Pre-Darwinian biology acknowledged the existence in living beings of a double finality: different structures were not only constituted and articulated in such a way as to integrate an organized being, but they also allowed the fit of this being into its environment. However, this double conformity to ends, still conceived by Cuvier as an unique set of conditions that defined the very possibility of an organism, will in contemporary biology appear split into two different kinds of phenomena. Thus, after identifying the turning point in the history of life sciences where that partition happened, we shall analyze the conceptual conditions that made it both possible and necessary. We hold that this "conceptual mitosis" had its raison d'être in the end of the classical idea of natural economy; and we shall also argue that it must be considered in the context of a change in the ideal of natural order of natural history.
G. Cuvier.; C. Darwin; C. Bernard; Teleology; History of biology