Has Biosemiotics come of age?
Review of Semiotica 134 - 1/4 (2001). Special Issue
Jakob von Uexkull: A paradigm for biology and semiotics
Marcello Barbieri
Dipartimento di Morfologia ed Embriologia
Via Fossato di Mortara 64, 44100 Ferrara, Italy
Introduction
This very special issue of Semiotica is dedicated to celebrating the coming
of age of biosemiotics, the study of living systems from a semiotic perspective,
by celebrating Jakob von Uexkull as the once forgotten chief architect of the
new discipline. The recovery of a "neglected figure in the history of semiotic
inquiry", and the proclamation of a new scientific domain, are certainly
worthwhile academic pursuits, but the general reader may feel, at first, that
such specialized items do not concern him. In this case, however, he would be
wrong, because underneath the academic niceties one can feel, in almost all
papers of this volume, a powerful, pulsating new vision about the fundamentals
of life: a new theory of signification and biological meaning.
In the very opening paper, Kalevi Kull, the guest editor, puts the cards on
the table in no uncertain terms: "Sign science and life science are coextensive",
"semiotics is biology and biology is semiotics". And the message is
promptly reinforced with a quotation from Umiker-Sebeok: "If, according
to semiobiological theory, all living things are signs, and signs are living
things, then life qua signs must be seen as constantly evolving according to
certain general rules, for symbols grow". The concept is hammered out again
in the following paper by Thomas Sebeok: "Because there can be no semiosis
without interpretability - surely life's cardinal propensity - semiosis presupposes
the axiomatic identity of the semiosphere with the biosphere".
The reader is warned. It is not a small academic niche which is discussed here,
but an entirely new conception of biology: life as semiosis. And more is to
come.
The third paper, by Frederik Stjernfelt, begins with the announcement that "Jakob
von Uexkull's theoretical biology is a main contribution to the developmental,
or epigenetic, trend in the biology of recent centuries, a lineage involving
scholars like Goethe, Saint-Hilaire, von Baer, d'Arcy Thompson, Spemann, Driesch,
Waddington, Brian Goodwin, Rene' Thom and Stuart Kauffman". This lineage
has been the historical antagonist of the 'mechanistic' approach of Galileo,
Descartes, Newton, Lamarck, Darwin, Mendel, James Watson, Francis Crick and
Jacques Monod, an approach which has produced what is still the main paradigm
of modern biology. This special issue, in short, not only presents a revolutionary
idea of biology, but also announces that such a revolution comes from the heirs
of the historical opposition to mechanism. And this is no isolated announcement.
41 distinguished academics from 15 different countries have produced a 828-pages-long
volume with papers on history, philosophy, theoretical biology, ecology, linguistics,
arts, literature and computer science, and all come, by varying degrees, to
similar general conclusions. The volume owes in fact its remarkable overall
unity to this ideal convergence, and there is no doubt that its aim is to strike
at the very heart of the life sciences.
In such a situation, a reviewer can hardly avoid getting involved, but first
I will try to describe, as impartially as I possibly can, the three main points
of this book: (1) the making of biosemiotics, (2) the redeployment of Jakob
von Uexkull, and (3) the endorsement of a non-mechanistic science of life.
The making of biosemiotics
Semiotics, the science of signs, belongs to the Humanities, because it has always
been taken for granted that signs, or symbols, are quintessential cultural products.
The idea that man evolved from animals implies of course that culture has biological
roots, but this has never undermined its independence from 'the brute forces
of nature'. For the development of mathematics, for example, it is irrelevant
that animals are able to count or not, and similar considerations appeared to
apply to the humanities in general and to semiotics in particular.
Even the discovery of animal psychology and the development of ethology did
not much change the status of semiotics, since primitive forms of communication
seemed to have very little to say about the complex architecture of human semiosis.
It was therefore very bold, and very risky, of Thomas Sebeok, to suggests, in
the early 1960s, that human semiotics needs to be complemented by animal semiotics
(or "zoosemiotics", as he called it in 1963) in order to find its
proper place, and its real nature, within the larger framework of "general
semiotics".
Sebeok knew of course that this idea would not have stood a chance unless he
could back it up with some experimental data, and so he started looking around
and digging in various gardens, particularly in psychology, medicine and molecular
biology. And the hunt paid off. In his contribution to this volume, Sebeok presents
a streamlined account of his life-long chase, and declares that he got the crucial
experimental clues from three men: Heini Heniger (1908-1992), Giorgio Prodi
(1929-1988), and, above all, Jakob von Uexkull (1864-1944). The first two he
met personally, while the encounter with Jakob came from reading, in 1976, the
original German edition of Theoretische Biologie (1928). This was apparently
a kind of 'fulguration on the road to Damascus', so much so that Sebeok decided
to end his individual search and start an active campaign of proselytization.
