Together with his former student Paul Griffiths, in 1999, Sterelny published Sex and Death, a comprehensive treatment of problems and alternative positions in the philosophy of biology.
This book incorporated a number of the positions developed in previous articles on the range of topics in the philosophy of biology.
At certain points Sterelny and his coauthor differed (for example, on the Darwinian treatment of emotions and on the prospects for developmental systems theory).
In 2004 Sterelny's book Thought in a Hostile World: The Evolution of Human Cognition received the Lakatos Award[4] for a distinguished contribution to the philosophy of science.
[6] In 2004, he received the Lakatos Award for his book Thought in a Hostile World: The evolution of human cognition.