1. The semiotisation of nature

20th century life sciences have been characterised by two major trends. One trend is molecular and genetic reductionism. This trend is well known and need no further comment. Beginning as an undercurrent to this trend, however, another much less noticed but in the long run just as important trend has gradually been unfolding: The semiotisation of nature.

The earliest manifestation of this trend is probably in the work of the German biologist Jakob von Uexküll, who in the first part of this century developed his umweltsforschung. The term umwelt refers to the phenomenal worlds of organisms, the worlds around animals as they themselves perceive them. "Every action" wrote Uexküll "that consists of perception and operation imprints its meaning on the meaningless object and thereby makes it into a subject-related meaning-carrier in the respective umwelt" (Uexküll, 1982 [1940]) ; Uexküll's work has been reviewed in (Sebeok, 1979, Ch. 10, and Uexküll, 1982).

Konrad Lorenz was inspired by the work of Uexküll and the growth of the new discipline of ethology, can be seen as the next important step in the semiotisation of nature. It was Thomas A. Sebeok who first explicitly observed that ethology is 'hardly more than a special case of diachronic semiotics' (Sebeok, 1976, 156) and who as early as in 1963 coined the term 'zoosemiotics’ (Sebeok, 1963). Ethology itself has branched into several new disciplines such as 'animal communication' and 'sociobiology'.

A major breakthrough in our understanding of the semiotic character of life was the establishment in 1953 of the Watson-Crick double-helix model of DNA and the subsequent deciphering of the genetic code. While up to this point the semiotic understanding of nature had been concerned mainly with communicative processes between organisms, termed exosemiotics by Sebeok (1976), it now became clear that semiotic processes were also prevalent at the biochemical level (endosemiotics). In 1973 Roman Jakobsen pointed out that the genetic code shared several properties with human language and that both were based on a double-articulation principle (Jakobsen, 1973; Emmeche and Hoffmeyer, 1991). Due to its reductionist inclination, however, mainstream biology did not at the time - and still does not - apply a semiotic terminology (an exception to this is (Florkin, 1974)).

Eugene F. Yates has pointed out the strange shift in vocabulary which has taken place in biochemistry (Yates, 1985). It seems as if modern biochemistry cannot be taught - or even thought - without using communicational terms such as 'recognition', 'high-fidelity', 'messenger-RNA', 'signalling', 'presenting' or even 'chaperones'. Such terms pop up from every page of modern textbooks in biochemistry in spite of the fact, that they clearly have nothing to do with the physicalist universe to which such books are dedicated. As Yates rightly remarks: "There is no more substance in the modern biological statement that ‘genes direct development’ than there is in the statement ‘balloons rise by levity’". Expressions like these even appear in scientific papers. Thus, out of a total of 60 review articles appearing in the 1994 volume of TIBS (Trends in Biochemical Sciences) I counted 27 articles with titles containing terms presupposing a semiotic context.

Rather than talking about sign-processes biochemists prefer to talk about information exchange. According to the mathematical theory of information, information is an objectively existing measurable entity, a property so to say of a given object. The tacit assumption behind the idea of biological information seems to be that such information is the same sort of thing as 'mathematical' information, i. e. an objectively existing property of so-called informational molecules such as DNA, RNA or protein. Thus for instance the famous 'central dogma' formulated by Francis Crick holds that information is always passed from DNA to RNA and from RNA to protein, never the other way around. Information, then, is something which can be moved or transported.

This conception of biological information has been criticised often enough (Rosen, 1985; Yates and Kugler, 1984; Kampis, 1991; Hoffmeyer and Emmeche, 1991; Sharov 1992; Hoffmeyer, 1996). Here I shall content myself to point out that basically when biologists and physicists talk about information, they talk about different kinds of things. While information as understood by physicists has no connection to values, relevance or purpose, biologist think about information in a much more everyday language sense, and in fact biological information always serves a purpose in the system, if nothing else it at least serves to promote survival. The point is that biological information is inseparable from its context, it has to be interpreted in order to work. For example, if we discuss genetic information it should be noted, that contrary to the general image raised in textbooks there is no simple relation between the DNA coded messages and the construction of the organism, whether single celled or multi-cellular (Hoffmeyer 1995c). What is described in the DNA-text mostly concerns the amino acid sequence of the backbones of proteins and even before these backbones are actually assembled, so-called RNA-editing processes may well have introduced a context dependent element in the process (Rocha, 1995). Furthermore, how the amino acid backbones are actually folded into three-dimensional protein molecules is not itself directly specified. Neither is it fully specified how the virgin proteins should be put into the right place in the nearly unbelievably complex architecture of the cell, or how and when, in multi-cellular organisms, cells divide, differentiate or migrate in the embryonic tissue. As Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin once said: "First, DNA is not self-reproducing, second, it makes nothing and third, organisms are not determined by it" (Lewontin, 1992). A more extended criticism of the DNA-centred view of biological information has been advanced by the adherents of 'developmental systems theory' (Oyama 1985, 1995; Johnston and Gottlieb 1990; Griffiths and Gray 1994).

