The semantic theory of evolution

According to modern biology there are only two codes in nature: the genetic code – which appeared on Earth with the origin of life – and the human codes of cultural evolution, which arrived almost four billion years later (Figure 8-2). This implies that no other code came into existence for nearly four billion years, and therefore that biological evolution never produced any other organic code after the origin of life. According to modern biology, in other words, from the first cells onwards, biological evolution took place only with informatic mechanisms, and not with semantic ones.
The discovery of other organic codes is bound therefore to make us think again about the mechanisms of evolution. When biologists will finally realize that phenomena such as splicing and signal transduction are based on true organic codes, exactly as translation is based on the genetic code, they will also realize that the history of life cannot be understood without the history of organic codes.
Before studying this history, however, we need to address a methodological problem. The evolution of any organic code was an historical process, and either the beginning or the end of that process could be taken as the “origin” of the code. Here, however, it will be assumed that the origin of a code corresponds to the appearence of a complete set of rules, i.e. to the end of its primary evolution.
This choice does have some drawbacks, especially in the case of splicing. If we say that splicing codes appeared with the first eukaryotes, some two billion years after the origin of life, it could rightly be objected that some splicing phenomena were probably much older than that, and could have been present at the very beginning, which is certainly possible.
We need therefore to justify the above choice, and the justification is this: the origin of an organic code is the appearence of a complete set of rules, because when that happens it also appears something totally new in nature, something that did not exist before.
In the case of the genetic code, for example, we have already seen that its rules could have appeared one at a time in precellular systems, because each of them could give a contribution to the development of those systems.