I can see how chemical reactions could seriously undercut or revise the sort of teleology Aristotle found in non-living things. For example, he might have thought of water as having a particular way of interacting with other things as its purpose. But water interacts very differently under different temperatures, pressures, etc. and with different things. Where's the sense of a unitary telos? Who is to say that water's acting as a solvent at a 1,000 atmowspheres pressure is not part of water's telos? Is it because it rarely acts that way? What if we discover that most water in the universe is at such a pressure? What, then, is accidental, i.e., the result of a chance encounter? Isn't every encounter equally natural? Of course, Aristotle didn't think of individual non-living things as having individuals purposes, but of the whole cosmos as having one purpose. Perhaps some sort of equlibrium at the cosmic level or other characteristic is a kind of goal of inte...