In August 1977 he delivered his now historical speech on "Neglected figures"
at a congress in Vienna, and from that time on the making of biosemiotics became
a collective enterprise that Sebeok led with all the academic and editorial
power he could muster. In this campaign he was quickly joined by Thure von Uexkull
(Jakob's son), who could argue, from within his own professional field, that
medicine has been a semiotic discipline since antiquity, because it has always
been concerned with the interpretation of clues.
Sebeok's own idea of zoosemiotics was generalized in the process. Originally
he had only taken animals into consideration because of the commonly held idea
that semiosis requires a nervous system, but in 1981 Martin Krampen showed that
plants too engage in vegetable semiosis (phytosemiotics). In 1986, Giorgio Prodi
spoke of "Signs and codes in Immunology", thus extending his 1977
idea of the "natural semiosis" of cells, and in 1988 Sorin Sonea proposed
that semiosis goes on even in the bacterial world, which can be regarded as
a true "global organism". The word 'zoosemiotics' was clearly inadequate,
and Sebeok decided to replace it officially with 'biosemiotics', a term proposed
by Juri Stepanov in 1971, but which appeared for the first time (with a restricted
meaning) in 1961, when Friedrich Rothschild used it to indicate a semiotic approach
to psychology.
The making of biosemiotics gathered further momentum in the 1990s, with the
joining in of a younger generation and the increasing participation of biologists.
Among these, Jesper Hoffmeyer and Claus Emmeche, who founded a Biosemiotic Group
in Copenhagen, and Kalevi Kull, who became director of the Jakob von Uexkull
Center in Tartu, Estonia. Biosemiotics has thus become a well established interdisciplinary
field, and perhaps it is fair to say that its development was formally completed
in 2001, when the first Gathering exclusively dedicated to biosemiotics took
place in Copenhagen (by which time the official Directory listed 61 biosemioticians
from all countries of the world).
The making of biosemiotics has been therefore a 40-year-long affair (1961-2001),
which can be divided into two phases: the first (1961-1977) was a period of
uncoordinated attempts, often of utterly isolated initiatives, while the second
(1977-2001) was a period in which individual ideas could fall on a more receptive
ground and contribute, under the discreet supervision of Thomas Sebeok, to the
collective growth of the field.
The redeployment of Jakob von Uexkull
In 1905, Jakob von Uexkull published a book on the physiology of marine animals
(Leitfaden in das Studium der experimentellen Biologie der Wassertiere) where
he described a neuromuscular cycle (later a functional cycle) which can be regarded
an early formulation of the feedback principle. In a second book, published
in 1909 (Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere), he adopted the word Umwelt (coined
by a poet in 1800) to indicate the subjective world of an organism (the combination
of its perceptual world with its operational, or motor, world). These two concepts
- functional cycle and Umwelt - formed the basis of his major book, Theoretische
Biologie (1920 and 1928), and are to this day his true biological heritage.
The functional cycle was further developed by Charles Sherrington into the negative
feedback principle of the reflex arc, while the Umwelt idea had an influence
on some philosophers (Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger, for example), and
was instrumental for Konrad Lorenz's development of ethology. All of which explains
why, in biology's history books, Jakob von Uexkull is mentioned as a precursor
(some say a co-founder) of both animal cybernetics and ethology. And that is
probably what he would have continued to be remembered for, had it not been
for Thomas Sebeok's 'discovery' that Uexkull's greatest merit was his contribution
to semiotics.
As a matter of fact, Uexkull himself categorically denied (in a letter to a
linguist friend) that he ever had anything to do with semiotics, and Sebeok
did not actually call him a semiotician, but only a cryptosemiotician ("einer
der grossten Kyptosemiotiker seiner Zeit"). Be that as it may, the fact
is that in this special issue of Semiotica Uexkull is extensively redeployed
as a "chief architect" of the modern discipline of biosemiotics, and
so we can only ask ourselves if such a claim can be justified.
First however let us notice that the redeployment operation had to face the
fact that Uexkull's philosophy of life was, to put it lightly, somewhat dated.
