The study of living systems from a semiotic perspective.

Biosemiotics is not one among other biological sub disciplines but rather constitutes a certain theoretical frame for the study of biology. According to biosemiotics all processes going on in animate nature at whatever level, from the single cell to the ecosystem, should be analysed and conceptualised in terms of their character of being sign-processes. This does not imply any denial of the anchoring of such processes in well-established physical and chemical lawfulness. Only, it is claimed that life-processes are part of and are organised in obedience to a semiotic dynamic. Biosemiotics, then, is concerned with the sign-aspects of the processes of life itself (not with the sign-character of the theoretical structure of life-sciences). Biosemiotics, however, is still in the phase of 'vagueness' and a diversity of interests and viewpoints has come to existence under its umbrella as can be seen from the recent collection of articles edited by Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok (1992). The term ‘biosemiotics’ was used in Russian semiotic literature by Yuri Stepanov as early as 1971, but did not appear in international literature until introduced by the American linguist and semiotician Thomas A. Sebeok in 1986.

The beginnings of biosemiotics should be traced back, however, to its roots in the work of the Estonian born German biologist Jakob von Uexküll (1864-1944). In 1926 Uexküll founded the Institut für Umweltforschung at Hamburg University where he studied the phenomenal world of animals, their umwelt, i.e. the worlds around animals as they themselves perceive them. This research programme not only greatly influenced Konrad Lorenz - and Uexküll thus indirectly became a founder of ethology - but at the same time it introduced a new and semiotic set of conceptual tools. The semiotic nature of Uexküll’s biology has been reviewed by his son Thure von Uexküll (Uexküll 1982) and by Sebeok (1979, Ch. 10).

In 1963 Sebeok suggested the term zoosemiotics to account for the study of animal behaviour (ethology), and this may be seen as the inauguration of modern biosemiotics which is essentially concerned with the interpretation of nature's sign universe in the context of the semiotic tradition from Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914). For Peirce a sign is a triadic unity of something (the sign vehicle, e.g. a footprint) which stands to somebody (the interpretant) for something else (the object, e.g. that a person has passed by). Peirce saw the sign as the connective element not only in all experience and thought, but in the universe at large.

In the biosemiotic conception the life sphere is permeated by sign processes (semiosis) and signification. Whatever an organism senses also means something to it, food, escape, sexual reproduction etc. and all organisms are thus born into a semiosphere, i.e. a world of meaning and communication: sounds, odours, movements, colours, electric fields, waves of any kind, chemical signals, touch etc. The semiosphere poses constraints or boundary conditions to the Umwelts of populations since these are forced to occupy specific semiotic niches i.e. they will have to master a set of signs of visual, acoustic, olfactory, tactile and chemical origin in order to survive in the semiosphere. And it is entirely possible that the semiotic demands to populations are often a decisive challenge to success. Probably more than anything else organic evolution has to do with the development of ever more sophisticated means for surviving in the semiosphere.

In addition to Thomas Sebeok also Gregory Bateson (1900-1980) and Thure von Uexküll (b. 1908) should be mentioned among the pioneers of biosemiotics. Bateson did not himself use the concept of biosemiotics but his whole scientific project dealt with communication between animals, people and machines. And his conception of evolution and thought as two related mind-processes fits nicely into the biosemiotic set of ideas. Thure von Uexküll has further developed the umwelt-theory and used it as a fundament for a biosemiotic understanding of psychosomatic medicine (Uexküll 1986). He also constructed a semiotic theory of natural levels ranging from the cell which constitutes the lowest level (a "semiotic atom") through vegetative semiosis (phytosemiotics) and animal semiosis (zoosemiotics) to human sign systems such as language which allows for the capacity to represent absent objects and possible worlds.

