This book by the French biologist and Nobel Prize winner Jacques Monod became famous for a small part of it, the one that claims humans exist by accident. But Monod actually begins by showing that the difference between natural and artificial things is illusory, as natural things are also built for a purpose. A species' teleonomic level is the quantity of information that must be transferred to to the next generation to assure transmission of the content of reproductive invariance.
Invariance precedes teleonomy, teleonomy is a secondary property stemming from invariance.
All three pose, according to Monod, insourmantable problems. The birth of teleonomic systems is improbably. The development of the metabolic system is a superlative feat. And the origin of the genetic code and its translation mechanism is an even greater riddle. The core of Monod's philosophical ideas, closely related to French existentialism, are in chapter 5.