Teleology’s universality reflects an evolutionary advantage: it helped our ancestors to survive. For example, museum dioramas presenting animal families as nuclear units with a large father, smaller mother, and two children (even if reality demonstrates no such family) betray our biases toward what we think “should be” natural. When our expectations bias our initial impressions of nature, we end up with prejudices masquerading as “nature”. We blur the line between what “is” and what “ought” to be. Instead of objectively describing nature with neutral explanations, we subtly (or not so subtly) imbue them with judgments and justifications. Here lies the real danger of the insidious and nearly inescapable teleological viewpoint. Why? Because ideas in science are judged based on evidence, not on how reasonable they seem.
#EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON PROFESSIONAL#
Unfortunately, professional ecologists have rejected this view.
The “balance of nature” idea seems sensible. We explain that ecosystems, like bodily processes, tend toward equilibrium. Still, scientists persist in spreading the teleology viewpoint, whether in taxonomy, physiology, or molecular genetics. It’s just a quirk that the surviving lineage had five toes. Some of the first fish that crawled ashore had six- and seven-toed hands, so we could have ended up with an entirely different counting system. We don’t have five fingers on each hand to oblige our decimal (base ten) mathematics. All organisms today are equally distant from the first living creatures.Īnd we should properly speak of the heart’s function, not its purpose-like other organs, it might have evolved in a different way given that evolution has no goal and doesn’t look ahead. We do a disservice when we speak of “higher” life forms. More to the point, they seem not to be untroubled by their lot in life. They are also complex in ways that humans can only envy, with remarkable abilities of sensation, locomotion, and feeding. Even biologists who dispassionately understand that evolution is not goal-oriented persist, if subconsciously, in spreading the view that “lower” animals exist solely for the “purpose” of giving rise to “higher” animals.īut frogs and fish are not just older, more diverse, and more abundant than many kinds of animals. The real trouble is that all of us, including researchers and educators, are brought up with a teleological view of the world, which demands focused dedication and self-awareness to overcome. But the problem is rampant and runs deeper than evolutionary shorthand language. The terminology we use in biology-for example, molecules “need to” bind with receptors, hormones are “meant” to travel directly to targets to deliver their messages, and viruses should not be too deadly “in order to” survive-fosters this notion of intentionality. Why this is so, and what we can do about it, is the focus of my research. Turns out teleology is hard to shake in science too, especially the life sciences. Spend time with children anywhere around the world and you will appreciate how “natural” this way of thinking is. This widespread, deep-seated idea, known (since the days of Plato and Aristotle) as teleology, develops at a young age. Instead, what people mean is that things happen so as to fulfill a goal or purpose-that events unfold as part of a grand plan.
Long before Isaac Newton, we knew that balls don’t start rolling by themselves. When people utter the familiar phrase “everything happens for a reason,” they don’t mean that every phenomenon is preceded by an underlying cause.