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Introduction to biosemiotics. The new biological synthesis. (English) Zbl 1111.92001

Dordrecht: Springer (ISBN 1-4020-4813-0/hbk). xii, 530 p. (2007).
The 18 (mostly) enthusiastically written papers comprising this book – a Thomas Sebeok’s Festschrift – present different viewpoints on various aspects of biosemiotics. While the approaches may differ, the unifying thread – “the introduction of meaning in biology” (Barbieri, p.112) – is much more important. To quote Kalevi Kull, “Both biology and semiotics study communicative structures and the sign systems that create them. One can say, in a way, that semiotics is biology, and biology is semiotics. Or, in Lotman’s words, ‘a zoologist ought to be a linguist, and may be a linguist ought to be a zoologist’ [[1] Kalevi Kull, Jakob von Uexküll, an introduction. Semiotica 134, 1–4, 1–59 (2001)]. A non-expert in biology or in semiotics may and probably ought to be interested in this book because it is essentially about finding commonalities in different areas of human endeavor. Indeed, the authors of many papers emphasize the importance and role of systems thinking in general and of relationships between things in particular, as opposed to considering only isolated things (or isolated symbols). This approach is not new and is very well-known to such philosophers and system thinkers as Mario Bunge [[2] M. Bunge, Philosophical dictionary. Enlarged edition. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books (2003)], and F. A. Hayek [[3] F. A. Hayek, Studies in philosophy, politics, and economics. Simon and Schuster (1969)], as well as to system analysts using, for example, the Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) [[4] ISO/IEC. Open Distributed Processing – Reference Model: Part 2: Foundations (ITU-T Recommendation X.902 | ISO/IEC 10746-2] in their work. In addition, most authors stress that reductionism in biology (as in studies of any complex system) does not work: organisms are not preprogrammed puppets (J. von Uexküll, p.108). Moreover, lack of proper consideration of the context is one of the main limits of reductionism (Bruni), again not only in biology but in any complex system.
Unfortunately, the book does not mention Bunge, Hayek, or RM-ODP, although, for example, putting the authors’ excellent work – in the same manner as putting the work of a good system analyst – in the context of the theory of “complex phenomena of mind, life and society” [3] would be of interest and most probably of substantial help. The very readable and highly recommended paper by Favareau presents a historical overview of biosemiotics understandable to a non-expert and shows that many ideas go back to Aristotle and Augustine of Hippo. In particular, Augustine noted that the essence of a sign is in its relational character of evoking an awareness of something which is not itself - implying the Peircean triad! Indeed, in semiotics a sign is identified with a pure relation: “y is acted upon as a sign of z for a (system) x”, p.12. Favareau stresses the need to consider not only system-internal, but also system-external relations that living beings correspondingly need and use in order to survive: a semiotic process is “the natural interface by which an organism actively negotiates the present demands of its internal biological organization with the present demands of the organization of its external surround” (p. 24). This is very similar not only to the approaches in [2,3], but also to the corresponding definitions in RM-ODP [4] applicable to any complex system, and ought to be well-known to any good system analyst. The active negotiation and active integration of an organism into the complex environment happens due to purposefulness of organisms (von Uexküll). Note also that the subjective experience of organisms plays a genuinely causal role in the ongoing co-organization of nature (p.33) – in the same manner as the organization of society, as described by Hayek [3], is the result of human actions but not of human design.
Jacob von Uexküll was the pioneer of the semiotic approach to biology in the 20th century. His insights (emphasized, e.g., by Danesi and Barbieri) are that the inner world of an organism is well adapted to interpret the outer world (the Umwelt, that is, the personal semiotic space (Kull)) in a species-specific way, and that animals are interpreters rather than just receivers of signals where interpreting is understood as converting signals into signs by giving meaning to them (p.105). This corresponds to the Peircean approach to semiotics, and also to Lotman’s observation (quoted by Markos et al., p.245) that for a total guarantee of adequacy between the transmitted and the received message there has to be an artificial simplified language and artificially simplified communicators. The latter observation is well-known to good system analysts [H. Kilov, Business models. Prentice-Hall (2002)] [5]. Salthe properly notes that Peircean semiotics is an abstract system of relations capable of being overlaid upon any complex enough material system (p.140), so, in RM-ODP terms, it is a template instantiated in a specific system. In the same manner as with Hayek’s theory of complex phenomena, semiotics may and ought to be (re)used in the study of complex systems, including biological ones. This book often shows how such (re)use leads to interesting and perhaps eye-opening discoveries. While several papers in the book emphasize various aspects of molecular biology, Salthe (and others) properly observe that biology is semiotically more than the consequences of cells interpreting genetic information (although genes are essential for understanding it): genetic reductionism also does not work. This is especially interesting within the framework of Barbieri’s paper on the cell as a semiotic system (a “trinity made of sign, meaning, and code”) where the author notes, among other things, that spontaneous processes do not produce specific sequences, that only “manufactured” molecules can have biological specificity, and that the genetic code “was only the first in a long series of organic codes that appeared during cellular evolution and that gave origin to more complex types of cells” (p.205).
