Randomization in Science, Society and Nature July 2nd-3rd 2026

Location: Wills Hall Conference Centre, University of Bristol

Organizers: Samir Okasha and George Davey-Smith

Contact: Samir.Okasha@bristol.ac.uk 

Workshop Theme

Randomization, characterized abstractly, involves an agent deliberately “flipping a coin”, or using a randomizing device, in order to choose between alternatives. The agent could be a person, a non-human organism, or “nature” (i.e. evolution). A simple Bayesian argument suggests that randomizing, rather than choosing a certain alternative, can never be strictly advantageous, and is only permissible when the options are of equal value. Yet randomization is widely used in a range of contexts, for various purposes. The aim of this workshop is to reflect on the use of randomization in five such contexts:

1. decision and game theory (why do agents sometimes prefer to randomize?)

2. clinical trials / experiments (is randomization necessary for causal inference? what is its justification?)

3. politics and society (when is allocation by lottery/sortition a good idea and why?)

4. evolutionary biology (when are bet-hedging strategies advantageous?)

5. genetics (why did sex and recombination, i.e. random shuffling of genes, evolve? why did meiosis evolve to be fair?)

The unifying thread is the question of when randomization (by agents or by nature) is "valuable", where this can mean rational, scientifically useful, socially useful, fair, or evolutionarily advantageous, depending on the context.

Speakers

Samir Okasha (University of Bristol)

George Davey-Smith (University of Bristol)

Nancy Cartwright (Durham University)

Eleanor Sanderson (University of Bristol)

Peter Stone (University College Dublin)

Kevin Zollman (Carnegie-Mellon University)

Richard Bradley (London School of Economics)

Thomas Icard (Stanford University)

Thomas Haaland (Norwegian University of Science and Technology

David Teira (UNED, Madrid)

Thomas Scott (Oxford)

Since its original conception in the mid-90s (Maynard Smith and Szathmary 1995) the idea of major evolutionary transitions has undergone evolutionary trajectories of its own. While the original formulation targeted a conjunction of events where new units of organisation evolve out of pre-existing ones, and events and where new modes of transferring information across generations evolve (Szathmáry 2015), later formulations have tended to be more coherent in explanatory targets as well as explanatory models, at the cost of scope. Particularly representative here is the derived concept of Evolutionary Transitions in Individuality, which focuses on the evolution of new biological individuals from pre-existing ones (Michod and Herron 2006, Bourke 2011, Calcott and Sterelny 2011, Birch 2017, Okasha 2022) and the closely-related debate around what biological individuality is (Clarke 2010, Pradeu 2016). This remains a lively area of debate within theoretical biology and philosophy of biology, and it continues to inspire similar research outside the realm of biology.

The purpose of this workshop was to stimulate discussion on the topic of major transitions in cultural evolutionary theory (Jablonka and Lamb 2006, Hodgson and Knudsen 2010, Waring and Wood 2021). While the prospects of applying the major transitions framework seem promising, given increasing hierarchical complexity in sociocultural systems over the course of their evolutionary histories, the approach faces challenges. For instance, how should we understand the central concepts of major transitions in biology? How do (or can) these concepts apply in the case of sociocultural processes? What explanatory benefits does major transition thinking offer in biology, and do these benefits transfer when applied to culture? The aim was to interrogate issues in major transitions thinking in biology, and assess the prospects of applying this thinking to sociocultural change.

Speakers: 

Samir Okasha

Ross Pain and Christine Balasa

Arsham Nejad Kourki

Richard Moore

Eva Jablonka

Tim Waring

Azita Chellappoo

Adrian Currie and Tyler Brunet

Daniel Lawson

Rachael Brown

Maureen O'Malley

Matthew Herron

David Harrison

Ellen Clarke

Ceri Shipton

Monique Borgerhoff-Mulder

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement number 101018533). All project outputs are published Open Access.