Autopoiesis, Life, Mind and Cognition: Bases for a Proper Naturalistic Continuity

The strong version of the life-mind continuity thesis claims that mind can be understood as an enriched version of the same functional and organizational properties of life. Contrary to this view, in this paper I argue that mental phenomena offer distinctive properties, such as intentionality or representational content, that have no counterpart in the phenomenon of life, and that must be explained by appealing to a different level of functional and organizational principles. As a strategy, and following Maturana’s autopoietic theory of cognition, I introduce a conceptual distinction between mind and cognition. I argue that cognition corresponds to the natural behaviour that every living being exhibits in the realization of its existence, and that, viewed in that way, cognition is a dynamic process of structural coupling that, unlike mental phenomena, involves no representational contents. On the basis of this distinction, I try to show that while life suffices for cognition, it does not suffice for mind. That is, that the strong continuity is not between life and mind but between life and cognition.     

Delectable Creatures and the Fundamental Reality of Metaphor: Biosemiotics and Animal Mind

This article argues that organisms, defined by a semi-permeable membrane or skin separating organism from environment, are (must be) semiotically alert responders to environments (both Innenwelt and Umwelt). As organisms and environments complexify over time, so, necessarily, does semiotic responsiveness, or ‘semiotic freedom’. In complex environments, semiotic responsiveness necessitates increasing plasticity of discernment, or discrimination. Such judgements, in other words, involve interpretations. The latter, in effect, consist of translations of a range of sign relations which, like metaphor, are based on transfers (carryings over) of meanings or expressions from one semiotic ‘site’ to another. The article argues that what humans describe as ‘metaphor’ (and believe is something which only pertains to human speech and mind and, in essence, is ‘not real’) is, in fact, fundamental to all semiotic and biosemiotic sign processes in all living things. The article first argues that metaphor and mind are immanent in all life, and are evolutionary, and, thus, that animals certainly do have minds. Following Heidegger and then Agamben, the article continues by asking about the place of animal mind in humans, and concludes that, as a kind of ‘night science’, ‘humananimal’ mind is central to the semiotics of Peircean abduction.     

On the Role of Ideas of Human Nature in Shaping Attitudes Towards Environmental Governance

Attitudes towards the management of the natural environment have been described mainly as building on individuals’ images of nature and the human–nature relationship. However, in previous qualitative research I found strong evidence that in order to understand public views on environmental policies we also need to understand individuals’ beliefs about their fellow humans. The present study tested the hypothesis that beliefs about human nature and preferences for certain governance approaches—such as regulations and collective action—are related to individuals’ attitudes towards concrete management measures. Survey results (n = 155), analysed by means of structural equation modelling, suggest that effects of beliefs about human nature are discernible, but not significant. I could, however, identify generic preferences for particular approaches to environmental governance. These significantly explained variation in attitudes towards environmental governance in an applied context, suggesting a strong need for further research in this politically highly relevant field.     

Defining Life or Bringing Biology to Life

In the present, post-genomic times, systemic or holistic approaches to living phenomena are compulsory to overcome the limits of traditional strategies, such as the methodological reductionism of molecular biology. In this paper, we propose that theoretical and philosophical efforts to define life also contribute to those integrative approaches, providing a global theoretical framework that may help to deal with or interpret the huge amount of data being collected by current high-throughput technologies, in this so-called ‘omics’ revolution. We claim that two fundamental notions can capture the core of the living, (basic) autonomy and open-ended evolution, and that only the complementary combination of these two theoretical constructs offers an adequate solution to the problem of defining the nature of life in specific enough—but also encompassing enough—terms. This tentative solution should also illuminate, in its most elementary version, the leading steps towards living beings on Earth.     