At the same time, Markos et al. in their very interesting paper consider the results of Barbieri’s bottom-up approach “to be rather robots than genuine living beings” and propose a top-down approach hoping that one day they will be able to “land safely on Barbieri’s platform”. (Unfortunately, “those working with neurotransmitters do not communicate much with those working with behavior” (Pain, p.448)). Markos et al. provide biological knowledge with a more explanatory conceptual framework (Faria). They observe that, with the important but still marginal exception of biosemiotics, the idea of “genuine autonomy of the critters of this world, of their active participation on making it their home is definitely not on the agenda of the science prevailing nowadays” (p.240), despite the fact that autonomous living beings were discussed by Darwin in the context of a single rule “Laissez faire, laissez passer, la nature va d’elle meme” (p.240). Thus, an order emerges not by a random walk but rather as a result of “system’s internal dynamics” (p.246) – similarly to the market order as described by Hayek. The authors also consider horizontal communication between organisms as a biosphere (semiosphere) network of mutual understanding, and it is of interest, although not noted in their paper, that a business modeler may encounter similar concepts and problems in seemingly very different application areas. Such semiotic behavior across species is discussed in the interesting papers by Danesi and by Martinelli. Danesi proposes to use the triple (form, referent, model) instead of (signifier, signified, signification), thus making it possible to converge differently named but semantically similar concepts.
Some observations contained in the outstanding paper by Hoffmeyer are probably among the most important in the book: that “the apparently purposeful nature of living systems is obtained through a sophisticated network of semiotic controls ... across a diversity of levels ... under the guidance of interpretation in a local context”, and that “the understanding that biology models the activity of model-building organisms is at the core of biosemiotics”. Moreover, he was quoted by Huber et al. as properly observing that the description of the internal structure of cells or organisms in purely biochemical terms “will not give us a true understanding of such structures”. Hoffmeyer further stresses that in biology relations become “considerably more important than autonomous things”, and this corresponds very well to the importance of relationships in any kind of system thinking [2,3], as well as to Dieudonné’s statement that “the primary role in a theory is played by the relations between the mathematical objects concerned rather than by the nature of these objects [[6] J. Dieudonné, Mathematics – the music of reason. Translated from the French by H. G. and J. C. Dales. (1992; Zbl 0753.00012)]. Similarly, Hayek defines an order as a structure of relationships. Kull’s observation that biological codes provide a certain natural analogy to the codes of cultures also belongs here. The interesting paper by Battail is about using information theory (which ignores semantics) and “nested” error-correcting codes to explain genome conservation which is theoretically impossible without error-correcting means (the nature of which is not known yet). These concepts have been all too often overlooked by biologists. Bettail notes that a collaboration between communications engineers and biologists should be highly beneficial for both communities.
In the very nice paper by Bruni on a ‘toolbox’ of concepts of mapping semiotic concepts across hierarchical levels of complexity and for relating the different emergent codes in living systems, the author makes the profound observation that, whenever a code emerges, “there is already an emergent interpretant ... which is logically ‘above’ the formality of the code itself” (p.370). Some observations by Bruni may easily and directly be represented as fragments of business models [5] using such well-known constructs – encountered in modeling of any kind of business systems – as composition-assembly and multiple and dynamic types. And within the context of modeling, Bruni emphasizes the need for higher abstraction levels: biology was often “putting us in front of a jungle of proteins where it is sometimes difficult to see the forest for the trees” (p.380). The need to consider individual organisms rather than statistically studied populations stressed by Pain (Chapter 16) is, of course, very similar to Hayek’s observation on the need to consider relationship semantics as opposed to statistics when we try to understand complex phenomena. (Pain is the only author to mention abstraction explicitly, although many papers use it implicitly and in a substantial manner.) Some papers contain statements with which it is rather difficult to agree. For example, it is doubtful that “there is no deterministic relationship between sign and meaning” (p.181): when we consider a sign system and an object system, it becomes clear that similar but different meanings ought to be represented by similar but different signs. Those system analysts who had to use inadequate tools having rather arbitrary representations of similar concepts, and especially the customers of those analysts, would certainly agree with Jakobson’s thesis that the relationship between a system of signs and a system of their meanings should be anything but arbitrary. For another example, “the shift of orientation from modeling in the classical sense to modeling in the modern sense” (p.229) is in fact a good example of models muddle referred to by Bunge [2]: these two concepts of ”model” are unrelated. Finally, certain papers (e.g., Chapters 2 and 14) could be improved by appropriate editing of their English.
Summing up, this is an excellent, very interesting, and thought-provoking book. Most papers do not require the reader to be a biology expert, so the term ”Introduction” in the title is appropriate. It would be nice to provide a biological introduction at a sufficiently high abstraction level for the biologically uninitiated reader, but this reviewer thinks that conceptual understanding of the contents is possible and would be very useful even for such a reader.

MSC:

92B05 General biology and biomathematics
92-06 Proceedings, conferences, collections, etc. pertaining to biology
68-06 Proceedings, conferences, collections, etc. pertaining to computer science
03A05 Philosophical and critical aspects of logic and foundations
00B30 Festschriften

Biographic References:

Sebeok, Thomas

Citations:

Zbl 0753.00012
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