samir Okasha and Ken Binmore ’ s Evolution and rationality : decisions , co - operation , and strategic behaviour . Cambridge : Cambridge University

There is a long history of sharing models between evolutionary biology and economics. Most famous is of course the introduction of game theory from economics into biology, which was then transformed into evolutionary game theory and re-imported into economics (Grüne-Yanoff 2011). Another area where both biology and economics have things to say is on cooperation. Both evolutionary biology and rational choice theory (RCT, hereafter) have problems accounting for cooperation within their standard frameworks. This has led to the development of a literature on cooperation that straddles the borders between economics and biology, and also philosophy. These topics were explored in two conferences organized by Samir Okasha and Ken Binmore at the University of Bristol, and eleven papers from these conferences are collected in this volume. In the introduction, Okasha and Binmore emphasize the strong connections between evolutionary theory and RCT. Continuing a theme from Okasha's recent work (Okasha 2007; and 2011), they focus particularly on how both RCT and evolutionary theory conceptualize behaviour 'as if' it is maximizing some quantity: utility in the case of RCT and fitness in the case of evolutionary theory. They suggest that the main question arising from this is, " when is it possible to identify the economist's notion of utility with the biologist's notion of fitness? " (p. 2). While this specific question might be of interest to some, it makes the book much more worthwhile that not all the chapters explicitly address it. Rather, the authors discuss a range of conceptual and methodological issues regarding the many interrelations between evolutionary theory and RCT, construed in their broadest senses. The most prominent interrelation is the use of game theory in both economics and biology to model strategic interaction. In addition, about half of the contributions address issues of cooperation in one way or another. Different explanations of cooperation, such as strong