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One of the first commandments of my scientific education was ‘thou shalt not use teleological language.’ This was closely related to a second commandment ‘thou shalt not commit anthropomorphism’. It was permissible to compare a frog to a machine but not to a human being (unless one also compared the human being to a machine). Biology did not concern itself with questions of value, purpose, and meaning. These were the province of flakey disciplines such as the humanities, social science, or religion. Asking ‘why’ rather than ‘how’ was unscientific, perhaps even sinful. In my book Darwin to Derrida, I offer an extended defense of the use of teleological reasoning in biology. The physical universe is a world without values. But meaning and purpose are the defining features of living things, they do things for good reasons because there are things in the world that they value. Biologists should not be ashamed of the difference.

SUGGESTED READING The fight for the future of biology By Denis Noble

Teleology comes from the Greek telos, something at the end, which was translated into Latin as causa finalis, and from thence into English as final cause. The final cause was that ‘for the sake of which’ an action was performed or ‘for the sake of which’ a thing existed. Final causes have been rejected as unscientific because a cause cannot come after its effect. But there is no backward causation when we act with intention. We form a plan which we attempt to implement. The intention comes before the fruition. There is no guarantee we will succeed. The outcome is not predestined. The same applies to the intentional actions of human beings. One of my favorite passages from Augustine is this: