The System of Interpretance, Naturalizing Meaning as Finality

A materialist construction of semiosis requires system embodiment at particular locales, in order to function as systems of interpretance. I propose that we can use a systemic model of scientific measurement to construct a systems view of semiosis. I further suggest that the categories required to understand that process can be used as templates when generalizing to biosemiosis and beyond. The viewpoint I advance here is that of natural philosophy—which, once granted, incurs no principled block to further generalization all the way to pansemiotics—nearer to Peirce’s own very general perspective. This project requires a hylozooic framework, which I present in the form of a specification hierarchy, whereby physical dynamics subsume all other transactions at more highly developed integrative levels. The upshot of the paper is a proposal that meanings can be assimilated most generally to final causes.     

Cast in Plastic: Semiotic Plasticity and the Pragmatic Reading of Darwin

As Darwin portended but failed to develop, and of which Gould made much, the forensic evidence of evolution points toward Punctuated Equilibrium rather than Phyletic Gradualism; however Gould’s empirical postulation has long suffered from its lack of a testable theoretical basis. This is rectified by the work of Jaroslav Flegr and the Frozen Plasticity Theory, a hypothesis with striking application within semiotic theory and hence to questions of epistemology and ontology. The consequences of applying FPT within Biosemiotics is this: when any particular sign carries a great range of interpretation (semiotic polymorphism) combined with a high degree of mutually supportive referencing (semiotic pleiotropy), that sign is less likely to exhibit plasticity—less able to find new expressions capable of taking on a life of their own (as it were), but more likely to exhibit elasticity, and the flexibility necessary to survive a wide variety of niches. By contrast, much Darwinian and most Neo-Darwinian thought presumes that plasticity is equally and necessarily present in all living things, and that all populations thus slowly evolve. This devalues the point of interplay of such processes, which is the instigation of a specific instance of relating both delineated by and delineating its own unique heritage, and a phenomenon of signage. The presumption that these moments of transaction are all of a singular type has generated certain failures in extrapolating from evolutionary theory to understanding the experience of life. However Darwin was read differently by Darwin’s philosophical champion and Peirce’s “boxing master” Chauncey Wright. Using the historical encounter of the early Pragmatists with Origin, the hypothesis that Peirce’s Pragmatism and Semiotics originated within a study of the ontology implicit within Darwin’s one long argument, and also an evocative import from Sir Edward Strachey, this essay approaches Frozen Plasticity as a theoretical semiosis, so as to clarify the functioning of signage in evolution and cognition.     

Technological biology? Things and kinds in synthetic biology

Social scientific and humanistic research on synthetic biology has focused quite narrowly on questions of epistemology and ELSI. I suggest that to understand this discipline in its full scope, researchers must turn to the objects of the field—synthetic biological artifacts—and study them as the objects in the making of a science yet to be made. I consider one fundamentally important question: how should we understand the material products of synthetic biology? Practitioners in the field, employing a consistent technological optic in the study and construction of biological systems, routinely employ the mantra ‘biology is technology’. I explore this categorization. By employing an established definition of technological artifects drawn from the philosophy of technology, I explore the appropriateness of attributing to synthetic biological artifacts the four criteria of materiality, intentional design, functionality, and normativity. I then explore a variety of accounts of natural kinds. I demonstrate that synthetic biological artifacts fit each kind imperfectly, and display a concomitant ontological ‘messiness’. I argue that this classificatory ambivalence is a product of the field’s own nascence, and posit that further work on kinds might help synthetic biology evaluate its existing commitments and practices.     

Autopoiesis and Interpretive Semiosis

Translation has long been viewed as ‘code-switching’ either within or between languages. Hence, most translation discussions center on its linguistic and cultural aspects. However, the fundamental mechanism of ‘translation as interpretative semiosis’ has yet to be studied with appropriate rigor. Susan Petrilli (2008) has identified ‘iconicity’ as the key that enables translative semiosis. Nevertheless, as her model is restricted to a discussion of literary translation activity in verbal sign systems, a fundamental mechanism to explain translation as interpretative semiosis is still needed. By analyzing the interactions between the source sign (the translated) and the target sign (the translatant) in the translating process, it can be discerned that Humberto Maturana’s notion of autopoiesis may provide some crucial insights into translative semiosis. By identifying the autopoietic nature of translation, that is, the interlocked structural coupling between the Translated and Translatant, translation is no longer the ‘one-to-one-correspondence’ between sign systems, but rather a recursive process of interpretation—an interpretive semiosis. Moreover, it is by this autopoietic, self-productive mechanism of translation that I would suggest translation becomes a recursive generation of new inter-connections between semiotics systems.     

