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
Leo Wiener the United States alone, with the purpose of creating a vegetarian commune in Belize. Then, after having travelled and worked around the country, he went to Kansas City, Missouri, and started working as a teacher. He was a polyglot, and was reputed to speak thirty languages well. Beginning in 1896, Wiener lectured on Slavic cultures at Harvard University and became the first American professor of Slavic literature. He translated 24 volumes of Leo Tolstoy's works into English. He taught George Rapall Noyes. He was the father of MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener. Leo Wiener Leo Wiener (1862–1939) was an American historian,