The rejection of the idea of teleology was tied to Galileo’s rejection of Aristotelian physics, with it’s outmoded notions of ‘natural place’. However, I argue that while this is perfectly sound for physics, it is questionable in biology, as all of organic life acts so as to preserve itself and survive which in principle is a form of rudimentary intentional action, even if not in the first place accompanied by conscious awareness, which evolves much later. Living things are not simply acted upon by forces —they grow, develop, repair, adapt and evolve. Throughout, they act as if they’re pursuing ends: survival, reproduction, flourishing. And biologists, even when steeped in the reductionist spirit, can’t help but speak in the language of purpose.
In 20th c biology, this gave rise to a certain unease, memorably captured by J. B. S. Haldane:
Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he’s unwilling to be seen with her in public.
To ease this tension, the term teleonomy was introduced. It was meant to describe the appearance of goal-directedness in living organisms without invoking any spooky metaphysical purpose. In other words, creatures act as if they have ends, but these ends are entirely the result of blind evolutionary processes. The term was a rhetorical compromise: a way to acknowledge the structure and coherence of biological processes while maintaining ideological fidelity to non-purposive causality.
(But then, who’s to say what really distinguishes ‘apparent’ from ‘real’ purpose? I suspect that what many people mean by ‘real purpose’ is simply purpose of the kind they can entertain having—deliberate, self-conscious, human. But if you’re a lone villager being stalked by a rogue tiger while gathering firewood, that tiger’s intent is deadly real, and you’ll discover it soon enough if you don’t make haste.)
So, as the philosopher David Hull once noted, “calling something ‘teleonomic’ doesn’t explain teleology away—it just gives it a different name.” The explanatory work is still being done by the as if. And when the entire vocabulary of biology—function, adaptation, selection, error-correction, information—is suffused with purpose-shaped terms, one has to wonder whether we’ve really done away with telos, or simply smuggled it back in through the servants’ entrance.
The Great Abstraction
The rise of early modern physics was built on a profound methodological simplification: the exclusion of context. Galileo and Newton inaugurated a new style of reasoning by isolating variables—mass, motion, force—and expressing their relations mathematically. The result was a set of laws remarkable for their precision and generality. What made them so effective was precisely their invariance: they were true in all places and times, for all observers, regardless of the specificities of any actual situation. As Thomas Nagel put it in Mind and Cosmos, regarding the inevitable dualism that this entailed:
The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand – how this physical world appears to human perception – were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind – as well as human intentions and purposes – from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. (Mind and Cosmos, Pp35-36)
But this universality came at a price. To attain it, physics had to bracket out the world as we actually live it: a world rich with meaning, embedded in time, shaped by perception and concern. Philosopher of biology Steve Talbott put it like this:
The physicist wants laws that are as universal as possible, true of all situations and therefore unable to tell us much about any particular situation — laws, in other words, that are true regardless of meaning and context… Such abstraction shows up in the strong urge toward the mathematization of physical laws.
In this light, the familiar claim that the universe is meaningless begins to look suspicious. It isn’t so much a conclusion reached by science, but a background assumption—one built into the methodology from the outset. The exclusion of purpose was never, and in fact could never be, empirically demonstrated; it was simply excluded as a factor in the kind of explanations physics was intended to provide. Meaning was left behind for the sake of predictive accuracy and control in specific conditions.
That this bracketing was useful—indeed revolutionary—is not in doubt. But the further move, so often taken for granted in modern discourse, is the assertion that because physics finds no purpose, the universe therefore has none. This is not science speaking, but metaphysics ventriloquizing through the authority of science. It is a philosophical sleight of hand that confuses methodological silence for ontological negation.
And yet, the moment we turn to the biological realm, the limits of this framework become apparent. Organisms don’t merely obey laws—they respond, adapt, develop, pursue, express. They live. Their very being is bound up with shifting internal and external contexts, with dynamic self-organization and regulation. As Talbott further writes:
In biology a changing context does not interfere with some causal truth we are trying to see; contextual transformation is itself the truth we are after… Every creature lives by virtue of the dynamic, pattern-shifting play of a governing context, which extends into an open-ended environment. The organism gives expression, at every level of its being, to the unbounded because of reason — the tapestry of meaning.
To speak of organisms is necessarily to speak in the language of function, adaptation, and goal-directedness. Biologists may insist that these are mere heuristics, that such language is shorthand for mechanisms with no actual purpose. And the plain fact is that life is not like that.
(This is a reprise of a thread posted on the previous version of the forum which can be accessed via the archives. There’s also a complete draft on Medium which can be accessed here without without requiring sign-up.)