What all this amounts to is a simple but crucial fact: DNA does not contain the key to its own interpretation. In a way the molecule is hermetic. In the prototype case of sexually reproducing organisms only the fertilised egg ‘knows’ how to interpret it, i.e., to use its text as a manual containing the necessary instructions for producing the organism (Hoffmeyer, 1987; Hoffmeyer, 1991; Hoffmeyer, 1992). The interpretant of the DNA message is buried in the cytoskeleton of the fertilised egg (and the growing embryo), which again is the product of history, i.e., of the billions of molecular habits having been acquired through the evolution of the eukaryotic cell (Margulis, 1981) in general and the successive phylogenetic history of the species in particular. (It took evolution two billion years to produce this marvellous entity, the eukaryotic cell. Having accomplished this deed evolution spent only one and a half billion years on producing all the rest).

While it is understandable that biology as a profession prefers to base its understanding of basic life processes on a concept of information having been developed in the safe world of physics, this way of saving the life sciences from the muddy waters of interpretative processes nevertheless seems increasingly illusory the more we learn about the true subtleties of those processes. Cellular processes are of course chemical processes, but what sets them apart form other chemical processes is the way they are organised around a multitude of cytoskeletal membranes and in response to the dynamic needs of semiosis. Cells like organisms are historical entities carrying in their cytoskeleton and in their DNA traces of their pasts going back more than three billion years. They perpetually measure present situations against this background, and make choices based on such interpretations. Thus, one might well claim that the sign rather than the molecule is the basic unit for studying life (Hoffmeyer, 1996).

In the last decade the trend towards semiotisation of nature discussed here has manifested itself at still new levels. Thus, in evolutionary biology, neo-Darwinism has been seriously challenged by a set of ideas referred to as infodynamics (Brooks and Wiley, 1986; Weber, et al., 1989; Weber and Depew, 1995; Goodwin, 1989; Salthe, 1993). Infodynamics in the words of Stanley Salthe 'subsumes thermodynamics and information theory, essentially animating the latter by means of the former' (Salthe, 1993, 6). The general idea as originally suggested by Dan Brooks and Ed Wiley is that information capacity (disorder) increases spontaneously in developing systems, being produced along with physical entropy as the system grows and differentiates. Since such self-organisation is a prevalent property of our universe, natural selection should not be seen as the dominating force of evolution, but rather as playing the more modest role of pruning down the novelty that is constantly and autonomously being generated by the requirements of the second law of thermodynamics. Elsewhere I have discussed the surprising correspondence between these ideas and the 'cosmogonic philosophy' of Charles Sanders Peirce (Hoffmeyer 1996, see also Salthe, 1993).

Another interesting development from this point of view takes place in the area of 'artificial life'. Here the strong thesis, as presented by Chris Langton, is that life is not a property exclusively of 'flesh and blood', rather life is a formal phenomenon which may be exhibited by a whole range of material substrates, for instance silicon (Langton, 1989). Based on this assumption researchers in artificial life (a-lifers as they call themselves in distinction to b-lifers, the biologists!) have developed a multitude of computer simulations exhibiting this or that property deemed essential for living systems. For a critical review of this area of research see Claus Emmeche (1994) who emphasises the fruitfulness for biology of a dialogue with these competing ideas of life but also expresses his reservations to the strong version of the programme. From a semiotic point of view artificial life research is interesting because it so radically identifies life with its digital informational aspect. Nevertheless, by abstracting life away from its embodiment it threatens to deprive it of its historical nature and thereby, in fact, also deprive it of its inherent semiotic nature, the ongoing need for a translation between analoguely and digitally coded representations (Hoffmeyer and Emmeche, 1991, see also Etxeberria, 1995). It remains to be seen if the research in artificial life is capable of freeing itself from this over-simplified vision of life and thus contribute to a true semiotisation of our view of nature.

