Considerthe shaky science that was presented to justify the “Paleo Diet.” Here, teleology took center stage. The plausible premise was that we should eat what we were “intended” to eat.
Namely, our diet should reflect our adaptive history: our enzymatic capabilities and immune sensitivities. However, there were several further assumptions: that our digestive enzymes evolved primarily during the Paleolithic Era; that the human diet at that time consisted of primarily meat and vegetables (absent agricultural grains and domesticated dairy products); and, finally, that not much has changed since then (with too little time for further natural selection).
Science seemed to conveniently justify what many took to be a healthy and desirable diet anyway. Alas, all the key assumptions proved unfounded (Zuk 2013). The justification for the Paleo Diet was no more than wishful thinking with a flawed scientific gloss.
What is important here, however, is the original impetus to secure the science. In this case, the scientific reasoning was strongly shaped by the desired conclusions. The promoters of the Paleo Diet tried to inscribe their ideals and tastes into “objective” nature (which would then, teleologically, carry substantive persuasive weight). The science exhibited a fundamental error: converting their personal values into supposed “facts” of nature—what we have called the naturalizing error (Allchin and Werth 2017).
Cultural ideology masqueraded as science through faulty rationalization. But here the masking effort would have been pointless without a teleological view of nature and the implied virtue of following nature as it was “intended.”
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