Darwin and His Pigeons. The Analogy Between Artificial and Natural Selection Revisited

The analogy between artificial selection of domestic varieties and natural selection in nature was a vital element of Darwin’s argument in his Origin of Species. Ever since, the image of breeders creating new varieties by artificial selection has served as a convincing illustration of how the theory works. In this paper I argue that we need to reconsider our understanding of Darwin’s analogy. Contrary to what is often assumed, nineteenth-century animal breeding practices constituted a highly controversial field that was fraught with difficulties. It was only with considerable effort that Darwin forged his analogy, and he only succeeded by downplaying the importance of two other breeding techniques – crossing of varieties and inbreeding – that many breeders deemed essential to obtain new varieties. Part of the explanation for Darwin’s gloss on breeding practices, I shall argue, was that the methods of his main informants, the breeders of fancy pigeons, were not representative of what went on in the breeding world at large. Darwin seems to have been eager to take the pigeon fanciers at their word, however, as it was only their methods that provided him with the perfect analogy with natural selection. Thus while his studies of domestic varieties were important for the development of the concept of natural selection, the reverse was also true: Darwin’s comprehension of breeding practices was moulded by his understanding of the working of natural selection in nature. Historical studies of domestic breeding practices in the eighteenth and nineteenth century confirm that, besides selection, the techniques of inbreeding and crossing were much more important than Darwin’s interpretation allowed for. And they still are today. This calls for a reconsideration of the pedagogic use of Darwin’s analogy too.     

The biological principles of swarm intelligence

The roots of swarm intelligence are deeply embedded in the biological study of self-organized behaviors in social insects. From the routing of traffic in telecommunication networks to the design of control algorithms for groups of autonomous robots, the collective behaviors of these animals have inspired many of the foundational works in this emerging research field. For the first issue of this journal dedicated to swarm intelligence, we review the main biological principles that underlie the organization of insects’ colonies. We begin with some reminders about the decentralized nature of such systems and we describe the underlying mechanisms of complex collective behaviors of social insects, from the concept of stigmergy to the theory of self-organization in biological systems. We emphasize in particular the role of interactions and the importance of bifurcations that appear in the collective output of the colony when some of the system’s parameters change. We then propose to categorize the collective behaviors displayed by insect colonies according to four functions that emerge at the level of the colony and that organize its global behavior. Finally, we address the role of modulations of individual behaviors by disturbances (either environmental or internal to the colony) in the overall flexibility of insect colonies. We conclude that future studies about self-organized biological behaviors should investigate such modulations to better understand how insect colonies adapt to uncertain worlds.     

No evolution,no heredity,just development—Julius Schaxel and the end of the Evo–Devo agenda in Jena, 1906–1933: a case study

Julius Schaxel is an almost forgotten figure in the history of early twentieth century biology. By focusing on his life and work, I would like to illustrate several central developments in that period of history of biology. Julius Schaxel was an early representative and organizer of theoretical biology, discussing and criticizing both Wilhelm Roux’s mechanism and Hans Driesch’s vitalism. In addition to his theoretical work, Schaxel also did experimental research on developmental issues to support his critique. In this paper, special emphasis is made on the negotiating practice of Schaxel, which he used to establish a new area of biological research and a new audience for that area. In contrast to these new fields, Schaxel can be also portrayed as the endpoint of a research tradition investigating ontogeny and phylogeny together, which today is called Evo–Devo. Following Garland Allen’s dialectical processes that led to the decline of the Evo–Devo research agenda, Schaxel’s example is used to investigate these processes.     

(R)evolutionary aesthetics: Denis Dutton’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">The art instinct: beauty,pleasure and human evolution</Emphasis>

Denis Dutton’s “The Art Instinct” succeeds admirably in showing that it is possible to think about art from a biological point of view, and this is a significant achievement, given that resistance to the idea that cultural phenomena have biological underpinnings remains widespread in many academic disciplines. However, his account of the origins of our artistic impulses and the far-reaching conclusions he draws from that account are not persuasive. This article points out a number of problems: in particular, problems with Dutton’s appeal to sexual selection, with his discussion of the adaptation/by-product distinction and its significance, and with drawing normative conclusions from evolutionary hypotheses.     

