Has Biosemiotics Come Of Age? And Postscript

Abstract

The 2001 Special Issue of Semioticahas been dedicated to celebrating Jakob von Uexküll as a founding father of biosemiotics. The two main points of the volume – the making of biosemiotics and the recovery of Jakob von Uexküll from oblivion – come out with clarity and force, and are definitely a success. The volume is also an excellent example of interdisciplinarity, with contributions from history, philosophy, linguistics, biology, art, literature and computer science that integrate each other with admirable ease. There is however a third message of the special issue that is less agreeable. It is the message that biosemiotics has been the crowning achievement of the tradition that goes back to Goethe, von Baer, Driesch and von Uexküll, and many contributors did not hide their preferences for neo-vitalism and anti-darwinism. The author of the review welcomes the project of introducing meaning in biology but points out that neo-vitalism is not the best approach. The existence of organic codes and organic meaning in nature are scientific problems that can and should be investigated with the classical method of science, i.e. with the mechanistic approach of model building. This led the reviewer to conclude that biosemiotics had not yet come of age in 2001. In the Postscript of 2005, however, the same reviewer acknowledges that in a few years the situation has rapidly changed. Biosemiotics has become a pluralistic field of research that no longer excludes the mechanistic method, and today it is a vibrant young science where all approaches to the problem of biological meaning are investigated without preconditions