As we can see, the semantic theory does not only offer new explanations for unsolved experimental problems, but predicts new mental structures that one day could be discovered.

Artefacts and natural selection

Before the appearence of human language, the Earth was inhabited by two kinds of objects: the creatures of the living world, and the inanimate objects of the physical world such as stones, clouds, rivers, lightnings and volcanoes. With language, instead, a third kind of objects came into being, and our planet started to be populated by human artefacts such as knives, wheels, clocks, books and windmills.
Artefacts are inanimate objects, and one could expect that their diffusion in nature is described by equations such as those that apply to stones and clouds, but things turned out to be very different. From a mathematical point of view, it has been discovered that artefacts behave exactly as living organisms.
From the 1970s onwards, Cesare Marchetti and other system analysts have studied thousands of artefacts, and have discovered that their behaviour is described by the same equations that Lotka and Volterra found for the behaviour of preys and predators. The growth’s pattern of cars, for example, is a logistic curve. Cars spread in a market exactly as bacteria in a broth or rabbits in a prairie. Cultural novelties diffuse into a society as mutant genes in a population, and markets behave as their ecological niches. But why?
The answer is that artefacts originate in the human mind as mental objects, and afterwards are turned by man into physical objects (this is true even for a poetical work which must become ink on paper or sound-waves in air). Artefacts have therefore a genotype and a phenotype. The genotype of the pen that I am writing with, is the idea that was born in its inventor’s mind, and which was replicated countless times in the blueprints of its mass production. The real pen that my hand is holding, is an inanimate object because it is a pure phenotype, a phenotype which is physically separated from its genotype, but I could never understand its existence if I don’t keep in mind that this physical object came from a mental object.