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
Wiener series Wiener series In mathematics, the Wiener series (or "Wiener G-functional expansion") originates from the 1958 book of Norbert Wiener. It is an orthogonal expansion for nonlinear functionals closely related to the Volterra series and having the same relation to it as an orthogonal Hermite polynomial expansion has to a power series. For this reason it is also known as the "Wiener-Hermite expansion". The analogue of the coefficients are referred to as Wiener kernels. The terms of the series are orthogonal (uncorrelated) with respect to a statistical input of white noise. This property allows the terms to be identified in applications