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
Norbert Wiener Center for Harmonic Analysis and Applications Norbert Wiener Center for Harmonic Analysis and Applications The Norbert Wiener Center for Harmonic Analysis and Applications (NWC) is a division of the Mathematics Department in the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences devoted to research and education in pure and applied harmonic analysis. The center, named after acclaimed scientist Norbert Wiener was founded in 2004 and is based out of the Mathematics Building on the University of Maryland, College Park campus. It is supported by the University of Maryland, the National Science Foundation, and local industries with which it interacts. Currently, the Norbert Wiener Center