Most theorists who have attended to biomedical contexts agree that the function of an organ or structure can be understood without thinking of it as an adaptation

In effect, Schaffner is arguing that the biomedical sciences employ a causal, rather than a teleological, concept of function. This is in the spirit of Cummins’s (1975) systemic analysis of function as the causal contribution a structure makes to the overall operation of the system that includes it. Cummins’s concept of function is not a historical or evolutionary concept. According to Cummins, a component of a system may have a function even it was not designed or selected for. Wakefield has ti