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
Paley–Wiener theorem Paley–Wiener theorem In mathematics, a Paley–Wiener theorem is any theorem that relates decay properties of a function or distribution at infinity with analyticity of its Fourier transform. The theorem is named for Raymond Paley (1907–1933) and Norbert Wiener (1894–1964). The original theorems did not use the language of distributions, and instead applied to square-integrable functions. The first such theorem using distributions was due to Laurent Schwartz. The classical Paley–Wiener theorems make use of the holomorphic Fourier transform on classes of square-integrable functions supported on the real line. Formally, the idea is to take the integral defining the (inverse) Fourier transform