Teleology

Aristotle illustrated teleology with the acorn: it grows toward becoming an oak tree, not randomly but purposefully toward its telos (end or goal). For him, understanding nature meant asking not just "what causes this?" but "what is this for?" This perspective made every organism seem like it was striving toward its own perfection, a view that feels intuitive when watching a caterpillar transform into a butterfly, yet one that Darwin's natural selection would later explain without invoking purpose at all.

The Scientific Revolution saw mechanistic explanations displace teleological ones—Newton's laws described how planets move without needing to know their "purpose." Francis Bacon famously dismissed final causes as "barren virgins," arguing they produced no useful knowledge for manipulating nature. Yet this created a curious split: while physics abandoned purpose entirely, biology couldn't quite shake it—we still say hearts are "for" pumping blood, even if evolution built them without foresight.

Natural selection performs an extraordinary sleight of hand: it creates the appearance of design without a designer, purpose without intention. A bird's wing looks perfectly designed for flight because generations of poorly-flying birds left fewer offspring—retrospective filtering masquerading as forward planning. This is why biologists constantly slip into teleological language ("plants evolved flowers to attract pollinators") while knowing it's technically backwards—the purposeful phrasing is just too cognitively efficient to abandon.

Humans are hardwired teleological thinkers—children as young as five assume everything exists for a purpose, believing rocks are pointy "so animals can scratch on them." This cognitive bias, called "promiscuous teleology," probably evolved because understanding intentions ("the rustling bush wants to eat me") kept our ancestors alive. It's why design arguments feel so intuitively compelling and mechanistic explanations require effort—we're fighting our brain's default operating system.

While physics expelled teleology, ethics desperately needs it—you can't define "good" without knowing what humans are for. Virtue ethics asks what traits help us flourish as the kinds of beings we are; utilitarianism optimizes toward the end of happiness. Even existentialists who reject inherent purpose end up arguing we must create our own purposes to live meaningfully—escaping teleology turns out to be philosophically impossible when you're the creature asking "what should I do?"

Machine learning is quietly rehabilitating teleological thinking through goal-directed systems that genuinely act "in order to" achieve objectives. When AlphaGo places stones "to" control territory, we're not anthropomorphizing—the algorithm literally optimizes toward that end state. This technological development forces philosophers to revisit old questions: can purposefulness exist without consciousness? Is goal-directedness a spectrum rather than an on-off switch? Silicon might be teaching us that teleology was never simply right or wrong, but context-dependent.