Abstract
In the case of living beings – the very concept of “level” of organization becomes obscure: it suggests a value-based assessment, assigning notions like “lower” and “higher” with rather vague criteria for constructing the ladder of perfection, complexity, importance, etc. We prefer therefore the term “domain”, entities ranking equal. Domains may represent natural entities as well as purely human constructs developed in order to gain understanding of some facets of living things; living, evolved beings (e.g. viviparous animals, eukaryotic cells, etc.) as well as those abstract constructs, such as genotype and ‘niche’ which have been developed in the search for better understanding of such living things. Delimitation of such domains is sometimes a question of the dexterity of the researcher, and sometimes draws from the tradition in a given field. Such domains are not completely (canonically) translatable to each other. Rather, they interact by a process that we call here reciprocal formation. Life (including the biosphere and human cultures which are emergent within the frame of the biosphere) is unique among multi-domain systems. In contrast to purely physical systems, life is a semiotic system driven by the historical experience of lineages, interpreted and re-interpreted by the incessant turnover of both individuals and their communities. This paper provides cases of domain interrelations, and addresses two questions: (1) How do new qualities of inter-domain interaction emerge historically? (2) How do new domains (ways of understanding the world) emerge in evolution. Two approaches, physical and biosemiotic, are discussed as we seek to get a better understanding of the overarching tasks.
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Notes
The concept of supervenience is common in both analytical philosophy and theoretical biology; e.g., Deacon 2006, 2007; McLaughlin 2008 [1997]; Chalmers 2008 [1996]). It can be summarized by the slogan “two things cannot differ in quality without differing in intrinsic nature“.
We use the term extraphysical here to clarify the fact that there are determinants which do not conform to nor are derivable from the first principles of some microphysics.
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Supported by the Templeton Foundation and by the Czech Science Foundation 13-24275S (AM).
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Markoš, A., Das, P. Levels or Domains of Life?. Biosemiotics 9, 319–330 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-016-9271-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-016-9271-6