fA curious persistence of design language is evident in contemporary descriptions of biological evolution. While this occurs most often in reports about recent scientific findings that appear in newspapers, magazines, websites, and the popular press, design language also occasionally shows up in academic writing.
tThis article explores the widespread use of design language in both mass market and scientific publications. Although these kinds of descriptions may be accounted for as imprecise terminology, intended to convey information in ways that can be understood by non-specialists, the persistence of design language can also create an impression of intentionality, purpose, and goal in biological evolution. Such use of design language is odd, therefore, since evolutionary theory does not allow for any purpose, goal, design, or intention in evolution.
To highlight the extent and durability of such terminology, I call attention to numerous descriptions of biological evolution that employ the language of design, purpose, and intention. This widespread usage raises the question whether design language may give rise to misconceptions about evolution while also reflecting the continued intuition of purpose in creation — that resonates with religious beliefs and tenets — but in ways that are significantly different from the perspectives advanced by proponents of Intelligent Design (ID).
The start of my interest in this curious aspect of publications about biological evolution occurred several years ago, when I was reading a New York Times article titled “Plants Can’t Talk. But Some Fruits Say ‘Eat Me’ to Animals.”[1] The article’s subtitle caught my attention: “Two national parks in Uganda and Madagascar presented researchers with a natural experiment to understand how plants have adapted to appeal to animals that spread their seeds.” The words “adapted to appeal to animals” seem to imply intention on the part of plants. While this simply might have been a way for the subtitle to attract the attention of potential readers, some text in the body of the article also appeared to convey the notion of intent:
Over millions of years of natural selection, these plants have developed ways to communicate with animals through their fruits, new research suggests, saying something like “choose me.” With traits evolved to match each animal’s sensory capacities or physical abilities, fruits can signal dinner time in the jungle, and further their plant’s survival as a species. [emphasis added, here and throughout]
Dr. Valenta and her colleague Omer Nevo, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Ulm in Germany … are working to understand how plants have adapted to appeal to animals that spread their seeds.
In a similar way, many flowers tailor their petal shape, color, texture or nectar’s scent or flavor to attract often a single pollinating species.
A few months later I read the article, “A Man Kept One of the ‘World’s Most Dangerous’ Birds on his Farm. Then it Killed Him,”[2] about someone who, tragically, was killed by the cassowary he kept on his farm. Cassowaries, which can grow as tall as a human and are related to rheas, emus, and ostriches, are sometimes referred to by ornithologists as the world’s most dangerous bird, due to the long, sharp, pointed nails on their feet. The article quoted Eric Slovak, assistant curator of birds at Washington, D.C.’s National Zoo, who said, “It’s just kind of a big, 200-pound, six-foot bird roaming around eating fruit all day,” and also noted that “their deadly nail was probably developed to help them move through the dense forests.” Strangely, his description — “probably developed to help them” — attributes purpose to the evolution of a distinctive physical trait.
My suspicion that the use of such language, implying purpose, design, or intention, was not simply a rare instance of careless writing, was reinforced when I read an article published by National Public Radio, titled “Golden Arches: Human Feet More Flexible Than We Thought.”[3] The article began by commenting that “The notion that sport shoes and inserts should keep the human arch stiffly supported is a decades-old assumption that could use some rethinking ….” And concluded with this statement:
Robin Huw Crompton, a physical anthropologist at the University of Liverpool’s Institute of Ageing and Chronic Disease, says his findings suggest the outer arch of the healthy human foot is actually much more flexible than previously thought. … “A sports shoe with a lot of arch support might not be such a great idea,” he says. A bit of cushioning is fine. “But I’d look for a shoe that lets your toes wiggle and doesn’t constrain foot motion. You want your foot to be able to move and flatten because that’s what it’s designed to do.”
Design language also appears in “Your Body Knows You’re Burned Out,” published in The New York Times.[4] Quoting Christina Maslach, a social psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, the article notes that “Our bodies were ‘not designed for the kinds of stressors that we face today’.”
Plants have adapted to appeal to animals
Another National Public Radio broadcast, titled “A Musical Brain May Help Us Understand Language and Appreciate Tchaikovsky,” calls attention to differences in how humans and macaque monkeys hear sound.[5] According to the broadcast’s creator, Jon Hamilton,
What sounds like music to us may just be noise to a macaque monkey. That’s because a monkey’s brain appears to lack critical circuits that are highly sensitive to a sound’s pitch, a team reported Monday in the journal Nature Neuroscience. The finding suggests that humans may have developed brain areas that are sensitive to pitch and tone in order to process the sounds associated with speech and music.