An important distinction in biosemiotics is between endosemiotics and exosemiotics. Endosemiotics is concerned with sign processes that take place in the interior of organisms, while exosemiotics deals with sign processes between organisms. The latter is by far the most well studied area being the object for research in several disciplines such as ethology, sociobiology and behavioural ecology. Exosemiotics may be concerned with for instance pheromone emission by insects, alarm calls in birds, the dances of cranes or even Japanese greetings rituals. An area of special interest to exosemiotics is inter-specific communication (Bouissac 1993). Unfortunately little research in these matters has until now been done in a semiotically informed theoretical frame.

Endosemiotics has only recently been subject to more detailed study (Uexküll 1986, Hoffmeyer 1997). While the semiotic aspect of phenomena such as the song of birds, threat behaviour in baboons, or camouflage colours of butterflies is intuitively rather obvious, the processes going on under the skin has traditionally been described by the well-developed conceptual systems of biochemistry and physiology in which the binomial or dyadic cause-effect model is generally believed to be sufficient. But this is clearly not satisfactory if, as biosemiotics claims, the biochemical and physiological processes are organised in obedience to their semiotic function in the integrated organism.

Millions of so-called receptors capable of recognising specific signal molecules in the cell environment are located in the membranes of each of our cells. These receptors functions as communication channels through which our cells, tissues and organs are persistently communicating with each other all around the body. Especially interesting is the recent discovery that receptors on the surface of immune cells are capable of decoding the messages exchanged among nerve cells and vice versa. The psycho-somatic integration of the nervous system, the immune system and the endochrinological system in a healthy organism is the result of this gigantic semiotic interaction among many thousand billions of cells, each of which is capable of interpreting a limited range of molecular signs. Disease my be seen then as the result of erroneous communication among our body parts. We fall ill because our cells cannot quite succeed in uniting to create us.

Another important distinction in biosemiotics is between horizontal semiotics and vertical semiotics. Horizontal semiotics is concerned with sign processes unfolding in the spatial or ecological dimension, and comprises most of what was above described as endo- and exosemiotics. Vertical semiotics studies the temporal or genealogical aspects of biosemiotics: Heredity, i.e. the transmission of messages between generations through the interdependent processes of reproduction and ontogenesis. From a semiotic point of view this transmission is based on an unending chain of translations of the hereditary messages back and forth between the digital code of DNA and the analog code of the organism. A crucial - but often overlooked - fact about this process is that 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 kind of receipt specifying how to construct the organism through the integrated processes of cell division, differentiation, and migration. 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 in general and the successive phylogenetic history of the species in particular.

Life, then, exhibits a non-trivial, semiotic, interaction between two co-existing messages, the analogly coded message of the organism itself and its redescription in the digital code of DNA. This principle has been termed code-duality (Hoffmeyer and Emmeche 1991). As analogly coded messages the organisms recognise and interact with each other in the ecological space, while as digitally coded messages they (after eventual recombination through meiosis and fertilisation in sexually reproducing species) are passively carried forward in time between generations. The essence of heredity is ‘semiotic survival’ .

The joint emergence on our planet of life and code-duality brought us from the sphere of difference to the sphere of distinction, i.e. information in the sense of Gregory Bateson's famous definition: "a difference which makes a difference" (Bateson 1970), which is in fact quite close to a sign in the sense of Peirce. Sebeok’s prophesy that “a full understanding of the dynamics of semiosis may in the last analysis turn out to be no less than the definition of life” is worth mentioning in this connection (Sebeok 1979).

In its most radical version biosemiotics sees itself as “general semiotics”, while traditional semiotics studying human sign systems is seen as just a special part hereof, anthroposemiotics. This understanding may eventually be coupled to a cosmological vision of evolution as a general tendency of our universe to strengthen the autonomy of the semiotic sphere relative to the physical sphere on which it depends. In system Earth this might further be seen as a trend in organic evolution towards the formation of species with increasingly sophisticated umwelts, or in other words towards a general growth of semiotic freedom, a trend which has reached its temporarily richest expression in the art, religion and science of human cultures.

Jesper Hoffmeyer