Why did evolution not give us a utility function that is offspring alone? Why do we care intrinsically about other outcomes, such as food, and what determines the intensity of such preferences? A common view is that such other outcomes enhance fitness and the intensity of our preference for a...

Consider the possible biological origin of the expected utility criterion. On the one hand, if individuals possess a utility function stemming from the rate of production of expected offspring, they can rapidly adapt to arbitrary unknown distributions in a bandit problem. Embedding such a...