Purpose terminology appears in the title of the New York Times article, “How einefeine Evolved to Help Plants Survive and Help People Wake Up.”[6] Drawing on the report, “The Coffee Genome Provides Insight into the Convergent Evolution of Caffeine Biosynthesis,” published in the journal Science, the Times article’s author, Carl Zimmer, incorporates the language of purpose and intent in various ways. According to him,
Despite our huge appetite for caffeine … scientists know little about how and why plants make it. … The new study … sheds light on how plants evolved to make caffeine as a way to control the behavior of animals — and, indirectly, us. … When coffee leaves die and fall to the ground, they contaminate the soil with caffeine, which makes it difficult for other plants to germinate. Coffee may thus use caffeine to kill off the competition. … Plants make nectar to feed insects and other animals so they’ll spread their pollen. When insects feed on caffeine-spiked nectar, they get a beneficial buzz: they become much more likely to remember the scent of the flower. This enhanced memory may make it more likely that the insect will revisit the flower and spread its pollen further.
The New York Times piece, “Why Do Americans Refrigerate Their Eggs?” explains why people in the United States refrigerate eggs while those in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere typically leave eggs unrefrigerated.[7] The author, Kim Severson, notes that US egg producers, with 3,000 or more laying hens, are required to wash their eggs. “But – and here is the big piece of the puzzle — washing the eggs also cleans off a thin, protective cuticle devised by nature to protect bacteria from getting inside the egg in the first place.”
In an online article from the US edition of The Guardian, titled “The Secret Life of Plants: How They Memorise, Communicate, Problem Solve and Socialize,” the author reports on an interview she conducted via Skype, with plant neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso, during the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic.[8] Mancuso, who studies intelligence and behavior in plants at the University of Florence, stated that “In a plant, a single brain would be a fatal flaw because they have evolved to be lunch. ‘Plants use a very different strategy …’.”
Similarly, the author of the New York Times article, “Why You Procrastinate (It Has Nothing to Do With Self-Control),” draws on design language in explaining why humans often put off doing things until later.[9] The article’s author, Charlotte Lieberman, comments that “Procrastination is a perfect example of present bias, our hard-wired tendency to prioritize short-term needs ahead of long-term ones.” She then quotes from Dr. Hal Hershfield, a professor of marketing at the U.C.L.A. Anderson School of Management: “We really weren’t designed to think ahead into the further future because we needed to focus on providing for ourselves in the here and now.”
Although terms that convey notions of purpose, intent, and design most often appear in materials written for newspapers, websites, and the other publications intended for a general audience, such language is also at times used in academic publications. For example, Science, Evolution, and Creationism, published by the National Academy of Sciences (USA), includes a description of microevolution. The authors write,
Another example of microevolutionary change comes from an experiment on the guppies that live in the Aripo River on the island of Trinidad. Guppies that live in the river are eaten by a larger species of fish that eats both juveniles and adults, while guppies that live in the small streams feeding into the river are eaten by a smaller fish that preys primarily on small juveniles. The guppies in the river mature faster, are smaller, and give birth to more and smaller offspring than the guppies in the streams do because guppies with these traits are better able to avoid their predator in the river than are larger guppies.[10]
Plants have evolved to be lunch
According to Becky Ferreira, author of a New York Times article titled “When Snakes Had Use for a Pair of Legs,” snakes with hind legs,
such as the Najash group, did not represent a short-lived evolutionary phase. Instead, snakes retaining two of their legs were a successful body plan that sufficed for eons until most snakes transitioned into fully limbless slitherers during the latter half of the Cretaceous period.[11]
Citing Michael Caldwell, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Alberta and co-author of a study published in Science Advance, Ferreira writes: “Snakes probably were one of the first lizard groups to start experimenting with limb-lessness ….”
Moreover, the language of a successful body plan appears in the Science Advance research article itself:[12]
This indicates that … (ii) the “forelimb-absent and hindlimb-reduced” morphology was a stable and successful body plan, rather than a transient phase between limbed and limbless conditions ….
The New York Times article, “Watch Bees Surf to Safety on Waves They Create,” highlights the ability of honeybees to ride on the surface of water.[13] Characterizing honeybees as “world-class surfers,” the author, Emma Goldberg, uses information from the journal article, “Honeybees Use Their Wings for Water Surface Locomotion,” published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A. (PNAS)[14] Goldberg wrote:
The researchers said the surf-like motion [of honey bees] hasn’t been documented in other insects and most semiaquatic insects use their legs for propulsion, what’s known as water-walking. It may have evolved in bees, they speculate, so the workers could collect fluid without getting stuck in the water and dying.
