Word.ws English Dictionary

teleogenesis

teleogenesis noun: autonomous setting of goals.

Noun

teleogenesis (uncountable)

  1. (cybernetics) Autonomous setting of goals
  2. (dated, rare) A regime of controlled, intentional reproduction
    • […] in the same way that appetite has ensured the intake of food, sexual compulsion has ensured the placement of sperm. Under teleogenesis this would no longer be the case.1955, Paul Stewart Henshaw, Adaptive Human Fertility, page 257
  3. (dated, rare) The preferential evolution of features and organs in certain ways
    • Third, to this hundred per cent. structural equipment of our remote ancestors phylogeny adds a hitherto unperceived germinal potentiality of specialization along certain pre-determined directions rather than others in adaptive reactions to changes of environment; this teleogenesis rests upon...1930, Henry Fairfield Osborn, “The Discovery of Tertiary Man”, in Science, volume 71, page 1827

Origin of teleogenesis

From teleo- + genesis.

Questions about teleogenesis

What does teleogenesis mean?
Teleogenesis means autonomous setting of goals.
What part of speech is teleogenesis?
Teleogenesis is a noun.

Words near teleogenesis in the dictionary

  1. teleocracies
  2. teleocracy
  3. teleocratic
  4. teleodesmacean
  5. teleofunctional
  6. teleogenesis
  7. teleogenetic
  8. teleogenic
  9. teleologic
  10. teleological
  11. teleological argument

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: teleogenesis (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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