Top Teleology Quotes

Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the...

The great cognitive shift is an expansion of consciousness from the perspectival form contained in the lives of particular creatures to an objective, world-encompassing form that exists both individua...

Teleology Definition

(n.) The doctrine of the final causes of things

(n.) the doctrine of design, which assumes that the phenomena of organic life, particularly those of evolution, are explicable only by purposive causes, and that they in no way admit of a mechanical explanation or one based entirely on biological science; the doctrine of adaptation to purpose.

Among the things most characteristic of organisms--most distinctive of living as opposed to inorganic systems--is a sort of directedness. Their structures and activities have an adaptedness, an eviden...

The chicken does not exist only in order to produce another egg. He may also exist to amuse himself, to praise God, and even to suggest ideas to a French dramatist.