Hey nice comment! I was thinking something similar.I believe that it should be possible to effectively use both mechanistic and teleological language. In mecha

Hey nice comment! I was thinking something similar.I believe that it should be possible to effectively use both mechanistic and teleological language. In mechanics you have newtonian (mechanistic) and lagrangian (teleological) approaches. I often wonder how well determined the shapes and forms of animals are by evolutionary dynamics. I would think that evolution is very sensitive to small accidents and fluctuations in populations, i.e. you could rewind the clock and run evolution forward many times and get many different answers. Against this view are all those examples of convergent evolution. Another reason that people may react harshly when you use teleological language is that biology (unlike physics) is constantly under attack by people with all sorts of crazy theories about a supernatural designer - (talk about a teleology!) so I can understand why such language would be somewhat taboo.