TY - JOUR

T1 - The semiome

T2 - from genetic to semiotic scaffolding

AU - Hoffmeyer, Jesper

PY - 2014

Y1 - 2014

N2 - The fact that agency is an essential aspect of life introduces new explanatory avenues into the map of evolutionary thought. There is hardly any process in animate nature that is not, in one way or another, regulated communicatively, ie. through the ability of living systems' to read and interpret relevant signs in their environment. Semiotics - the science of signs - therefore ought to become a key tool for the 'life sciences' in general and biology in particular. The paper analyzes the ways semiotic interactions in nature have been developed to scaffold the web of physiological, developmental and ecological pathways. Semiotic scaffolding is only very indirectly based on genetic scaffolding. The gene products, the proteins, are not just molecules, but are always also semiotic tools, and what the genes really do is to specify the efficiency of semiotic modulators. In addition to the concept of the genome we need in biology a concept of the semiome: the entirety of an organism’s semiotic tool set: i.e., the means by which the organisms of this species may extract significantly meaningful content from their surroundings and engage in intra- or interspecific communicative behavior. The semiome thus defines the scope of the organism’s cognitive and communicative activity. The theoretical question raised in this paper is the question of the interconnectedness between genomic and semiomic changes.

AB - The fact that agency is an essential aspect of life introduces new explanatory avenues into the map of evolutionary thought. There is hardly any process in animate nature that is not, in one way or another, regulated communicatively, ie. through the ability of living systems' to read and interpret relevant signs in their environment. Semiotics - the science of signs - therefore ought to become a key tool for the 'life sciences' in general and biology in particular. The paper analyzes the ways semiotic interactions in nature have been developed to scaffold the web of physiological, developmental and ecological pathways. Semiotic scaffolding is only very indirectly based on genetic scaffolding. The gene products, the proteins, are not just molecules, but are always also semiotic tools, and what the genes really do is to specify the efficiency of semiotic modulators. In addition to the concept of the genome we need in biology a concept of the semiome: the entirety of an organism’s semiotic tool set: i.e., the means by which the organisms of this species may extract significantly meaningful content from their surroundings and engage in intra- or interspecific communicative behavior. The semiome thus defines the scope of the organism’s cognitive and communicative activity. The theoretical question raised in this paper is the question of the interconnectedness between genomic and semiomic changes.

U2 - 10.1515/sem-2013-0099

DO - 10.1515/sem-2013-0099

M3 - Journal article

VL - 2014

SP - 11

EP - 31

JO - Semiotica

JF - Semiotica

SN - 0037-1998

IS - 198

ER -