He was not only a staunch anti-Darwinist, but also a feeble evolutionist (verging
on creationism), had strong sympathies for Hans Driesch's vitalism, and often
resorted to musical metaphors to explain the perfection of the living world.
To the credit of this issue's contributors, these points have not been swept
under the carpet, and this makes it easier to leave them in the background.
It is only the main idea, after all, which must be good. And Umwelt is indeed
an excellent idea. More than that. It is a deep concept, not at all easy to
grasp, but once grasped is breathtaking. Surely one of the most original concepts
of 20th century biology.
Uexkull started from Kant's idea that we do not know the world as it is (the
thing in itself), but only what our mind reconstructs from the inputs of the
senses, and the mind does not start from scratch in this enterprise but from
inborn ideas, i.e. from 'inner forms of perception'. The mind is therefore two
things in one: an inner mind which provides the basic tools, and an outer mind
which builds the world of appearances around us. Uexkull was deeply committed
to this brand of idealism, and even when he had to take some liberties in order
to apply it to biology, he never thought he was being unfaithful to his master.
But liberties he had to take, and he took them.
The first was to recognize that the body takes an active part in the production
of mental objects. This is why Uexkull did not speak of inner and outer minds,
but of inner and outer subjective worlds: Innenwelt and Umwelt. In any organism
there is something which remains private, and something else which is projected
to the outside to become the world of appearances. This is Umwelt: the mental
bubble that we perceive as our surrounding world.
The second liberty that Uexkull had to take was the recognition that animals
have nervous systems similar to ours, and so they too must have Umwelts. Which
is more or less what we mean today when we say that animals too have minds.
But together with similarities there are also differences between the nervous
systems of our fellow animals, and so their Umwelts are not alike. As a matter
of fact, every species must have its own Umwelt because it reacts in a distinctive
way to the same signals from the physical world. The concept of space is a good
example here. We are convinced that we live in a three-dimensional world, but
this is because the semicircular canals of our inner ear are at right angles
and allow us to perceive three different directions. The same is probably true
for all animals which have semicircular canals, but not for those which are
deprived of them. Many animals therefore have a perception of space which is
totally different from ours, and we cannot even imagine what it must be like
living in a different space.
Uexkull's greatest insight, however, was probably his third amendment to Kant.
He was drawn to it by the fact that animals can play, cheat, threaten, court
and act (and now even dream), all of which suggests that they can react to the
same stimulus in many different ways. Which in turn means that animals are interpreters,
not just receivers, of signals. Interpreting implies the ability to transform
signals into signs by giving meaning to them, and so we have before us all three
basic elements of semiosis: object, interpreter and sign. Uexkull however used
the word "cue" instead of "sign", and this is why he was
not aware that he was dealing with semiotics. But "cue" can well be
regarded as a "cryptosign", and so Sebeok was right after all in defining
Uexkull a "cryptosemiotician". Which brings us to the conclusion that
it was indeed right and proper to celebrate him as a chief architect of the
modern field of biosemiotics.
The endorsement of a non-mechanistic biology
Most contributors to this special issue of Semiotica have openly admitted that
some of Uexkull's ideas are no longer tenable, but no one has objected to his
opposition to mechanism. And this for the very good reason that they too share,
more or less wholeheartedly, this attitude. The endorsement of a non-mechanistic
approach to life is indeed a constant underlying theme of this volume, to the
point that one is almost unwittingly driven to the conclusion that biosemiotics
must be incompatible with mechanism. The most outspoken expression of this stance
comes from Claus Emmeche, and so it is his paper that I am referring to, but
only in respect to the points that are shared by most biosemioticians. Emmeche
starts by debunking one of the most common cliche' of our times: the idea of
"twentieth-century biology as a fight between vitalism and mechanicism
that finally was won by mechanicists". He points out that "the resolution
of the debate was not a mechanistic stance but a sort of historical compromise"
that has been called organicism.
This is very thoughtful and, sadly, very true. The fight has indeed been between
three ideologies, and the winner, today, is not mechanism but the 'third road'
that has improperly been called 'organicism'. I say "improperly" because
the debate has been between three theoretical stances that according to logic
correspond to mechanism, antimechanism and non-mechanism.
Antimechanism is virtually synonymous with vitalism, and in this case the two
names are interchangeable (antimechanism is only slightly more general). Organicism
and non-mechanism, instead, are not equivalent at all, and in this case we will
see that the distinction is important because it is a matter of substance, not
of terminology. In order to develop this point, however, we first need to make
clear what mechanism actually is.