Later in the article, Goldberg quotes from Howard Stone, who teaches mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University. According to Goldberg, Stone “said nature is a helpful guide for technological innovation because [according to him,] ‘evolution has had lots of years to try out solutions’ to common physical problems.”
Intent and purpose apparently extend to bacteria. As reported in the article “Deadly Superbugs Pose Greater Threat than Previously Estimated,” published in The Washington Post, author Lena H. Sun notes that “More pathogens are developing new ways of fending off drugs designed to kill them, and infections are spreading more widely outside of hospitals.”[15] She then cites Helen Boucher, chief of infectious diseases at Tufts Medical Center, as saying,
We want to have diagnostic tools and medical treatments for problems we know we’re going to have … But we also need to prepare for the kind of resistance that we could never predict. We know from history that bacteria and Mother Nature are smarter than we are.
Sun later comments that “Bacteria are constantly evolving to fend off the drugs used to kill them.”
In the Washington Post article, “Newly Discovered Gecko Has a Quick-Release Mechanism for Escaping Predators,”[16] the author, Jason Bittel, draws from a publication titled “Off the Scale: A New Species of Fish-Scale Gecko (Squamata: Gekkonidae: Geckolepis) with Exceptionally Large Scales,” published in the journal PeerJ.[17] Bittel begins his article with this:
Lizards are famous for their ability to detach their tail when a predator grabs it, but a newfound species of gecko from Madagascar takes this ability to the extreme. When a predator goes to take a bite, Geckolepis megalepis gives it a mouthful of scales and flesh instead.
Later in the article, Bittel writes that “The skin [of this species], in other words, is built to be torn away. The geckos don’t even bleed.” He quotes a herpetologist, Mark Scherz, lead author of the PeerJ article, who works at Munich’s Bavarian State Collection for Zoology, as saying, “It is reasonable to infer that this is a good escape strategy, or else it is unlikely to have evolved.”
In the National Public Radio article, “For Humans, Slow and Steady Running Won the Race,” correspondent Christopher Joyce generously employs the language of purpose, design, and intent.[18] In discussing the evolutionary transition of humans to walking on two legs, Joyce relies on Dan Lieberman, a biologist and anthropology professor at Harvard University, who claims “Humans invented something better than speed: endurance running. It allowed us to hunt faster animals, and that changed the course of evolution.” Joyce continues,
“Most animals are designed for speed, for power, not for endurance,” Lieberman explains … “And we are a special species in having been selected for endurance, not speed. So we grew longer legs and lighter feet; the joints in the legs and pelvis got bigger to absorb a lot of impact; and we grew a bigger butt muscle.”
Commenting on one of Lieberman’s projects, Joyce notes, “Lieberman is creating a computer model of how we run. He thinks it will tell him how the earliest humans evolved to run. He believes running made us what we are.” Additionally, Joyce remarks, “Maybe what Lieberman sees as the body’s ‘running’ adaptations were just for better walking,” while also stressing the emphasis Lieberman places on running as exercise. According to Joyce, Lieberman maintains “running is the purest form of exercise,” and then quotes Lieberman as saying “Adding information about how we evolved to exercise and how exercise is actually woven into our body’s natural selection, in a special way, I think, adds extra relevance.”
The earliest humans evolved to run
Another article about the human body, titled “‘Selfie Elbow’ Is the Latest in a Long Line of Tech-Related Injuries,” discusses biological evolution in terms of design.[19] Describing this recent condition experienced by many humans, in which the tendon extending from a person’s elbow to their hand becomes inflamed, the author, Hayley Tsukayama, cites a spokeswoman for the American Physical Therapy Association, Mary Ann Wilmarth, a doctor of physical therapy, as saying “Inflammation from taking selfies … happens because you’re extending your arm but also trying to keep a firm grip on your phone as you do — something that the body just isn’t designed to do often.”
Citing a research article titled “Tree Crickets Optimize the Acoustics of Baffles to Exaggerate their Mate-Attraction Signal,” published in the journal eLife, New York Times reporter, Katherine J. Wu, authored “He’s Too Quiet for His Mate to Hear Him. So He Makes a Megaphone.”[20] In the article, Wu writes that
To stay competitive, the study finds, [male] crickets with quieter voices or tiny bodies will fashion mini-megaphones out of leaves to amplify their calls, coaxing females into mating with them longer and more frequently than they otherwise would.
Wu then quotes Rittik Deb, a biologist at the National Center for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India, as saying “‘We humans boast about loudspeakers, but [male tree crickets] have evolved to make such a simple structure,’ said Dr. Deb, a co-author of a paper on baffling that was published on Wednesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.”