The Rise of Modern Humans

Human beings are distinguished most strikingly by their unique “symbolic” way of processing information about the world. Although based on a long evolutionary history, the modern human cognitive style is not predicted by that history. It is not the product of a process of incremental refinement but is instead “emergent,” representing an entirely distinct level of complexity. Physically, Homo sapiens is very distinctive, its peculiarities clearly resulting from a significant developmental reorganization with numerous skeletal ramifications and quite plausibly others as well. It seems reasonable to suppose that the structural underpinnings of symbolic thought were acquired in this reorganization. Still, the fossil and archaeological records indicate that the first anatomically recognizable members of the species predated the first humans who behaved in a demonstrably symbolic manner. So while the biological potential for symbolic thinking most likely arose in the morphogenetic event that gave rise to H. sapiens as a distinctive anatomical entity, this new capacity was evidently exaptive, in the sense that it had to await its “discovery” and expression, clearly through a cultural stimulus that was plausibly the invention of language. One manifestation of symbolic reasoning is the adoption of technological change in response to environmental challenges, in contrast to earlier responses that typically used existing technologies in new ways. As climates changed at the end of the last Ice Age, this new technophile proclivity was expressed in a shift toward agriculture and sedentary lifestyles, precipitating a fundamentally new (and potentially self-destructive) relationship with Nature. Both of the two most radical and fateful evolutionary innovations in the history of life (symbolic thinking and sedentary lifestyles) were thus very recent occurrences, well within the short tenure of H. sapiens.     

Manipulating Representations

The present paper proposes a definition for the complex polysemic concepts of consciousness and awareness (in humans as well as in other species), and puts forward the idea of a progressive ontological development of consciousness from a state of ‘childhood’ awareness, in order to explain that humans are not only able to manipulate objects, but also their mental representations. The paper builds on the idea of qualia intended as entities posing regular invariant requests to neural processes, trough the permanence of different properties. The concept of semantic differential introduces the properties of metaphorical qualia as an exclusively human ability. Furthermore this paper proposes a classification of qualia, according to the models–with different levels of abstraction–they are implied in, in a taxonomic perspective. This, in turn, becomes a source of categorization of divergent representations, sign systems, and forms of intentionality, relying always on biological criteria. New emerging image-of-the-world-devices are proposed, whose qualia are likely to be only accessible to humans: emotional qualia, where emotion accounts for the invariant and dominant property; and the qualic self where continuity, combined with the oneness of the self, accounts for the invariant and dominant property. The concept of congruence between different domains in a metaphor introduces the possibility of a general evaluation of truth and falsity of all kinds of metaphorical constructs, while the work of Matte Blanco enables us to classify conscious versus unconscious metaphors, both in individuals and in social organizations.     

Relations of homology between higher cognitive emotions and basic emotions

In the last 10 years, several authors including Griffiths and Matthen have employed classificatory principles from biology to argue for a radical revision in the way that we individuate psychological traits. Arguing that the fundamental basis for classification of traits in biology is that of ‘homology’ (similarity due to common descent) rather than ‘analogy’, or ‘shared function’, and that psychological traits are a special case of biological traits, they maintain that psychological categories should be individuated primarily by relations of homology rather than in terms of shared function. This poses a direct challenge to the dominant philosophical view of how to define psychological categories, viz., ‘functionalism’. Although the implications of this position extend to all psychological traits, the debate has centered around ‘emotion’ as an example of a psychological category ripe for reinterpretation within this new framework of classification. I address arguments by Griffiths that emotions should be divided into at least two distinct classes, basic emotions and higher cognitive emotions, and that these two classes require radically different theories to explain them. Griffiths argues that while basic emotions in humans are homologous to the corresponding states in other animals, higher cognitive emotions are dependent on mental capacities unique to humans, and are therefore not homologous to basic emotions. Using the example of shame, I argue that (a) many emotions that are commonly classified as being higher cognitive emotions actually correspond to certain basic emotions, and that (b) the “higher cognitive forms” of these emotions are best seen as being homologous to their basic forms.     

The Bio-semiotic Roots of Metapsychology

This paper provides an overview of the origins, vicissitudes, and abandonment of ‘metapsychology’, the psycho-biological scientific core of the Freudian opus, and introduces the authors’ key revisions. Although couched in the language of metaphor and analogy from 19th century physics, the conceptual foundations of Freud’s theories contained the seeds of a bio-semiotic theory of mind and of human nature in the natural world. Its updated, modernized, version opens the door to an inter-penetrative epistemology leading to universal principles of logical form, applicable to all types of vital inter-action.     