One of the expressions that best catches the spirit of mechanism is John Maynard
Smith's statement that "we understand biological phenomena only when we
have invented machines with similar properties". In fact, 'understanding'
something means explaining it with a model that we are familiar with, and a
machine gives us an immediate sense of familiarity. When we see it working before
our eyes, we instinctively feel that we 'know' it. Actually, we do not even
need to build a machine to get this feeling. A description is enough, and so
a 'machine' is often just a 'machine-model', i.e. an algorithm. One of the most
famous machines of all times was built by Turing with just pencil and paper.
A machine model, furthermore, is not necessarily a set of mathematical equations.
Natural selection, for example, is a mechanistic model which is entirely expressed
in words. The important point is that the model has the logic of a machine,
i.e. that it delivers the same sense of familiarity that we get from a real
functioning machine. Mechanism, in short, is the view that scientific knowledge
is obtained by building machine-like models of what we observe in nature.
Let us now examine 'organicism', the dominant paradigm of modern biology. The
standard view, faithfully reported by Emmeche, is that organicism is qualified
by being "non-vitalist, non-reductionist, and emergentist", and so
let us see where the contrast with mechanism comes from. Needless to say, mechanism
too is non-vitalist, and so the difference seems to come from non-reductionism
and emergence. But a machine is a machine not when it is reduced to pieces,
but precisely when it is put together into a functioning whole, which means
that mechanism is quintessentially a non-reductionist approach. As for emergence,
there is absolutely nothing in mechanism that prevents it. Take a machine that
brings in hydrogen from one side and oxygen from another and there you can witness
the emergence of water. In brief, it is not only misleading but downright wrong
to say that the combination of "non-vitalism + non-reductionism + emergence"
amounts to something different from mechanism, because those three properties
actually belong to mechanism.
The real problem is: why do so many biologists believe in such a muddled conclusion?
This is where the difference between organicism and non-mechanism becomes a
matter of substance. What most contemporary biologists share is actually non-mechanism,
i.e. the feeling that mechanism is not enough, that there must be something
else in life, and this is a profoundly respectable view. The point is that one
cannot make a science out of doubts, and so some people (Ernst Mayr first in
line) had this splendid idea of taking three outstanding properties of mechanism
and saying that together they form 'organicism', the new philosophy of life
that liberates biology from mechanism.
Claus Emmeche does not comment on organicism as such, but he must have felt
uncomfortable with it, because he quickly distinguishes between mainstream organicism
(the official version) and qualitative organicism, an interpretation that comes
out of this volume as the view which is shared by most biosemioticians. Qualitative
organicism (that in my opinion should be called qualitative biology) is the
most serious attempt produced so far to put some substance into the empty container
of non-mechanism without resorting to the tricks of official organicism.
Emmeche describes it in this way: "Qualitative organicism is concerned
with qualities which are not only of the famous category of 'primary' qualities
(roughly corresponding to the scientifically measurable quanta), but also concerned
with the 'secondary' qualities of color, taste, sound, feeling, etc. …It
is obvious that the Umwelt notion is of central importance to the development
of a coherent theory of the qualitative experiential world of the organism,
a task present day biology must face, instead of continuing to ignore a huge
phenomenal realm of the living world - the experiential world of animal appetites,
desires, feelings, sensations, etc."
Here we are then. So far biosemiotics has been the discipline which has discovered
that animals are interpreters, or semiotic agents; now we are told that mechanism
is not competent to study this new world. Only a qualitative science can do
that. Why? Because mechanism cannot explain meaning, that's why.
One is not supposed to object to this piece of wisdom, but mechanism has proved
to have an unsuspected resilience in the past, and has changed its skin many
times in the face of adversity. The first mechanistic model of the body was
the clock-machine, then came the steam-engine-machine, and lately the computer-machine.
Which is equivalent to saying that mechanism introduced in biology first mechanical
energy, then chemical energy, and finally information. Are we really sure that
it cannot introduce meaning? This special issue of Semiotica seems to be saying
that only a qualitative approach can cope with biological meaning, but we really
cannot rule out a mechanistic approach. Our only option, I am afraid, is to
discuss both views.
The biosemiotic approach to meaning
Perhaps the most instructive and surely the most enjoyable part of Uexkull's
work is his description of real-life cases of animal behaviour, cases that he
reports with the light touch of the consummate expert and a masterly attention
to details. It is in fact this evidence which convinces us that animals are
indeed interpreters of the world, and not pre-programmed puppets. And that is
really all we need to know in order to conclude that animals are 'subjects',
i.e. semiotic agents. We would need something else if we wanted to know how
they do their semiosis, but in order to realize that they do it, the description
is enough. In this case, seeing is believing.
