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The mechanists were undoubtedly right in rejecting the teleology of the vitalists as scientifically sterile and as making nonsense of physical science. Yet they undid all they had gained by failing to realise that the unique manner in which vital phenomena appear to be tailored to the application of teleological concepts, and positively invite their use, points to very real differences between animate and inanimate matter….
Throughout these chapters it has been emphasised that in a species' environment of evolutionary adaptedness instinctive behaviour commonly has effects that contribute in an obvious way to the survival of the individual or of the species. Nutrition, safety, reproduction, each is a vital requirement and each is served by its own special and efficient behavioural systems. Instinctive behaviour is organised to achieve a predictable outcome and any attempt to reduce it to something simpler evades the issue. Yet, if we are not to be trapped in theories of a teleological kind, it is necessary to walk warily. The task of theory, in fact, is to ‘discover how to express the concerns of the vitalists in the exact scientific language of the mechanists’ (Sommerhoff, 1950).
A teleological theory is one that not only recognises that an active biological system, whether physiological or behavioural, tends in a species' environment of adaptedness to result in a predictable outcome that is usually of value to the species, but accounts for its reaching that outcome by supposing that in some way the outcome is itself an immediate cause of the physiological reaction, or of the behaviour, that leads to it. ‘The bird builds a nest to have somewhere to rear young’ is a teleological statement when it carries the meaning that the