I particular, I'd be very curios to know how many of the replicable results require a "behavioral" explanation and how many are explainable trough the utility functions and rational agents.

> The mean power is 46%, which implies that only half of the results would be replicated in exact replication studies. The success rate in actual replication studies is often lower and may be as low as the estimated discovery rate (Bartos & Schimmack, 2020). So, replicability is somewhere between 12% and 46%. Even if half of the results are replicable, we do not know which results are replicable and which one’s are not. The Chapter-based analyses provide some clues which findings may be less trustworthy (implicit priming) and which ones may be more trustworthy (overconfidence), but the main conclusion is that the empirical basis for claims in “Thinking: Fast and Slow” is shaky.

Beyond that, culture has a huge role to play. Many complex lifeforms learn how to survive from their parents and peers. Those groups with less adaptive strategies will be wiped out. For many organisms, they are not "thinking" per se, they are processing sensory data in the way they've been taught. The "thinking" was done by multilevel selection, weeding out ineffective strategies.

IOW, no organism technically needs to think through a problem from first principles. There's always some cultural heuristic to fall back on.

Second paragraph is spot on. The search space is far too large for evolution to provide direct solutions for every challenge a multicellular lifeform could face. General solutions rule. But it's likely that cultural adaptation plays a larger role than individual cognition.

One could argue the prokaryotic life is 100% instinct though - adaptive responses seem to be pretty rare in bacteria.