One of the further forces in operation here is the desire not to give aid and comfort to creationists and the Intelligent Design crowd. By speaking of purpose and design in Nature, we (apparently) give them half their case; it is better, some think, to maintain a stern embargo on such themes and insist that strictly speaking nothing in the biosphere is designed unless it is designed by human artificers. Nature’s way of generating complex systems (organs, behaviors, etc.) is so unlike an artificer’s way that we should not use the same language to describe them.
