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Introduction

There is a familiar story about the place of teleology in biology that goes as follows. Since Aristotle, biologists have used a teleological idiom to describe living organisms, but the justification for doing so only became apparent with Darwin. Though the process of evolution by natural selection is mechanical and lacks foresight, Darwinism nonetheless licenses talk of function and purpose in nature. In statements such as ‘the polar bear’s white coat is for camouflage’ and ‘the cactus has spines in order to deter herbivores’, the teleological terms (‘for’, ‘in order to’) are really a way of talking about adaptive significance. Natural selection led polar bears to evolve white coats and cacti to grow spines because these traits helped to camouflage bears and protect cacti, so were adaptive. Thus Darwinism supplies a naturalistic basis for at least some of the teleological idioms that biologists had long used....

Oxford University Press

Samir Okasha

Oxford Scholarship Online

2018

Title: Introduction

Description:

There is a familiar story about the place of teleology in biology that goes as follows.

Since Aristotle, biologists have used a teleological idiom to describe living organisms, but the justification for doing so only became apparent with Darwin.

Though the process of evolution by natural selection is mechanical and lacks foresight, Darwinism nonetheless licenses talk of function and purpose in nature.

In statements such as ‘the polar bear’s white coat is for camouflage’ and ‘the cactus has spines in order to deter herbivores’, the teleological terms (‘for’, ‘in order to’) are really a way of talking about adaptive significance.

Natural selection led polar bears to evolve white coats and cacti to grow spines because these traits helped to camouflage bears and protect cacti, so were adaptive.

Thus Darwinism supplies a naturalistic basis for at least some of the teleological idioms that biologists had long used.

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Introduction

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