Biologists have long excluded the notion of teleology from polite scientific discourse. To admit nebulous concepts like purposefulness or the intentional pursuit of goals—what teleology is—is to open the door to creepy creationism or a return to spooky vitalist thinking in biology.  

Yet life itself is inherently purposeful. So, one must ask: how can one study life while excluding the very thing that makes life distinctive? Modern biology doesn’t really have a good answer to this question, and this is part of why Darwinism seems to be fading among scientists and why ideas like intelligent design theory are not going away. 

Part of the defense employed by Darwinian thinkers is to minimize or diminish the importance of other ways of thinking about evolutionary biology. Lamarck, for example, is often treated as putting the idea of evolution “in the air,” but we all know he was wrong until Darwin finally “got it right.” Evolutionary thinking in the latter half of the 19^th century was an extraordinarily rich froth of diverse ideas about evolution, many of them deeply critical of Darwinism. Students rarely hear about the thinking of people like St. George Jackson Mivart, Henri Bergson, or Teilhard de Chardin, except for the magnitude of their errors against Darwinism. Alfred Russel Wallace, who independently discovered the idea of natural selection, is treated as a scientific dilettante who wandered off into the realms of spiritualism and seances, not to be taken seriously.  

Michael Flannery wants to set that record straight. Flannery is an Emeritus Professor from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and he joins us on the next episode of One Universe Two Books. Michael Flannery is a historian and a prolific writer on issues in bioethics and the philosophy of evolutionary thought. His books include Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life, Intelligent Evolution: How Alfred Russel Wallace’s World of Life Challenged Darwinism, and Nature’s Prophet: Alfred Russel Wallace and His Evolution from Natural Selection to Natural Theology.

He will be joining my colleague Ian Oxnevad and me for a wide-ranging discussion of the history of evolutionary thought, its errors, and triumphs. The episode, “T is for Teleology – or Trouble,” premieres at 4:00 p.m. on July 17, 2026. 

Watch it on YouTube.

Follow J. Scott Turner on X.