Individuals at the Center of Biology: Rudolf Leuckart’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Polymorphismus der Individuen</Emphasis> and the Ongoing Narrative of Parts and Wholes. With an Annotated Translation

Rudolf Leuckart’s 1851 pamphlet Ueber den Polymorphismus der Individuen (On the polymorphism of individuals) stood at the heart of naturalists’ discussions on biological individuals, parts and wholes in mid-nineteenth-century Britain and Europe. Our analysis, which accompanies the first translation of this pamphlet into English, situates Leuckart’s contribution to these discussions in two ways. First, we present it as part of a complex conceptual knot involving not only individuality and the understanding of compound organisms, but also the alternation of generations, the division of labor in nature, and the possibility of finding general laws of the organic world. Leuckart’s pamphlet is important as a novel attempt to give order to the strands of this knot. It also solved a set of key biological problems in a way that avoided some of the drawbacks of an earlier teleological tradition. Second, we situate the pamphlet within a longer trajectory of inquiry into part-whole relations in biology from the mid-eighteenth century to the present. We argue that biological individuality, along with the problem-complexes with which it engaged, was as central a problem to naturalists before 1859 as evolution, and that Leuckart’s contributions to it left a long legacy that persisted well into the twentieth century. As biologists’ interests in part-whole relations are once again on the upswing, the longue durée of this problem merits renewed consideration.     

An approach to practical persistence

 A basic problem in community ecology is determining whether a community of interacting species will survive in the long term. A criterion ensuring this is that of permanence (or uniform persistence), which is based on the idea that species densities for large time are above minimum non-zero levels. There are various mathematical techniques for investigating permanence, but they do not yield an estimate for the minimum levels, and these may lie below minimum viability levels in the biological sense of ‘Practical Persistence’. Here we study a technique for obtaining explicit expressions for the minimum levels when one species is ‘slow’. This is illustrated for a predator–prey problem governed by difference equations, and we note that the technique is applicable even when the dynamics is chaotic.. Received: 7 April 1997 / Revised version: 25 March 1998     

T-Cell Antigen Receptor-alpha Chain Transmembrane Peptides: Correlation between Structure and Function

Core peptide (CP) is a unique peptide derived from the transmembrane sequence of T cell antigen receptor (TCR)-alpha chain that is capable of inhibiting the immune response both in vitro and in animal models of T cell mediated inflammation. CP contains two basic amino acids (lysine and arginine) in its sequence. The presence of these charged residues interspersed between hydrophobic amino acids is important for function. Here in an attempt to understand CP’s biophysical properties leading to activity we have synthesized a number of CP analogues and correlated their model structure with their biological activity. It became apparent that it is not only the charge of the amino acids but also the nature of the polar amino acids themselves and the topography and spacing between them by hydrophobic amino acids, creating a hydrophobic face, that are critical for CP function.Australian Peptide Conference Issue.     

Azadirachta indica (neem): a plant of multiple biological and pharmacological activities

Azadirachta indica, commonly called neem or ‘dogonyaro’ in Nigeria, is a plant that has found varied use in ecological, medicinal and agricultural sectors. Biological and pharmacological activities attributed to different parts and extracts of these plants include antiplasmodial, antitrypanosomal, antioxidant, anticancer, antibacterial, antiviral, larvicidal and fungicidal activities. Others include antiulcer, spermicidal, anthelminthic, antidiabetic, anti-implantation, immunomodulating, molluscicidal, nematicidal, immunocontraceptive, insecticidal, antifeedant and insect repellant effects. But toxicological activities such as allergic, genotoxic, cytogenetic and radiosensitizing effects have also been reported in humans and some economic animals, particularly, aquatic organisms, chicks and goats. Bioassay-guided studies and phytochemical analyses utilizing modern state-of-the-art techniques such as HPLC–MS, GC–MS, NMR and Infra Red spectroscopy have revealed that phytocompounds like azadirachtins, nimocinol, isomeldenin, azadirachtol (a tetranortriterpernoid), 2,3′-dehydrosalanol gedunin, nimbin, nimolicinol, odoratone, azadironolide, isoazadironolide, naheedin and mahmoodin are responsible for the varied biological, pharmacological and toxicological properties observed. In this paper, we review how a developing country like Nigeria can harness the numerous opportunities presented by the multi-biological and multi-pharmacological nature of A. indica to solve some of her myriad problems, including those in the agricultural, health and economic sectors.     

