Biosemiotic Theses on the Door of Conventional Biology

摘要

This book, Towards a Semiotic Biology: Life is the Action of Signs, is a collection of articles, published in London in 2011, with a very ambitious goal: to apply biosemiotics as a paradigm throughout the range and extent of biology. The authors include many of the key figures in the biosemiotic revolution, such as Kalevi Kull, Claus Emmeche, Jesper Hoffmeyer, Howard Pattee, Donald Favareau, Terrence Deacon and others. One of the origin myths of biosemiotics, usually but not exclusively told by Jesper Hoffmeyer, is reminiscent of Moliere's figure of the bourgeois gentleman who was astonished to find out he had been speaking prose all along. In this case, though, it is the biologists who had been speaking biosemiotics all along, because they were unable to discuss how living systems worked without using words like genetic code, chemical message, information, communication, and the like. But, as Hoffmeyer and Emmeche first articulated in 1991, conventional biologists do not theorize these words. They treat them as common sense metaphorical expressions which, if they wanted, could be translated easily into mechanistic, efficient-cause explanations that fit a restricted practice of natural science.