I definitely agree that the use of teleological terms to describe the process of evolution (as in this article) is inappropriate. However, I will note that biologists often do so anyway as a shortcut because our language doesn't really provide any good concise way to describe the actions (happenings?) of a process that is without intention (English certainly, probably most others as well). I would hope that most biologists understand the intellectual shortcut they are taking by using such terms, but I suspect that in many cases they may not.
I know that I have definitely described evolution in such terms when explaining it to non-scientists, but when participating in discussions with other scientists I try to stick to purely the intention-free ways of saying things.
Evolutionary psychology is bullsh*t because it pretends to know how an incalculable array of factors interacted to cause certain people to successfully reproduce over generations. The thing is, the complexity of reality is far far more awesome than that and making simplistic sounding plausible evolutionary arguments for certain behaviours is just hubris. Yes, evolution is happening but we're really overestimating ourselves if we think we know just how it's happening in the absence of archaeological fossil evidence.
How is this in any way a response to this comment thread? When did anyone say anything about evolutionary psychology? I only said that biologists sometimes get sloppy and say things about evolution they don't actually mean, and that this confuses other people who take them at their word.
Evolution works by exploiting regularities in all of those complex and intertwined factors.
In instances where we see obvious regularities, and we see that they've been exploited, then we should at least bump that probability that it's a valid explanation for the behavior. Are we sure? Of course not. But we've got some information, and often a pretty significant amount.
That's not to say there isn't a lot of bad evolutionary psychology out there, especially in the popsci section at the bookstore. But the idea that we shouldn't even consider evolution when we're trying to explain behavior is too far in the other direction.
Actually, the wikipedia article on teleology has a pretty nice discussion of the issues of teleology and misleadingly-teleological statements in biology.
while attributing the saying (without citation of a source) to Haldane, gets to the issue I was getting at in my top-level comment. Evolution happens because chance survival of genes favors the genes that survive to replicate again. But anything about an individual organism's body functions is not a goal of evolution, certainly not in the sense of "If the proposed intervention would result in an enhancement, why have we not already evolved to be that way?" Evolution is not driven by "enhancements," which all of the biologically trained readers of this thread fully understand.
I think you're willfully misunderstanding the point: teleological thinking, what Evolution 'wants' or what is an 'enhancement', is indispensable as a crutch for thinking about these issues. It is not completely or literally true, any more than 'tables' exist; what Evolution 'wants' is a statistical tendency in a highly dimensional space etc etc like a table is a high-level fuzzy interpretation of the extremely complex dimensional space of mass-energy etc etc.
Even a highly general abstract mathematical formulation like used in discussions of evolutionary fitness like calculating time to fixation of alleles would be far too much work to apply everywhere in this essay, would make it unreadable by practically everyone, and not actually add anything meaningful.
I know that I have definitely described evolution in such terms when explaining it to non-scientists, but when participating in discussions with other scientists I try to stick to purely the intention-free ways of saying things.