Biosemiotics

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 […]

Does Biosemiotics Need a Theory of Reading? Paul Cobley Central to biosemiotics is the process of interpretation, which takes place across all species of life. General semiotics has been enlivened by the concept of ‘the text’ and the concomitant act of ‘reading’ (Lotman 1964), with interpretation embedded in it. The term ‘reading’ clearly invokes a […]

Preliminary Connections with Semiotics in Linguistic Anthropology As a newcomer to the field of Biosemiotics, I find the Biosemiotics Glossary Project a fascinating example of intentional interdisciplinary and intercultural communication.  Linguists within anthropology have long worked on language contact, i.e. the emergence, maintenance, and evolution of new registers within their cultural contexts. The building of […]

Structures of Animal Utterances Seen as Aesthetics – and as Communication. Semiotic perspectives on functions of so-called animal beauty   Due to a dramatic increase of research in ethology and zoo-communication over the last decades biosemiotics has now access to an extensive amount of empirical studies of how and why animals structure their utterances. Research […]