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Intuitions About Origins: Purpose and Intelligent Design in Children's Reasoning About Nature

Two separate bodies of research suggest that young children have (a) a broad tendency to reason about natural phenomena in terms of a purpose (e.g., Kelemen, 1999c) and (b) an orientation toward "creationist" accounts of natural entity origins whether or not they come from fundamentalist religious backgrounds (e.g., Evans, 2001). This study extends this prior work to examine whether children's purpose-based reasoning about nature is actively related to their intelligent design reasoning in any systematic fashion. British elementary school children responded to 3 tasks probing their intuitions about purpose and intelligent design in context of their reasoning about the origins of natural phenomena. Results indicated that young children are prone to generating artifact-like teleo-functional explanations of living and nonliving natural entities and endorsing intelligent design as the source of animals and artifacts. They also reveal that children's teleo-functional and intelligent design intuitions about natural phenomena are interconnected.