This bibliography gathers publications over many years from a variety of researchers exploring topics of agency, directionality, and function (among others) with a special emphasis on CASP members. It began with work from teams within the initial Agency, Directionality and Function project and continues to be populated with papers and articles from diverse researchers looking to further develop and expand ways of working interdisciplinarily on the complex theme of teleology.
Included in the bibliography are entries for publications and books that many scholars involved in the Agency, Directionality and Function project recommended as foundational texts in their field of study. We welcome suggestions for additions to the bibliography from CASP members.
Formal models of agency and cooperation
Love, A. C. (2023). Reflections on the Study of Biological Agency and its Evolution. Spontaneous Generations, 11(1).
Maynard Smith, J. (1982). Evolution and the Theory of Games. Cambridge (UK): Cambridge University Press.
Maynard Smith. J. and Szathmary, E. (1995). The Major Transitions in Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McAvoy, A., & Wakeley, J. (2022). Evaluating the structure-coefficient theorem of evolutionary game theory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(28), e2119656119.
Melgar, J., Schou, M. F., Bonato, M., Brand, Z., Engelbrecht, A., Cloete, S. W., & Cornwallis, C. K. (2022). Experimental evidence that group size generates divergent benefits of cooperative breeding for male and female ostriches. ELife, 11, e77170. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.77170
Mirramezani, M., Oktay, D., & Adams, R. P. (2023). A rapid and automated computational approach to the design of multistable soft actuators (arXiv:2309.04970). arXiv.
Moreno, A., Gambarotto, A. Body plan organization and the evolution of conscious agency. Biol Philos 41, 2 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-025-10004-6
Nowak, M. (2006). Evolutionary Dynamics: Exploring the Equations of Life. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press.
O’Connor, C. (2019). The Origins of Unfairness: Social Categories and Cultural Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Oderberg, D. S. (2023). Who’s afraid of reverse mereological essentialism? Philosophical Studies.
Okasha, S. (2018). Agents and Goals in Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Queller, D.C. and Strassman, J.E. (2009). “Beyond society: the evolution of organismality.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Part B: Biological Sciences 364:3143–3155.
Schulz, A. W. (2022). What’s the Point? A Presentist Social Functionalist Account of Institutional Purpose. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 52(1–2), 53–80.
Sterelny, K. and Calcott, B. (2011). The Major Transitions in Evolution Revisited. Cambridge (MA): The MIT Press.
Su, Q., & Plotkin, J. B. (2022). Evolution of cooperation with asymmetric social interactions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(1), e2113468118.
Su, Q., McAvoy, A., & Plotkin, J. B. (2023). Strategy evolution on dynamic networks. Nature Computational Science, 3(9), 763–776.
Virenque, L., & Mossio, M. (2023). What is Agency? A View from Autonomy Theory. Biological Theory.
W. Schulz, A. (2022). Tools of the trade: the bio-cultural evolution of the human propensity to trade. Biology & Philosophy, 37(2), 8.
West, S.A., Fisher, R.M., Gardner, A. and Toby Kiers, E. (2015). “Major evolutionary transitions in individuality.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, United States of America 112:10112–10119.
Wilson, R. A. (2022). Why kinship is progeneratively constrained: Extending anthropology. Synthese, 200(2), 175.
Function and Teleology
Scientific Explanation: A Study of the Function of Theory, Probability and Law in Science. Cambridge (UK): Cambridge University Press.
Allen, C. and J. Neal (2020). “Teleological notions in biology.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2020 Version). Edited by E.N. Zalta: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/teleology-biology/.
Allen, C., M. Bekoff and G. Lauder, eds. (1998). Nature's Purposes: Analyses Of Function and Design in Biology. Cambridge (MA): The MIT Press.
Amundson, R. and G.V. Lauder (1994). "Function without purpose: the uses of causal role function in evolutionary biology." Biology and Philosophy 9(4): 443–470.
Ayala, F.A. (1970). “Teleological explanations in evolutionary biology.” Philosophy of Science 37:1–15.