Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs

by Jesper Hoffmeyer, Donald Favareau (Editor)

Recent debates surrounding the teaching of biology divide participants into three camps based on how they explain the appearance of the human evolution, creationism, or intelligent design. Biosemiotics discovers an intriguing higher ground respecting those opposing theories by arguing that questions of meaning and experiential life can be integrated into the scientific study of nature. This groundbreaking book shows how the linguistic powers of humans imply that consciousness emerges in the evolutionary process and that life is based on sign action, not just molecular interaction. Biosemiotics will be essential reading for anyone interested in the nexus of linguistic possibility and biological reality. 

 

 

Genres: Philosophy, Science, Biology, Semiotics, Nonfiction, Linguistics

300 pages, Hardcover

First published July 15, 2008

Reviews

[Roy Kenagy]

Recommended in Naylor, Mountains in the Sea

[AvianBuddha · Rating 5 out of 5]

"If in place of inner feelings we put the processes of self-organization at work in a species, the Lamarckian scheme does, in fact, approach the most modern conceptions of the ways of nature" (210).

"Chance mutations are not selected because they are beneficial; they are beneficial because they happen to appear in a relational system which was already well prepared for them. That blind selection should be the sole cause of evolution is one of the mightiest fictions of our time. Selection is never blind; it is always guided by prior formation of developmental and semiotic integration" (202).

Jesper Hoffmeyer's Biosemiotics: Signs of Life and Life of Signs reframes biology as the study of sign-action in living systems. Drawing on Aristotle's causes and Peirce's triadic sign (object-sign-interpretant), Hoffmeyer argues that organisms constantly interpret cues from their environments; meaning is not an add-on to mechanism but constitutive of life itself. He scales this from skin and membranes up to ecosystems - the "semiosphere," a planet-wide web of sign exchanges - and stresses that while all organisms rely on iconic and indexical cues, humans uniquely sustain large, rule-governed symbolic systems.

A core contribution is "code-duality": life runs on two interlocking codes = analog, embodied control (gradients, receptors, physiology) and digital, hereditary memory (DNA/RNA). The back-and-forth between these codes bootstraps development, learning, and evolution; membranes and other interfaces aren't passive walls but semiotic surfaces that transduce outside signals into inside programs, and heredity itself is "semiotic survival," passing a digital description plus the analog tools to read it.

Hoffmeyer then shows how semiosis shapes evolution. Species co-evolve through "semethic interactions" (habit-based sign games like the broken-wing display), niche construction, and "semiotic partitioning," so that selection tends to flow down meaning-tracks that organisms have already carved. He distinguishes Baldwin effects from genetic assimilation and recasts the "unit" under selection in semiotic terms: not genes in isolation, but life cycles situated in semiotic niches. In humans, following Terrence Deacon, a discontinuous leap to symbolic reference (meanings defined by relations among relations) was scaffolded by iconic/indexical skills and movement-based cognition (à la Sheets-Johnstone).

If you like biology that restores agency, interpretation, and meaning to living systems - and you’re curious how membranes, development, ecosystems, and language can all be viewed as sign processes - this is a dense but rewarding synthesis.

[Rhys · Rating 3 out of 5]

Biosemiotics is an interesting book. I was a little overwhelmed by the cellular biology & biochemistry, but the author made reading these parts worthwhile as he integrated the details back into the main thesis: we are part of the semiosphere.

I was looking forward to some more thoughts on 'why' we adopted symbolic reasoning (over the index and icon) - something like Geoffrey Miller's The Mating Mind - but it was not forthcoming. And the author seemed a little wishy-washy on the topic of human exceptionalism (and the relationship of biosemiotics to deep and shallow ecology), as he at times asserted exceptionalism, and at other times he approached humans as an interesting anomoly of nature.

It seems to me that biosemiotics as Hoffmeyer presents is a deep ecology with some promise to sidestep human hubris and adopt a more integrated relationship with nature (if only for our own aesthetic and ethical good).

[Lette Hass · Rating 4 out of 5]

FAVORITE Chapter 3: Biosemiotics and the Human Being.
((En especial:))

-The Awakening of the Cerebral Cortex
-From Iconic to Indexical Reference
-Language and Biosemiosis