Wallace’s Other Line: Human Biogeography and Field Practice in the Eastern Colonial Tropics

This paper examines how the 19th-century British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace used biogeographical mapping practices to draw a boundary line between Malay and Papuan groups in the colonial East Indies in the 1850s. Instead of looking for a continuous gradient of variation between Malays and Papuans, Wallace chose to look for a sharp discontinuity between them. While Wallace’s “human biogeography” paralleled his similar project to map plant and animal distributions in the same region, he invoked distinctive “mental and moral” features as more decisive than physical ones. By following Wallace in the field, we can see his field mapping practices in action – how he conquered the problem of local particularity in the case of human variation. His experiences on the periphery of expanding European empires, far from metropolitan centers, shaped Wallace’s observations in the field. Taking his cues from colonial racial categories and his experiences collaborating with local people in the field, Wallace constructed the boundary line between the Malay and Papuan races during several years of work in the field criss-crossing the archipelago as a scientific collector. This effort to map a boundary line in the field was a bold example of using the practices of survey science to raise the status of field work by combining fact gathering with higher-level generalizing, although the response back in the metropole was less than enthusiastic. Upon his return to Britain in the 1860s, Wallace found that appreciation for observational facts he had gathered in the field was not accompanied by agreement with his theoretical interpretations and methods for doing human biogeography.     

Are Animals Just Noisy Machines?: Louis Boutan and the Co-invention of Animal and Child Psychology in the French Third Republic

Historians of science have only just begun to sample the wealth of different approaches to the study of animal behavior undertaken in the twentieth century. To date, more attention has been given to Lorenzian ethology and American behaviorism than to other work and traditions, but different approaches are equally worthy of the historian’s attention, reflecting not only the broader range of questions that could be asked about animal behavior and the “animal mind” but also the different contexts in which these questions were important. One such approach is that represented by the work of the French zoologist Louis Boutan (1859–1934). This paper explores the intellectual and cultural history of Boutan’s work on animal language and the animal mind, and contextualizes the place of animal behavior studies within late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century French biology. I explore the ways in which Boutan addressed the philosophical issue of whether language was necessary for abstract thought and show how he shifted from the idea that animals were endowed with a purely affective language to the notion that of they were capable of “rudimentary” reasoning. I argue that the scientific and broader socio-cultural contexts in which Boutan operated played a role in this transition. Then I show how Boutan’s linguistic and psychological experiments with a gibbon and children provide insights into his conception of “naturalness.” Although Boutan reared his gibbon at home and studied it in the controlled environment of his laboratory, he continued to identify its behavior as “natural.” I specifically demonstrate the importance of the milieu of the French Third Republic in shaping Boutan’s understanding not only of animal intelligence and child education, but also his definition of nature. Finally, I argue that Boutan’s studies on the primate mind provide us with a lens through which we can examine the co-invention of animal and child psychology in early-twentieth-century France.     

Herbivory and novel weapons: no evidence for enhanced competitive ability or allelopathy induction of <Emphasis Type="Italic">Centaurea diffusa</Emphasis> by biological controls

Biological control of weeds by arthropod herbivores is thought to work by reducing the competitive ability of the weed relative to the surrounding vegetation. However, the assumption that herbivory reduces plant competitive ability has not been tested in most biological control systems, and counter to expectation, recent research on the impact of biological control agents on invasive Centaurea species suggests that this genus may respond to herbivory by increased competitive ability through enhanced plant re-growth and/or by inducing increased production of phytotoxic allelochemicals. We examined the impact of two biological control agents of the invasive plant diffuse knapweed (C. diffusa) to see if feeding by either of these insects would enhance the plant’s competitive ability or allelochemical output. Sub-lethal herbivory by either of the biological control agents significantly reduced knapweed performance when the plant was grown in competition with either of two native species. Competition with knapweed significantly reduced the performance of both native species (Artemisia frigida and Bouteloua gracilis), and herbivory by one of the biocontrol agents resulted in a small but significant increase in both native species’ performance. Diffuse knapweed’s putative allelochemical 8-hydroxyquinoline was not detected in experimental or field collected soils from knapweed-infested sites. In contrast to other studies on the impacts of biological control on other Centaurea species, these data support the premise that biological control agents may reduce invading plant competitive ability. We find no evidence for diffuse knapweed allelopathy mediated by 8-hydroxyquinoline or enhanced allelopathy in response to herbivory by biological control agents.     

Meckel the Younger and his epistemology of organic form: Morphology in the pre-Gegenbaurian age

Summary The goal of our paper is to investigate Meckel’s epistemology of organic form, based on study of his original publications. Johann Friedrich Meckel the Younger (1781–1833) was one of the leading figures of German morphology in the early 19th century. Historiographic studies on morphology in this time period show, that biological research was largely preoccupied with questions about the relationship between form and function. Investigations into Meckel’s epistemology of organic form can contribute to our understanding of the development of morphology in the pre-Gegenbaurian age.     

