Since no one has written a public answer, I'll try (even though I'm not a
biologist, either). 'Function' is a pretty easy word; it does not
necessarily have teleological implications; it simply describes what
something does. And it's not that materialist Darwinists are totally
anti-teleological; they simply assert that blind evolutionary chance,
coupled with natural selection, is a sufficient design principle for
everything. Thus they can talk about a structure being 'designed' without
meaning what, say, M. Behe or P. Johnson mean when they use the word.
Darwinist 'teleology' is that selection pressures are strong enough to
eliminate poor 'design' leaving only the 'well-designed' features (along
with certain sloppy leftovers, like the human appendix). And certainly the
engineering metaphor is useful...
Dan Berger
bergerd@bluffton.edu
http://cs.bluffton.edu/~berger