Teleology biological

Since inflammatory reactions are not accompanied by any remarkable change in the erythrocyte survival, it is difficult from a teleological point of view to understand the increased Hp synthesis or pool output during inflammatory reactions. It is possible that the main biological function of Hp has not yet been discovered. Suggestions of its importance in the immune defense have been proposed (S10), and it is apparently an essential part of what the virologists call the Francis inhibitor (S10). 

I am not altogether sure how this approach is related to my own. First of all, the terms in which the two account are cast are difficult to compare. The teleological account is illustrated nearly exclusively by biological examples having to do with rather simple-minded animals. This is quite natural, for we do not understand much of the human mind in terms of biological functions. Conversely, my account is... 

In his report on Henderson s early work, younger colleague John Edsall noted that these basic facts pointed clearly to a teleological order in the universe. But Edsall immediately went on to indicate that Henderson explicitly disavowed any attempt to associate this order with notions of design or purpose in nature, and considered his views fully compatible with a mechanistic outlook on the problems of biology (Edsall, 1973, p. 350). 

But Lillie was not completely satisfied with the adaptive teleology that Henderson had developed. He noted the transfer of the conception of fitness from the organic to the inorganic environment, which thereby achieves the reciprocal nature of biological adaptation. However, Lillie countered that Henderson had not dealt in detail with the organism itself and the interrelation between organisms and the environment ... 

For the final question posed by his reading of Fitness, Lillie asked How then is it possible to reconcile teleology and the existence of will and purpose in nature with the existence of a physico-chemical determinism which appears the more rigid the further scientific analysis proceeds This question, which he did not answer in the review, Lillie admitted (and which is often pushed to the side by scientists), would require biological knowledge for a solution - if one is ever achieved. Lillie concluded that Henderson s book points biologists to the importance and urgency of these questions (p. 342). A polite, friendly, but hardly full endorsement. 

One suspects that the lack of contemporary interest in Henderson s work might have been because such ideas were closely associated with the teleological design arguments of the past, which had been discredited by the emergence of natural selection as a better explanation for biological fine-tuning and, to a far lesser extent, by the philosophical objections of Hume (1779) [19] and Kant (c. 1790) [20]. 

It is usually assumed nowadays that anything in the body must have a role or function. Once this role has been decided everyone feels happier, especially editors of textbooks and journals it is then no longer necessary to waste time worrying over alternative evidence or interpretations. But this modern habit of teleological thinking would have disturbed the founding fathers of biological science hardly had they rescued us from... 

Staden, Heinrich von. Teleology and Mechanism Aristotehan Biology and Early Hellenistic Medicine. In Aristotelische Biologic. Ed. Wolfgang Kulhnann and Sabine FoUinger, pp. 183-208. Smttgart Franz Steiner, 1996. 

It is evidently impossible to consider biological phenomena intelligently in other than functional terms. This need for a teleological approach (the term being used to denote functionality, not supernatural planning) seems to have first been forcefully expressed in a biochemical context by Krebs in 1954 [1]. Design by the trial-ahd-error procedures... 

Lenoir, Timothy. 1989. The Strategy of Life Teleology and Mechanics in Nineteenth-Century German Biology. Chicago University of Chicago Press. 

We contemplate, however, signs of cracking of that orthodoxy and these are protago-nized by some of the leading pioneers of molecular biology. The keyword is an old one, teleology, now rechristened as teleonomy. Jacques Monod has forcefully expressed its... 

---