In 1983, when I finished my studies of philosophies of language and science—in partic-ular pragmatic action theory—I did not know the direction my research interests wouldtake. In the ensuing four years, I studied a number of articles concerning different subjectsin biology and was struck by the key vocabulary that was used for the description of theessential activities of cellular life, such as "genetic code," "genetic information," "cell–cell communication," "nucleotide sequences," "protein coding sequences," "self/nonselfrecognition"—all of which connote themes of communication and exchange of infor-mation, similar to the themes I had encountered in my studies of philosophy and actiontheory. Of particular influence on my thinking were the articles and books of Karl vonFrisch, who received the Nobel Prize for his work on the language of bees; and a bookby Manfred Eigen, in which he developed a profound argument for the idea that thegenetic code functions not only as an analogue of natural human language but that boththe evolution of life and the evolution of the mind crucially depend on the characteristicfeatures of languages.
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