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disease, thus allowing the unaffected teleo-functional bias to recrudesce. 21
    There is, of course, a type of purpose in the natural world—just not teleo-functional purpose. Many biological traits are “for” specific purposes, even though they owe their existence entirely to the mindless machine of natural selection. These are evolutionary adaptations. It’s perfectly reasonable to say that a turkey vulture’s small, diamond-shaped, featherless head is “for” rooting around inside the meaty looms of carcasses.
    It’s a different story with artificial selection, where human beings domesticate and selectively breed plants and animals to accentuate particular traits for either pragmatic or aesthetic ends. Here, teleo-functional reasoning is logical because selective breeding is done with an end product in mind. My dog, Gulliver, has the typically shaped head of a border terrier, a hunting breed whose streamlined cranium resembles that of an otter. This skull design is the product of generations of Scottish breeders whittling away at the basic cranial morphology using selective breeding, to better allow “for” furrowing deep into holes and flushing out foxes.
    So with artifacts and some biological features (those modified by human beings), we’re on solid ground using teleo-functional reasoning. Again, however, young children and adults lacking a basic scientific education overdo it; they’re promiscuously teleological when reasoning about happenstance properties of nonbiological, inanimate objects. For example, when asked why rocks are pointy, the seven- and eight-year-olds in Kelemen’s studies endorse teleo-functional accounts, treating rocks as something like artifacts (“so that animals could scratch on them when they get itchy”) or as though the rocks were organisms themselves with evolved adaptations (“so that animals wouldn’t sit on them and smash them”).
    If you think this type of response is just the result of what kids hear on television or from their parents, Kelemen is one step ahead of you, at least with respect to parental input. In looking at spontaneous dialogues occurring between preschoolers and their parents—particularly with respect to “why” and “what’s that for” questions—Kelemen and her colleagues showed that parents generally reply with naturalistic causal answers (that is, scientific) rather than teleo-functional explanations. And even when they’re given a choice and told that all-important adults prefer nonfunctional explanations over teleo-functional ones, children still opt strongly for the latter. “So current evidence suggests the answer does not lie there,” says Kelemen. “At least, not in any straightforward sense.” 22
    Furthermore, not only do children err teleologically about inanimate natural entities like mountains, or about the physical features of inorganic objects like the shapes of rocks; they even display teleo-functional reasoning when it comes to the existence of whole organisms. One wouldn’t (at least, one shouldn’t) say that turkey vultures as a whole exist “for” cleaning up roadkill-splattered interstates. Dogs, as a domesticated species, may have been designed for human purposes, but, like buzzards, canines as a group aren’t “for” anything either. Rather, they simply are; they’ve come to exist; they’ve evolved. And yet, again, Kelemen has found that when children are asked why, say, lions exist, they prefer teleo-functional explanations (“to go in the zoo”).
    All of this may sound silly to you, but such findings, and the distorting lens of our species’ theory of mind more generally, have obvious implications for our ability to ever truly grasp the completely mindless principles of evolution by random mutation and natural selection. In fact, for the past decade University of Michigan psychologist Margaret Evans has been investigating why creationist thinking comes more easily to the human mind than does