For instance, animals have natural instincts for self-preservation, seeking food, and reproduction.
respond that the very recognition of such imperfection requires an ideal or standard of the perfect end from which the being in question falls short owing to a variety of factors including improper education, sin, or predestination.
Intrinsic finality provides the basis for the teleological argument for the existence of God and its modern counterpart, intelligent design.
Proponents of teleology argue that Darwinism does not resolve a fundamental defect in philosophical naturalism; that it focuses exclusively on the immediate causes and mechanisms of events and does not attend to the reason for their synthesis.
respond that biology has been profoundly concerned with the ways function constrains structure since the time of Aristotle and that Darwin's own awareness of teleology is evident in his study in functional constraints on the evolutionary development of the beaks of Galapagos finches, of which he wrote, "Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends."