The semiome: From genetic to semiotic scaffolding
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Jesper Hoffmeyer
Jesper Hoffmeyer (b. 1942) is Professor Emeritus at the University of Copenhagen 〈jhoffmeyer@me.com〉. His research interests include biosemiotics and philosophy of nature. His publications includeA legacy of living systems: Gregory Bateson as precursor to biosemiotics (2008); and “A Natural History of Intentionality” (2012).
Abstract
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, i.e., 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 intraor 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.
About the author
Jesper Hoffmeyer (b. 1942) is Professor Emeritus at the University of Copenhagen 〈jhoffmeyer@me.com〉. His research interests include biosemiotics and philosophy of nature. His publications include A legacy of living systems: Gregory Bateson as precursor to biosemiotics (2008); and “A Natural History of Intentionality” (2012).
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Dimensions of zoosemiotics
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- Dimensions of zoosemiotics: Introduction
- The semiome: From genetic to semiotic scaffolding
- Codes and coding: Sebeok's zoosemiotics and the dismantling of the fixed-code fallacy
- Zoosemiotics is the study of animal forms of knowing
- Zoo-aesthetics: A natural step after Darwin
- Curs, crabs, and cranky cows: Ethological and linguistic aspects of animal-based insults
- On zoosemiotics and bridging the value gap
- Umwelt or Umwelten? How should shared representation be understood given such diversity?
- Umwelt trajectories
- Training guide dogs of the blind with the “phantom man” method: Historic background and semiotic footing
- From sign to action: Studies in chimpanzee pictorial competence
- Patterns and dynamics of (bird) soundscapes: A biosemiotic interpretation
- Observation ↔ Text/e ↔ Culture
- Introduction
- Culture, power, dictionaries: What lexicography reveals about cultural objects
- La culture comme objet
- La mémoire et l'événement: Les autobiographies intellectuelles au Brésil
- Human voice: Its meaning and textuality outside the verbal and the musical
- Des parcours interprétatifs à la réception des textes médiévaux
- Semiotic of pretext, semiotics of pre-text
- From text to culture through corpus: Interactivity as an argumentative keyword of contemporary cyberculture
- Le texte comme fragment culturel: Trois scénarios d'observation
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Dimensions of zoosemiotics
- Frontmatter
- Dimensions of zoosemiotics: Introduction
- The semiome: From genetic to semiotic scaffolding
- Codes and coding: Sebeok's zoosemiotics and the dismantling of the fixed-code fallacy
- Zoosemiotics is the study of animal forms of knowing
- Zoo-aesthetics: A natural step after Darwin
- Curs, crabs, and cranky cows: Ethological and linguistic aspects of animal-based insults
- On zoosemiotics and bridging the value gap
- Umwelt or Umwelten? How should shared representation be understood given such diversity?
- Umwelt trajectories
- Training guide dogs of the blind with the “phantom man” method: Historic background and semiotic footing
- From sign to action: Studies in chimpanzee pictorial competence
- Patterns and dynamics of (bird) soundscapes: A biosemiotic interpretation
- Observation ↔ Text/e ↔ Culture
- Introduction
- Culture, power, dictionaries: What lexicography reveals about cultural objects
- La culture comme objet
- La mémoire et l'événement: Les autobiographies intellectuelles au Brésil
- Human voice: Its meaning and textuality outside the verbal and the musical
- Des parcours interprétatifs à la réception des textes médiévaux
- Semiotic of pretext, semiotics of pre-text
- From text to culture through corpus: Interactivity as an argumentative keyword of contemporary cyberculture
- Le texte comme fragment culturel: Trois scénarios d'observation
