Riskin’s thesis is that since the seventeenth century (read: after Descartes) there has been a movement in philosophy and the sciences to banish agency from the natural world, and that this movement has theological roots---particularly, in the idea of an intelligent, supernatural designer responsible for the apparent design in a nature world that is purely passive and mechanistic. At the same time, there has been a subterranean movement, a “shadow history” that goes for the opposite tack and attempts to explain living things by imbuing them with a sense of inner agency. The former conception is exemplified by Hobbes, William Paley, evolutionary biologist August Weismann, and contemporary “ultra-Darwinists” like as Dawkins and Dennett, while the latter conception is exemplified by Leibniz, La Mettrie, and Lamarck. She argues that the shadow history of inner agency has been unjustly forgotten, and it is time to bring back agency into nature.
The book is remarkable for tying a lot of disparate philosophical and scientific movements into a single narrative thread, from the early modern period and the scientific revolution, through the proto-Romantics, the genesis of evolutionary biology, all the way to cybernetics and artificial intelligence. Her historical account is so dazzlingly told that it was easy for me to not question whether her notion of agency is rather too capacious, allowing her to bucket such disparate thinkers into two camps. But I don’t think her aim with this book was to pin down a philosophically rigorous definition of agency and demonstrate that all these people had a specific particular conception in mind that common to them.