Swarm cognition on off-road autonomous robots

This paper contributes with the first validation of swarm cognition as a useful framework for the design of autonomous robots controllers. The proposed model is built upon the authors’ previous work validated on a simulated robot performing local navigation on a 2-D deterministic world. Based on the ant foraging metaphor and motivated by the multiple covert attention hypothesis, the model consists of a set of simple virtual agents inhabiting the robot’s visual input, searching in a collectively coordinated way for obstacles. Parsimonious and accurate visual attention, operating on a by-need basis, is attained by making the activity of these agents modulated by the robot’s action selection process. A by-product of the system is the maintenance of active, parallel and sparse spatial working memories. In short, the model exhibits the self-organisation of a relevant set of features composing a cognitive system. To show its robustness, the model is extended in this paper to handle the challenges of physical off-road robots equipped with noisy stereoscopic vision sensors. Furthermore, an extensive aggregate of biological arguments sustaining the model is provided. Experimental results show the ability of the model to robustly control the robot on a local navigation task, with less than 1% of the robot’s visual input being analysed. Hence, with this system the computational cost of perception is considerably reduced, thus fostering robot miniaturisation and energetic efficiency. This confirms the advantages of using a swarm-based system, operating in an intricate way with action selection, to judiciously control visual attention and maintain sparse spatial memories, constituting a basic form of swarm cognition.     

The Symptom

The symptom (which here refers to both the clinical or ‘objective’ sign, that is, the sign that physicians believe cannot lie, and the patient’s subjective revelation of disorder, which is always considered suspect) has been relegated by a number of semioticians to a category of signs often considered of little consequence, a ‘natural’ sign signaling some specific condition or state within the body whose object stands in a strictly biological and securely determined relationship to the symptom. I believe the symptom, however, is deep, rich, and symbolic in every sense, signifying the misadventures of a body impaled by its perceptual skills and history within its own unique Umwelt or sign-world. Unfortunately, the notion of a sign which reflects biologically coded events alone suggests the body is without the ability to think, learn, and produce a story of unlimited semiosis. This should seem especially problematic to those biosemioticians who find analogic codes of much greater importance than the supposedly digital codes of DNA. I suggest that the disordered and disorderly body and the Umwelt within which it survives offer biosemioticians and those who pursue semiotic models in other disciplines an important opportunity to jointly and more fully explore the experienced world of health and illness, a world in which culture and nature are fully interpenetrated.     

Becoming Modern Homo sapiens

Human beings are unusual in many ways but perhaps most strikingly in their unique symbolic form of processing information about the world around them. Although based on a long and essential evolutionary history, the modern human cognitive style is not predicted by that history: it is emergent rather than the product of an incremental process of refinement. Homo sapiens is physically very distinctive and is clearly the result of a significant developmental reorganization with ramifications throughout the skeleton and presumably beyond. It is reasonable to suppose that the neural underpinnings of symbolic thought were acquired in this reorganization. However, the fossil and archeological records indicate that the first anatomically recognizable members of the species substantially predated its first members who behaved in a demonstrably symbolic manner. Thus, while the biological potential for symbolic thinking most likely arose in the morphogenetic event that gave rise to H. sapiens as a distinctive anatomical entity, this new capacity was evidently exaptive, in the sense that it had to await its “discovery” and release through a cultural stimulus. Plausibly, this stimulus was the invention of language. One expression of symbolic reasoning is the adoption of technological change in response to environmental challenges, contrasting with earlier responses that typically involved using existing technologies in new ways. As climates changed at the end of the last Ice Age, the new technophile proclivity was expressed in a shift toward agriculture and sedentary lifestyles: a shift that precipitated a fundamentally new (and potentially self-destructive) relationship with nature. Thus, both of what are arguably the two most radical (and certainly the most fateful) evolutionary innovations in the history of life (symbolic thinking and sedentary lifestyles) were both very recent occurrences, well within the (so far rather short) tenure of H. sapiens.     

