Jesse Bering: Promiscuous Teleology

Yet, as Boston University psychologist Deborah Kelemen has found in study after study, young children erroneously endow such natural, inanimate entities - waterfalls, clouds, rocks, and so on - with their own teleo-functional purposes. Because of this tendency to over-attribute reason and purpose to aspects of the natural world, Kelemen refers to young children as "promiscuous teleologists". For example, Kelemen and her colleagues find that seven- and eight-year-olds who are asked why mountains exist overwhelmingly prefer, regardless of their parents' religiosity or irreligiosity, teleo-functional explanations ("to give animals a place to climb") over mechanistic, or physical, causal explanations ("because volcanoes cooled into lumps")...

 ...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 animals wouldn't sit on them and smash them")