People take issue with teleology frameworks in evolutionary processes. Teleological perspectives on individual organisms aren't the same.
1)All organisms are driven towards certain outcomes. Even if driven only towards reproduction.
2)Even an organism "at rest" is actively fighting/"moving" against the direction of entropy.
The core of your issue seems to do with anthropomorphisis not teleology. A lot of people conflate teleology with anthropomorphisis because their first introduction to the idea is through the "watchmaker argument" for a creator.
But...
If you're projecting a computational view on biology as many Molecular Biologists now do. You are entertaining a machine that is processing/reasoning about data. Saying that a machine can reason is an anthropomorphic interpretation.
Not all anthropomorphisis is equal. There's a difference between pre-rational anthropomorphisis and isomorphic constructs like entropy, computation, teleological processes, etc...
"As early as the 1980s, researchers started viewing DNA or genomes as the dynamic storage of a language system with precise computable finite states represented as a finite state machine (Searls, 1993). Recent complex systems research has also suggested some far-reaching commonality in the organization of information in problems from biology, computer science, and physics, such as the Bose–Einstein condensate (a special state of matter, Bianconi and A.L. Barabási, 2001)."
1)All organisms are driven towards certain outcomes. Even if driven only towards reproduction.
2)Even an organism "at rest" is actively fighting/"moving" against the direction of entropy.
The core of your issue seems to do with anthropomorphisis not teleology. A lot of people conflate teleology with anthropomorphisis because their first introduction to the idea is through the "watchmaker argument" for a creator.
But... If you're projecting a computational view on biology as many Molecular Biologists now do. You are entertaining a machine that is processing/reasoning about data. Saying that a machine can reason is an anthropomorphic interpretation.
Not all anthropomorphisis is equal. There's a difference between pre-rational anthropomorphisis and isomorphic constructs like entropy, computation, teleological processes, etc...
"As early as the 1980s, researchers started viewing DNA or genomes as the dynamic storage of a language system with precise computable finite states represented as a finite state machine (Searls, 1993). Recent complex systems research has also suggested some far-reaching commonality in the organization of information in problems from biology, computer science, and physics, such as the Bose–Einstein condensate (a special state of matter, Bianconi and A.L. Barabási, 2001)."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Biology