Lexicalisation and the Origin of the Human Mind

This paper will discuss the origin of the human mind, and the qualitative discontinuity between human and animal cognition. We locate the source of this discontinuity within the language faculty, and thus take the origin of the mind to depend on the origin of the language faculty. We will look at one such proposal put forward by Hauser et al. (Science 298:1569-1579, 2002), which takes the evolution of a Merge trait (recursion) to solely explain the differences between human and animal cognition. We argue that the Merge-only hypothesis fails to account for various aspects of the human mind. Instead we propose that the process of lexicalisation is also unique to humans, and that this process is key to explaining the vast qualitative differences. We will argue that lexicalisation is a process through which concepts are reformatted to be able to take on semantic features and to take part in grammatical relations. These are both necessary conditions for a grammatical mind and the increased ability to express conceptual content. We therefore propose a possible explanans for the discontinuity between humans and animals, namely that merge with lexicalisation (and consequently semantic features and grammatical relations) is a minimal requirement for the human mind.     

On the Delayed Ross–Macdonald Model for Malaria Transmission

The feedback dynamics from mosquito to human and back to mosquito involve considerable time delays due to the incubation periods of the parasites. In this paper, taking explicit account of the incubation periods of parasites within the human and the mosquito, we first propose a delayed Ross–Macdonald model. Then we calculate the basic reproduction number R ₀ and carry out some sensitivity analysis of R ₀ on the incubation periods, that is, to study the effect of time delays on the basic reproduction number. It is shown that the basic reproduction number is a decreasing function of both time delays. Thus, prolonging the incubation periods in either humans or mosquitos (via medicine or control measures) could reduce the prevalence of infection. S. Ruan’s research was partially supported by NIH grants P20RR020770-02 and R01GM083607-01, NSF grant DMS-0715772. D. Xiao’s research was supported by the National Natural Science Fund (NNSF) of China.     

Animal Metaphors and Metaphorizing Animals: An Integrated Literary, Cognitive, and Evolutionary Analysis of Making and Partaking of Stories

Humans use metaphors to explore their relationship with nature. Our ability to make and understand metaphors appears to be an automatic cognitive process, one that likely evolved along with our ability to create and understand language. Because metaphors are processed automatically, without conscious appraisal, they can be used to rapidly communicate, or manipulate. Applying theories of evolutionary psychology and cognitive science to literary texts, we explored the role of animal metaphors in the making and partaking of stories in the context of a course in environmental studies. We investigated how humans are animals and yet use culture to shield themselves from this reality. We read and analyzed literature in which animal metaphors are central, such as Honoré de Balzac’s short story Passion in the Desert and Langdon Smith’s poem “Evolution.” Throughout the course, the overarching theme is that animal metaphors are powerful tools for framing our relationship with the environment and that they can be best understood in the context of humans as evolved animals.     

History of the word photosynthesis and evolution of its definition

In 1893, Charles Barnes (1858–1910) proposed that the biological process for ‘synthesis of complex carbon compounds out of carbonic acid, in the presence of chlorophyll, under the influence of light’ should be designated as either ‘photosyntax’ or ‘photosynthesis.’ He preferred the word ‘photosyntax,’ but ‘photosynthesis’ came into common usage as the term of choice. Later discovery of anoxygenic photosynthetic bacteria and photophosphorylation necessitated redefinition of the term. This essay examines the history of changes in the meaning of photosynthesis. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.