Teleology which focuses instead on goal-contribution. With the objective goals of organisms being survival and inclusive fitness, Piccinini and Maley define teleological functions to be “a stable contribution by a trait (or component, activity, property) of organisms belonging to a biological population to an objective goal of those organisms.” Julian Bigelow, Arturo Rosenblueth, and Norbert Wiener have conceived of feedback mechanisms as lending a teleology to machinery. Wiener, a mathematician, coined the term 'cybernetics' to denote the study of "teleological mechanisms." Cybernetics is the study of the communication and control of regulatory feedback both in living beings and machines, and in
William James Sidis of intelligence as "silly, pedantic, absurd, and grossly misleading". Regardless of the exaggerations, Sidis is judged by other high IQ peers such as MIT Physics professor Daniel Frost Comstock and notable American mathematician Norbert Wiener to have had real ability. Sidis' life and work, particularly his ideas about Native Americans, are extensively discussed in Robert M. Pirsig's book "" (1991). Sidis is also discussed in "Ex-Prodigy", an autobiography by mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894–1964), who was a prodigy himself and a contemporary of Sidis at Harvard. A Danish author Morten Brask wrote a fictional novel based on Sidis' life; "The Perfect