Maynard Smith on the levels of selection question

The levels of selection problem was central to Maynard Smith’s work throughout his career. This paper traces Maynard Smith’s views on the levels of selection, from his objections to group selection in the 1960s to his concern with the major evolutionary transitions in the 1990s. The relations between Maynard Smith’s position and those of Hamilton and G.C. Williams are explored, as is Maynard Smith’s dislike of the Price equation approach to multi-level selection. Maynard Smith’s account of the ‘core Darwinian principles’ is discussed, as is his debate with Sober and Wilson (1998) over the status of trait-group models, and his attitude to the currently fashionable concept of pluralism about the levels of selection.     

Invariance and Meaningfulness in Phenotype spaces

Mathematical spaces are widely used in the sciences for representing quantitative and qualitative relations between objects or individuals. Phenotype spaces—spaces whose elements represent phenotypes—are frequently applied in morphometrics, evolutionary quantitative genetics, and systematics. In many applications, several quantitative measurements are taken as the orthogonal axes of a Euclidean vector space. We show that incommensurable units, geometric dependencies between measurements, and arbitrary spacing of measurements do not warrant a Euclidean geometry for phenotype spaces. Instead, we propose that most phenotype spaces have an affine structure. This has profound consequences for the meaningfulness of biological statements derived from a phenotype space, as they should be invariant relative to the transformations determining the structure of the phenotype space. Meaningful geometric relations in an affine space are incidence, linearity, parallel lines, distances along parallel lines, intermediacy, and ratios of volumes. Biological hypotheses should be phrased and tested in terms of these fundamental geometries, whereas the interpretation of angles and of phenotypic distances in different directions should be avoided. We present meaningful notions of phenotypic variance and other statistics for an affine phenotype space. Furthermore, we connect our findings to standard examples of morphospaces such as Raup’s space of coiled shells and Kendall’s shape space.     

When Your Sources Talk Back: Toward a Multimodal Approach to Scientific Biography

Interviewing offers the biographer unique opportunities for gathering data. I offer three examples. The emphatic bacterial geneticist Norton Zinder confronted me with an interpretation of Barbara McClintock’s science that was as surprising as it proved to be robust. The relaxed setting of the human geneticist Walter Nance’s rural summer home contributed to an unusually improvisational oral history that produced insights into his experimental and thinking style. And “embedding” myself with the biochemical geneticist Charles Scriver in his home, workplace, and city enabled me to experience the social networks that drive the practical events of his career, which in turn helped me explain the theoretical basis of his science. Face-to-face interaction and multisensory experience will shape each biographer’s experience uniquely. Recent developments in sensory physiology suggest that the experience of integrating sense data encourages different patterns of observation and reflection. It is reasonable, then, to think that biography based on face-to-face interviews will, for a given author, have a different character than one based entirely on documents. I reflect on how interviewing shapes my own writing and I encourage the reader to do the same.     

What is “Biological Physics”? 1976 update to the resource letter

This resource letter is a continuation and updating of our 1973 letter. We attempt to further define the term “Biological Physics” — this time through attempting a definition of the characteristic training which biological physicists receive. Our primary objective in this letter is to correct some major omissions from the first effort and to again survey the field in such a way as to bring the 1973 survey up-to-date, approximately to December 1975.     

Biological Boundaries and Biological Age

The chronologic age classically used in demography is often unable to give useful information about which exact stage in development or aging processes has reached an organism. Hence, we propose here to explain in some applications for what reason the chronologic age fails in explaining totally the observed state of an organism, which leads to propose a new notion, the biological age. This biological age is essentially determined by the number of divisions before the Hayflick’s limit the tissue or mitochondrion in a critical organ (in the sense where its loss causes the death of the whole organism) has already used for its development and adult phases. We give a precise definition of the biological age of an organ based on the Hayflick’s limit of its cells and we introduce a desynchronization index (the cell entropy) for some critical tissues or membranes, which are mainly skin, intestinal endothelium, alveoli epithelium and mitochondrial inner membrane. In these actively metabolising interface tissues or membranes, there is a rapid turnover of cells, of their cytoplasmic constituents such as proteins, and of membrane lipids. The boundaries corresponding to these tissues, cells or membranes have vital functions of interface with the environment (protection, homeothermy, nutrition and respiration) and have a rapid turnover (the total cell renewal time is in mice equal to 3 weeks for the skin, 1.5 day for the intestine, 4 months for the alveolae and 11 days for mitochondrial inner membrane) conditioning their biological age. The biological age of a tissue is made of two major components: (1) first, its embryonic age based on the distance (in number of divisions) between the birth date of its first differentiated cell and the time until it reaches its final boundary at the end of its development and (2) second, its adult age whose complement until its death is just the lapse of time made of the sum of remaining cell cycle durations authorized by its Hayflick’s limit. From this definition, we calculate the global biological lifespan of an organism and revisit notions like demographic survival curves, duration and synchrony of cell cycles, living boundaries from proto-cells to organs, and embryonic and adult phases duration.