Christianity; the World's Most Violently Persecuted Religion

[Thumpalumpacus]

There's little evidence the body was designed.  Was it developed for this or that?

Right. The mammalian retina is a great example of inefficient design cobbled together because its precedents had already dictated an evolutionary path that was too hard to undo. And who knows what function the appendix originally provided, and why didn't any Designer™ simply extirpate it? [ETA: Curiosity stoked and reading, this last point may be vapid; the appendix may indeed serve a function.]

 

A very circumscribed concept of teleology is accepted at times by biologists, but it's not clear that this kind of teleology is of the same kind as the traditional, agent-based form of teleology.

Could you expand on this, Dano? I'm not sure I understand what kind of teleology you're referring to.