Summarising this discussion we can see that throughout the 20th century the life sciences have been increasingly engaged in what Claus Emmeche has termed a spontaneous semiotics. Spontaneous semiotics implies that 'biological communication is studied not as a phenomenon requiring a special theory or explanatory frame but as a loose accumulation of experiences in different biological disciplines concerning sign-processes in nature' (Emmeche 1995). Biologists accept that communication takes place at all levels of animate nature but generally refrain from reflecting on whether this implies the need for searching any deeper pattern behind this kind of behaviour. This may be because in the end evolution through natural selection is thought to explain the appearance of all such phenomena, which furthermore in each single case can be reduced to molecular mechanics at the level of cells. The reductionist trend in biology here blocks the way for the development of a more theoretical biosemiotics.

There can be no doubt that reductionism in the life sciences has been healthy considered as a research strategy, and it should be pursued as such. But when it comes to theory, it seems that reductionism and the dualism on which it is justified (cf. Searle 1992, 54), has run into serious problems. To explain life as 'nothing-but-interacting-molecules' leaves out a whole dimension of life, which the reductionist research strategy has itself helped digging out, the dimension of semiosis. Accordingly, the aim of biosemiotics could be seen as that of developing biological theory to a level which equals our experimental knowledge about the living sphere of the earth.

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7. So, why a new semiotic synthesis?

A synthesis is a combination of separate parts, elements, substances, etc., into a whole or into a system. The 'modern synthesis' of the 1940ties is no such thing. Although there are nuances in the conception of what exactly is meant by 'the modern synthesis' the term at least must imply some kind of theoretical synthesis between the formerly disparate biological fields, thus, in the words of Depew and Weber: 'the modern synthesis appears as a call for explanatory unification among a variety of disparate disciplines in biology, such as biogeography, paleontology, systematics, and morphology, on the assumption that population genetics in one or another of its variant forms now made that unification possible' (Depew and Weber 1995: 299-300).

While it may be true that the 'synthesis' actually at the time furnished a relatively unified perspective to these different branches of biology it is now obvious that important areas of the life sciences are not included in this unification. The semiotic creativity of biological systems at all levels of complexity is systematically excluded form the explanatory universe of the 'synthesis'. As already noted this is a paradoxical situation, because the most central concept of the 'synthesis', the concept of 'selection', is quite simply meaningless outside a semiotic context.

Darwin was right in seeing selection as the central process in animate nature, but for more than hundred years Darwinists have resisted taking the full consequence of this insight. It is now necessary to take this consequence and admit the obvious: That selective processes presupposes interpretations (with the implied possibility of misinterpretation). Thus, to the extent selection is a natural process, semiosis is a natural process - semiosis goes on all the time and at all levels of the biosphere. It may be feared that such a position will put biology outside the safe range of natural science, since interpretation seems to presuppose the existence of some kind of subject-ness. This risk, however, must be confronted through a thorough analysis of the implications, rather than evaded by repression.

The idea of seeing semiosis as a unifying concept in the study of life is often met with charges of vitalism. In fact I think on the contrary that the strategy of repressing the semiotic dimension of life is exactly what nourishes the continual revival of vitalistic notions. No vital principles are of course invoked in a biosemiotic understanding of life. Biosemiotics confronts the same ontological problem as does traditional biology: The problem of explaining how coding surfaces could arise in lifeless nature. As already mentioned I have confronted this problem elsewhere (Hoffmeyer and Emmeche 1991, Hoffmeyer 1992), and I see no insurmountable difficulty in explaining it inside the universe of known physical principles. The difference between biosemiotics and biology rather has to do with the consequences to be drawn from the fact of coding. According to the biosemiotic conception life was from the very beginning suspended in a universe of signification, and though the internal structure of cells or organisms is probably describable in purely biochemical terms, this will not give us a true understanding of such structures, since they were developed through a period of billions of years under the guiding logic of semiotic interactions. The semiotic ordering (through spans of evolutionary history) of chemistry holds the key to the function of this chemistry. In this sense, and only in this sense, is life an irreducible phenomenon.

A modern unification of biology therefore has to be based on the fundamentally semiotic nature of life.

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