recent years, a few biologists believe that the separation of teleonomy from the process of evolution has gone too far. Peter Corning notes that behavior, which is a teleonomic trait, is responsible for the construction of biological niches, which is an agent of selection. Therefore, it would be inaccurate to say that there was no role for teleonomy in the process of evolution, since teleonomy dictates the fitness landscape according to which organisms are selected. Corning calls this phenomenon "teleonomic selection". Philosophy The Dutch Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza defined conatus as the tendency for individual things to persist in existence, meaning the pursuit of stability within the internal relations between their individual parts, in a similar way to homeostasis. Spinoza also rejected the idea of finalism and asserted nature does not pursue specific goals and acts in a deterministic although non-directed way. In teleology, Kant's positions as expressed in Critique of Judgment, were neglected for many years because in the minds of many scientists they were associated with vitalist views of evolution. Their recent rehabilitation is evident in teleonomy, which bears a number of features, such as the description of organisms, that are reminiscent of the Aristotelian conception of final causes as essentially recursive in nature. Kant's position is that, even though we cannot know whether there are final causes in nature, we are constrained by the peculiar nature of the human understanding to view organisms teleologically. Thus the Kantian view sees teleology as a necessary principle for the study of organisms, but only as a regulative principle, and with no ontological implications. Talcott Parsons, in the later part of his working with a theory of social evolution and a related theory of world-history, adopted the concept of teleonomy as the fundamental organizing principle for directional processes and his theory of societal development in general. In this way, Parsons tried to find a theoretical compromise between voluntarism as a principle of action and the idea of a certain directionality in history. Current status Teleonomy is closely related to concepts of emergence, complexity theory, and self-organizing systems. It has extended beneath biology to be applied in the context of chemistry. Some philosophers of biology resist the term and still employ "teleology" when analyzing biological function and the language used to describe it, while others endorse it. See also Anthropic principle Autopoiesis Conatus Naturalism (philosophy) Orthogenesis Religious naturalism Theistic evolution T-symmetry References