It is unlearnable and unusable and cannot therefore enter into any natural language. No child, in any linguistic community, would ever attempt to give such a meaning to a new verb that he happens to encounter for the first time in a conversation”.
This and many similar examples prove that the inborn mind of a child is submitting any new term to an unconscious “acceptability test”, and what is actually scrutinized first is not the content of the new term (the information that is delivering) but its ability to play the rules of the game. What does matter, before anything else, are not the individual characteristics of the new term but its group properties.
Could this lesson have something to say in biology? Up until now, biologists have only looked for individual features in genes and proteins, not for group properties, which is understandable because the latter are much more difficult and elusive. The main obstacle is that we do not have a mathematical expression for meaning, and this implies that semantic processes cannot be investigated with quantitative methods. It is possible, however, that the group properties that linguistics is discovering may, one day, turn into a good model, or at least in practical guidelines for biological group properties. The study of language is rapidly growing into a full science, and perhaps in the future we may be able to prove formally, among other things, why is it that a verb like “breat” is linguistically impossible.
Even today, however, linguistics can help. Just as the artificial selection practised by farmers and breeders was a powerful source of inspiration for Darwin, so today language can give us an illuminating model for the nature and the history of life. The most important lesson is that language evolution was a combination of two parallel but different processes – evolution of words and evolution of grammatical rules – and this is a fitting model for the two different mechanisms of biological evolution that are proposed by the semantic theory.

The development of semantic biology

Today, virtually all biology books speak of the genetic code, but none is mentioning transduction codes or splicing codes.