Biosemiotics

Umwelt as a Trans-sign Network, or The Implications of Biosemiotics to Humanities Katarzyna Machtyl The main thesis of the proposed talk is that biosemiotics has significantly changed and reformulated the way humanities-related scholars think about culture. For instance, one can mention here posthumanism, post- / nonanthropocentrism, nonhuman subjects’ studies, ecohumanities and many more. The biosemiotic […]

The Importance of the Concept of Umwelt in a Changing World Isabel Ferreira In the last decades, humankind has been experiencing the cumulative effects of a profound technological development that has accelerated immensely the dynamics of human social life, that has been reshaping the human sphere of action and interaction, that has hybridised human reality […]

The Creative Porpoise Climbs the Semiotic Scaffolding Phillip Guddemi One of Jesper Hoffmeyer’s many innovative concepts in biosemiotics was that of semiotic freedom. I propose to relate Hoffmeyer’s idea of semiotic freedom to Gregory Bateson’s concept of levels of learning, by way of describing an experiment in porpoise learning which was inspired by Bateson’s observations […]

Tales of semiotic freedom Óscar Miyamoto Do we have the means to clearly explain biosemiotics to the general public? Reaching broader audiences is not only feasible, but also a responsible step if biosemiotics aims at changing the classic way biology is understood in other disciplines. We are, though, a long way from conveying our terminology […]

Biological Writing: An Appendix to The Language Metaphor of Life Ľudmila Lacková The language metaphor of life has been proposed as an analogy to the linguistic model, where a specific biological level corresponds to a specific language level (DNA bases correspond to phonemes, triplets of bases correspond to words and genes correspond to sentences). This […]

Waste and the Second Turn in Biosemiotics Tyler Bennett The main characteristics of the second turn in biosemiotics are: “(a) extending the integration to Saussurean approaches; i.e. developing a general semiotics which synthesizes Peircean, Saussurean and Uexküllean theories; and (b) grounding aesthetics and ideology in biosemiotics” (Chávez Barreto et. al 2022). The second turn was […]

Deleuze and Biosemiotics Peter Lang The aim of this paper is to establish a clear link between biosemiotics and Deleuzean philosophy. This can be done by highlighting the affinity in Deleuze’s work to theories of autopoiesis and organic/biophysical sense-making. A compelling through-line can be drawn between Deleuze, theories of living systems, and biosemiotics in the […]

Biosemiotics as a theoretical framework to approach the human gut-microbiota-brain-axis Rebeca Méndez-Veras & Òscar Castro The human brain has approximately 86-100 billion neurons; however, the enteric nervous system has an estimated 200 million neurons, which is why our gut is called the “second brain”. Both systems connect through several sensors, microbes, and cells (Sarkar et […]

Protein language models and the semiotic language of Signal Peptides Mariana Vitti Rodrigues, Claus Emmeche & Henrik Nielsen Are language models learning to read the language of nature? This communication explores the learning potential of applying automated methods to predict signal peptides using protein language models. Signal Peptides (SP) are short amino acid sequences whose […]