Richard Prum (Yale University)
Philosophical discussions of the existence and implications of subjective experience have focused mainly on humans, but these issues have rich and diverse implications for the process of organic evolution. Following Nagel, I view the subjective experience of animals as irreducible, emergent phenomena. Animal subjectivity interacts with social, sexual, and ecological choices to create a novel locus of evolutionary agency. Subjective evaluation by individual animals constitutes a distinct and potentially independent criterion of success that is conceptually differentiable from the survival and fecundity components of natural selection.
