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
Advances in Complex Systems Advances in Complex Systems Advances in Complex Systems (ACS) is a peer-reviewed journal published quarterly by World Scientific providing a multidisciplinary perspective to the study of complex systems. The journal was founded in 1997 and aims to "promote cross-fertilization of ideas among all the scientific disciplines having to deal with their own complex systems". Papers in ACS are divided into five sections, each managed by a separate editor: Physics and Mathematics; Computer Sciences; Biological Systems; Social and Economic Systems; and Traffic and Environmental Systems. The journal is indexed in "Mathematical Reviews, CSA Human Population and the Environment Abstracts, CSA Risk