Uexkull's biology is therefore first and foremost a descriptive science, not
an explanatory one, a point which is underlined in the excellent paper contributed
by Tuomo Jamsa: "Uexkull does not expressly aim at creating an articulated
theory of sign and meaning but at a description of the functions of the organisms
in terms of signs and meaning".
On many occasions it may appear that Uexkull is not just describing animal behaviour
but also explaining it, and his theory of functional cycles may look like a
mechanistic model, but it's nothing of the kind. A mechanistic model would say
that animals receive signals from the physical world and react to them in a
subjective way, which means that somehow and somewhere the signals are transformed
into signs and the signs are processed by an interpreter, but all this partitioning
is thoroughly alien to Uexkull. As a dyed-in-the-wool idealist, he regards signifying
and interpreting as subjective operations which are consubstantial to any signal
processing act.
In the physical world there are inanimate objects without 'qualities', but life
is like a world where a sun is shining, and in such a world you cannot have
objects without shadows, the shadows being the qualities which are cast into
the subjective world from the quantities of the physical world. In a truly idealistic
philosophy, the positions are actually reversed: the qualities, or ideas, being
the real bodies, and living organisms being their shadows. This 'swapping of
the roles' was operated by Plato in his famous 'myth of the cave', and has stuck
in our culture ever since.
When Uexkull speaks of perception, he may seem to be putting signals first and
signs second, which would be like an attempt to 'naturalize' Kant and Plato,
but that is just an impression. The idea that perception starts with objective
signals from the outside which are transformed into subjective signs by the
organism is a mechanistic way of looking at things that Uexkull regards as pitifully
naive. For him, the objects 'out there' are in fact mental entities created
by the subject and projected to the outside, and so there is never a divorce
between signals and signs. Quantities and qualities, objects and subjects, bodies
and shadows can never be taken apart when the sun of life is shining.
A similar view of the world was also proposed by Charles Peirce, the acknowledged
father of semiotics. He stated clearly that semiosis requires three basic elements
- object, interpreter and sign - which are preconditional and therefore primitive
entities. They must be present simultaneously in order to have semiosis, and
since they are the starting point they cannot be reduced any further. Again,
they are consubstantial agents of semiosis, just as Uexkull treated them.
From this special issue of Semiotica it seems that most biosemioticians accept
both Uexkull's approach and Peirce's scheme, and therefore it is fair to say
that the theoretical framework of biosemiotics is based on the ideas of Immanuel
Kant, Charles Peirce and Jakob von Uexkull. In this framework, objects, interpreters
and signs are primitive entities, consubstantial protagonists of any semiotic
act. But a semiotic act is always associated with a signalling process, and
signalling is everywhere in life, so semiosis too must be everywhere. This is
why we are told that "semiotics is biology and biology is semiotics', "the
semiosphere is coextensive with the biosphere", "the basic unit of
life is the sign, not the molecule".
If semiosis is everywhere, life is immersed in it like in Hegel's famous night
where all cows are black. When something is everywhere and primitive you don't
need anything else. You just accept it and contemplate the omnipresence of meaning
in life. That is the comfort that philosophy and biosemiotics can give us, and
thank you very much for it.
But mechanistic science is not like that. Stubborn, nosy old mechanism wants
to open up even primitive boxes and look inside them: where is the interpreter?
what it is made of? how is the interpreting done? what is a sign? where does
meaning come from? what is meaning?
A mechanistic approach to meaning
If you are a mechanist and you want to study the problem of biological meaning,
you don't start with the assumption that meaning is everywhere, but the other
way round. You say that you are not going to recognize the existence of anything
which may be called 'meaning' unless you fall flat in its face. The evidence
provided by animal behaviour is convincing enough, but animals are complicated
things, and are also late-comers in the history of life, so they are not the
best to start with. It seems much more sensible to begin from the beginning,
i.e. from molecules, and work our way up.
Down there, at the molecular level, there are all sorts of transactions going
on, and we can scrutinize them one by one to find out what makes them tick.
Take for example the breakdown of sugar. At every step there is a transformation
of energy with the assistance of catalysts, and that is really all there is
to it, from beginning to end. In the replication of DNA molecules, instead,
we encounter something else. Again we find energy exchanges and catalysts at
each step, but here the end-products can be very different even when the energies
and the catalysts are exactly the same. The difference is due to the linear
order of the building-blocks (the nucleotides), an order that amounts to no
less than a new physical quantity which has been called information.