According to another report, titled “The Big Toe Developed Last so Humans Could Still Climb Trees,” Chrissy Sexton, a staff writer for the website earth.com, drew on research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.[21] Citing what the authors of that study wrote, Sexton claims that
The primate foot functions as a grasping organ … As such, its bones, soft tissues, and joints evolved to maximize power and stability in a variety of grasping configurations. Humans are the obvious exception to this primate pattern, with feet that evolved to support the unique bio-mechanical demands of bipedal locomotion.
Returning to The New York Times, in an opinion piece titled “Is Listening to a Book the Same Thing as Reading It?” the author, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, notes: “Writing is less than 6,000 years old, insufficient time for the evolution of specialized mental processes devoted to reading.[22] We use the mental mechanism that evolved to understand oral language to support the comprehension of written language.”
Our brains have been designed for locomotion
Finally, a National Geographic article, “Why You Move the Way You Do,” by Simon Worrall, indicates its focus through the article’s subtitle: “Animals — including humans — evolved to get from place to place.”[23] The article primarily consists of an interview Worrall conducted with Cambridge evolutionary biologist Matt Wilkinson, author of Restless Creatures: The Story of Life in Ten Movements. Worrall writes, “You hint at an interesting connection between our love of storytelling and the way our brains have been designed for locomotion. Unpack that idea for us.” In response, Wilkinson states “This is me speculating, but it refers to how our psychology has been adapted for locomotion. Just as our bodies have been clearly adapted for locomotion, so, too, have our minds.” Continuing, Wilkinson notes,
Cars … break our link with our biological heritage. The idea of connecting to our ancestral past requires us to locomote as we are evolved to do, using our senses and making sure the mind and body are in union.
If I am correct about the peculiar persistence of design language in writings about biological evolution, then what can we make of it, or how can we account for it? The work of Michael Ruse may give a clue. In his 2003 book, Darwin and Design: Does Evolution Have a Purpose? Ruse explores the history of the concept of design, as it relates to biological evolution. Noting that animals and plants both have adaptations, Ruse claims that, traditionally, both humans and God were seen as having intentions, which are the reason for adaptations. “Adaptations are God’s handiwork, fashioned to help organisms (including humans) to function down here on earth. … Or so it went until 1859, when the English biologist Charles Robert Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection” (6). Continuing in this line of thought, Ruse notes that Darwin’s theory “seemed to sound the death knell for a forward-looking way of regarding the living world” (7). Yet, Ruse points out, “we all — biologists included — still use function-talk” (7). Furthermore, Ruse says, “We speak of the purpose of the stegosaurus’s plates and the function of the eye or the hand. We still say that the finch has a strong stubby beak in order to crack nuts. In other words, we still use the language that theists used in Darwin’s day.” Moreover, Ruse notes, “Richard Dawkins — a brilliant science writer and fervent atheist — positively boasts of his commitment to the teleological way of thought” (7). Much later in the book, in a chapter titled “From Function to Design,” Ruse remarks,
We are faced with what we have been calling, in as neutral a way as possible, “organized complexity” — although … at a minimum one should rather speak of “seemingly organized complexity.” Whatever you call it, this complexity allows for and indeed calls for understanding in human terms of intentionality, of purpose, of design (265).
Furthermore, he argues, “Whether or not organisms really are designed, thanks to natural selection they … seem as if designed (for the ends of survival and reproduction)” (265). Summing up, Ruse writes, “End-directed thinking — teleological thinking — is appropriate in biology because, and only because, organisms seem as if they were manufactured, as if they had been created by an intelligence and put to work” (268). In short, he says, “Where we are today fits very comfortably with the Western tradition of thinking about organisms and final causes” (270).
Reflecting on Ruse’s position, and in light of the persistence of the language of design, purpose, and intent in writings about biological evolution, I am reminded of an observation, almost made in passing, by Philip Clayton, Professor of Theology at Claremont School of Theology. In the second edition of Religion and Science: The Basics, he offers an intriguing question and response within the context of commenting on Intelligent Design. “Could it be, then, that the real insight of ID [i.e., intelligent design] is this intuition of design, this experience of sensing order in the universe? If that’s right, then the painful mistake of ID is the attempt to turn the intuition of divine order into a new kind of empirical science” (20).
An earlier version of this article was presented via Zoom for the Science and Religion Forum’s 50th Anniversary Conference, May 29, 2025 (https://www.srforum.org/).
