KLI postdoctoral fellow Enrico Petracca has been awarded the prestigious FWF grant from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) for his project titled “Integrating evolution and enactivism through decision-making”.

The project aims to integrate evolutionary theory (especially the extended evolutionary synthesis, EES) and enactivism through the nexus of judgment and decision-making (JDM). By devising EES and enactivist models of judgment and decisions, the project aims to prove the structural similarity (isomorphism) between the two perspectives. The isomorphism concerns, in particular, three aspects: i) the view of agency; ii) the reciprocal notion of causation; and iii) non-adaptive normativity. Although significant, the isomorphism is not perfect: the timescales of EES and enactivism are not comparable. Whereas evolution (natural selection) typically unfolds over eons, enactivism deals with phenomena occurring in developmental time. Rather than being a problem, this provides an excellent integration opportunity. The project shows that EES and enactivism can unite to produce a timescale-integrated framework for studying both evolutionary and developmental phenomena, and especially, their strict interdependence. To prove that the resulting integration is sound, the project presents a case study about human thumbs, typically investigated separately as opposable thumbs in evolutionary biology, as resources for sense-making in enactivism, and as “rules of thumb” in JDM. The goal is to show that these different aspects of the thumb are, in fact, part of the same story unfolding at different timescales and need to be integrated.