If we extend our scrutiny, we realize that countless biochemical reactions can
be divided, like the above examples, into two great categories: the class where
all that takes place is transformations of energy, and the class where the physical
quantities that count are two, energy and information.
With just these two quantities we account for so many molecular transactions
that there seems to be no need for anything else. Except that Nature, as usual,
seems to like coming up with surprises. In our case the unexpected takes the
form of protein synthesis, because by using only energy and information there
is no way we can explain the fact that a chain of nucleotides is always transformed
into a unique chain of amino acids. It is like obtaining the letters of the
alphabet from combinations of dots and dashes. There simply is no necessary
connection between those entities, and the only way to establish one is by inventing
it, i.e. by creating a code. A Morse code in the case of the alphabet, and a
genetic code in the case of protein synthesis.
The Morse code is built by a human being (the interpreter) who attaches a meaning
to arbitrary combinations of dots and dashes (the signs) by setting them in
correspondence with the letters of the alphabet (the objects). In protein synthesis,
combinations of three nucleotides (the signs) are set in correspondence with
amino acids (the objects) by special compounds known as adaptors, i.e. by molecules
which perform two independent recognition processes (one in the nucleotide world
and one in the amino acid world). In this case the agent which is implementing
the code (the interpreter) is the entire set of adaptor molecules. Protein synthesis,
in short, is a true semiotic act because the three defining protagonists of
semiosis are all present, the only difference with cultural semiosis being that
the interpreter is not outside the system but very much inside it.
Can we generalize this experimental result? Indeed yes, we can. Any time we
discover that the link between two organic worlds requires not only catalysts
but also adaptors, we are very likely to be in the presence of an organic code,
and therefore of organic meaning.
All this seems to be accountable with the step-by-step procedures of mechanism,
but qualitative organicists apparently do not agree. Semiosis is not explicable
by mechanism, they say, and a good empirical proof of this is that semiotic
machines do not exist. Nor it is helpful to suggest that they may exist in the
future, because the issue is not the technicalities of implementation of such
machines, but the very possibility of their ontological existence. We seem to
be in a no-win situation here, because it is true that all mechanistic models
proposed so far, including the heterogeneous approaches which are collectively
known as "non-linear methods", have nothing to do with codes and meaning.
Clock-mechanism, steam-engine-mechanism, computer-mechanism, and now even nonlinear-mechanism,
have solved many biological problems, but have not even touched the problem
of meaning, which remains 'in principle' outside them, like an alien creature.
In a recent book however (The Organic Codes, 2001), I have described a mathematical
model of epigenesis where codes have an internal role, and this does make a
difference. It tells us that there is a whole new class of models, and therefore
a new type of mechanism (we may call it epigenetic-mechanism), where codes are
not alien creatures but components of the system that must necessarily be present
for the system to work. It is not the solution, yet, but it does look like the
foot in the door.
Mainstream organicists and qualitative organicists may well be responding with
enthusiasm to the "United against mechanism?" rallying question that
Malte Herwig is launching from this special issue, but I am not. The best chances
to solve the new problems of life are still likely to come from where all our
solutions have always come in the past: from good, rational, old-fashioned machine-like
models.
Conclusion
This special issue of Semiotica is truly a rare book. It gives an overall view
of a fascinating new field in its adolescence, when it has just completed the
difficult process of growth and it is preparing to enter the creative phase
of maturity. The volume is also an excellent example of a fresh way of doing
academic research, where interdisciplinarity is not just an empty word but a
convincing reality. The contributions from history, philosophy, linguistics,
biology, art, literature and computer science integrate each other with an ease
that makes one wonder why on earth the same approach has not been applied to
all other fields.
The first two main points of this special issue - the making of biosemiotics
and the recovery of Jakob von Uexkull from oblivion - come out with clarity
and force, and are definitely a success. Normally this would have been more
than enough for one book, but unfortunately there is also a third less happy
theme that is developed throughout the volume. The endorsement of non-mechanism,
or qualitative organicism, is in my opinion the first serious mistake of the
young field of biosemiotics. Indeed it is the one drawback that can prevent
it from growing into a true science. I must conclude therefore that biosemiotics
has not yet come of age, but I do hope that this criticism is taken for what
it is: a diagnosis that is supposed not to hurt but to help.