ENDNOTES
[1] JoAnna Klein, “Plants Can’t Talk. But Some Fruits Say ‘Eat Me’ to Animals.” The New York Times, Oct. 9, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/09/science/fruit-color-evolution.html
[2] Kayla Epstein, “A Man Kept One of the ‘World’s Most Dangerous’ Birds on His Farm. Then It Killed Him.” The Washington Post, April 14, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/04/14/florida-cassowary-attack-man-dies-after-encounter-with-worlds-deadliest-bird/
[3] Deborah Franklin, “Golden Arches: Human Feet More Flexible Than We Thought,” National Public Radio, August 20, 2013. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/08/20/213882836/golden-arches-human-feet-more-flexible-than-we-thought
[4] Melinda Wenner Moyer, “Your Body Knows You’re Burned Out,” The New York Times, Feb. 15, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/15/well/live/burnout-work-stress.html
[5] Jon Hamilton. “A Musical Brain May Help Us Understand Language And Appreciate Tchaikovsky” National Public Radio, June 10, 2019. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/06/10/730611589/a-musical-brain-may-help-us-understand-language-and-appreciate-tchaikovsky
[6] Carl Zimmer, “How Caffeine Evolved to Help Plants Survive and Help People Wake Up.” The New York Times, Sept. 4, 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/04/science/how-caffeine-evolved-to-help-plants-survive-and-help-people-wake-up.html
[7] Kim Severson. “Why Do Americans Refrigerate Their Eggs?” The New York Times, Feb. 13, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/13/insider/why-do-americans-refrigerate-their-eggs.html
[8] Amy Fleming. “The secret life of plants: how they memorise, communicate, problem solve and socialize.” The Guardian, April 5, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/05/smarty-plants-are-our-vegetable-cousins-more-intelligent-than-we-realise
[9] Charlotte Lieberman. “Why You Procrastinate (It Has Nothing to Do With Self-Control).” The New York Times, March 25, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/smarter-living/why-you-procrastinate-it-has-nothing-to-do-with-self-control.html
[10] Science, Creationism, and Evolution, National Academy of Sciences (NAS), Institute of Medicine. Washington, D.C. National Academies Press, 2008, p. 7. Available online: https://www.nationalacademies.org/publications/11876
[11] Becky Ferreira. “When Snakes Had Use for a Pair of Legs,” The New York Times, Nov. 20, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/20/science/snakes-legs-fossil.html
[12] Fernando F. Garberoglio, et al. “New skulls and skeletons of the Cretaceous legged snake Najash, and the evolution of the modern snake body plan.” Science Advances, vol. 15, no. 11, Nov. 20, 2019. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aax5833
[13] Emma Goldberg. “Watch Bees Surf to Safety on Waves They Create,” The New York Times, Nov. 18, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/18/science/bees-surfing-water.html
[14] Chris Roh and Morteza Gharib. “Honeybees use their wings for water surface locomotion” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 116, no. 49. November 18, 2019. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1908857116
[15] Lena H. Sun. “Deadly superbugs pose greater threat than previously estimated.” The Washington Post, November 13, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2019/11/13/deadly-superbugs-pose-greater-threat-than-previously-estimated/
[16] Jason Bittel. “Newly discovered gecko has a quick-release mechanism for escaping predators” The Washington Post, February 7, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/02/07/newly-discovered-gecko-has-a-quick-release-mechanism-for-escaping-predators/
[17] Mark D. Scherz, et al. “Off the scale: a new species of fish-scale gecko (Squamata: Gekkonidae: Geckolepis) with exceptionally large scales” PeerJ, February 7, 2017. https://peerj.com/articles/2955
[18] Christopher Joyce. “For Humans, Slow And Steady Running Won The Race” National Public Radio, July 19, 2010 https://www.npr.org/2010/07/19/128626037/for-humans-slow-and-steady-running-won-the-race
[19] Hayley Tsukayama. “‘Selfie elbow’ is the latest in a long line of tech-related injuries” The Washington Post, July 5, 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/07/05/selfie-elbow-is-the-latest-in-a-long-line-of-tech-related-injuries/
[20] Katherine J. Wu. “He’s Too Quiet for His Mate to Hear Him. So He Makes a Megaphone.” The New York Times, Dec. 15, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/15/science/tree-crickets-chirps.html
[21] Chrissy Sexton. “The
developed last so humans could still climb trees.” Earth.com. https://www.earth.com/news/big-toe-developed-last/
[22] Daniel T. Willingham. “Is Listening to a Book the Same Thing as Reading It?” The New York Times, Dec. 8, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/08/opinion/sunday/audiobooks-reading-cheating-listening.html
[23] Simon Worrall. “Why You Move the Way You Do” National Geographic, February 28, 2016. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/160228-motion-movement-locomotion-evolution-science-wilkinson-ngbooktalk
