We should note in passing that one aspect of the Kantian revolution in philosophy was a renewed, if exceedingly cautious, consideration of the question of teleology, especially in biology. And this resulted in a whole school of so-called teleomechanists (see note below) attempting to create a hybrid methodology of mechanistic explanation in a framework of teleology. Although swept aside in the coming of Darwinism, this line of research raised questions that must inexorably come back to haunt biological theory. No true methodology of biological systems has ever been formulated, even as the demand for 'science' is trumpeted by conventional science. The very gesture of insisting on reductionism tends to falsify biological explanation from the first step. The discrepancy is clearly visible in the confusion of evolutionary biologists attempting to sort out the question of macro and microevolution. We should be wary of injecting teleological thinking into that distinction and our examination of the eonic effect will show us a more viable approach in terms of directionality, a simpler and empirically demonstrable approach to a teleological framework. This is a still unresolved subject, and we should be wary of simplistic thinking on the subject of teleology. But the balance of evidence suggests that physicalist explanations is not adequate for a true theory, or theories, of biological systems.  

Teleological thinking has been steadfastly resisted by modern biology. And yet, in nearly every area of research biologists are hard pressed to find language that does not impute purposiveness to living forms. The life of the individual organism--if not life itself, seems to make use of a variety of stratagems in achieving its purposes. But in an age when physical models dominate our imagination and when physics itself has become accustomed to uncertainty relations and complementarity, biologists have learned to live with a kind of schizophrenic language, employing terms like 'selfish genes' and 'survival machines' to describe the behavior of organisms as if they were somehow purposive yet all the while intending that they are highly complicated mechanisms. The present study treats a period in the history of the life sciences when the imputation of purposiveness to biological organization was not regarded as an embarrassment but rather an accepted fact, and when the principal goal was to reap the benefits of mechanistic explanations by finding a means of incorporating them within the guidelines of a teleological framework. Whereas the history of German biology in the early nineteenth century is usually dismissed as an unfortunate era dominated by arid speculation, the present study aims to reverse that judgment by showing that a consistent, workable program of research was elaborated by a well-connected group of German biologists and that it was based squarely on the unification of teleological and mechanistic models of explanation.