It is argued that the ‘routines as genes’ and the ‘routines as skills’ analogies are misleading in several respects. Neither genes, nor skills, nor routines program behavior, if this is taken to involve, first, that they do so in a way that excludes conscious, deliberate choice and,...

In several recent papers Arthur Robson sketches evolutionary scenarios in order to explain why we humans evolved hard-wired utility functions and the capacity to choose flexibly on the basis of them. These scenarios are scrutinized minutely in the paper. It is pointed out that Robson ignores...