Why this word is great
TELEONOMY — [Noun] The property of living organisms that appear organized toward an end, such as survival or reproduction, arising from evolutionary processes rather than conscious design. From teleo- (from Greek telos, “end, purpose”) + -nomy (from Greek -nomia, “law, management”). Coined by biologist Colin Pittendrigh in 1958. Unlike “teleology” (which implies a guiding intelligence) or “mechanism” (which denotes purely blind, purposeless causality), teleonomy describes the functional, goal-directed architecture shaped by natural selection. It is the unerring flight of a migrating bird, the leaf angling its face to the sun, and the salmon fighting upstream to its natal gravel—purposefulness as an emergent property of brute, historical fact. We are surrounded by striving ghosts, each performing a script no one ever read.