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
Scientific imperialism Scientific imperialism Scientific imperialism is a term that appears to have been coined by Dr. Ellis T. Powell when addressing the Commonwealth Club of Canada on 8 September 1920. Though he defined imperialism as "the sense of arbitrary and capricious domination over the bodies and souls of men," yet he used the term "scientific imperialism" to mean "the subjection of all the developed and undeveloped powers of the earth to the mind of man." In modern parlance, however, scientific imperialism refers to situations in which critics perceive science to act imperiously. Philosopher of science John Dupré described it (in his