EIGHT

The Evolution of Semiosis

1. WHAT IS “SEMIOSIS”?

In Peirce’s usage (1935-1966:5.473), semiosis, or “action of a sign,” is an irreducibly triadic process, comprising a relation among (1) a sign, (2) its object, and (3) its actual or potential interpretant. It particularly focuses upon the way that the interpretant is produced, and thus concerns what is involved in understanding or teleonomic (that is, goal-directed) interpretation of the sign. Similarly, Charles Morris (1946:253) defined semiosis as “a sign-process, that is, a process in which something is a sign to some organism.” These definitions imply, effectively and ineluctably, that at least one link in the loop must be a living entity (although, as we shall see, this may be only a portion of an organism, or an artifactual extension fabricated by a hominid). It follows, then, that there could not have been semiosis prior to the evolution of life. For this reason, one must, for example, assume that the report, in the King James version of the Bible (Genesis 1.3), quoting God as having said “Let there be light,” must be a misrepresentation; what God probably said was “let there be photons,” because the sensation of perception of electromagnetic radiation in the form of optical signals (Hailman 1977:56-58), that is, luminance, requires a living interpreter, and the animation of matter did not come to pass much earlier than about 3,900 million years ago.

2. THE COSMOS BEFORE SEMIOSIS

The regnant paradigm of modern cosmology is the Big Bang theory of the origin and evolution of the Universe (for example, Silk 1980; and Barrow and Silk 1983). The genesis of the cosmos, in a singularity (that is, the point at which something peculiar happens to a physical process represented by an equation when one or more variables have certain values), is though to have occurred about 15 billion years ago. Of prior to Planck time 10^-43, we know nothing. What ensued afterward is a bit clearer: from the time that the Universe was three minutes old until about a million years after its apparent beginning, it was dominated by the influence of photons (heat and light). The elementary particles multiplied, matter became ordered, and the Universe organized itself into ever more complex systems. The quasi-semiotic phenomena of nonbiological atomic interactions and, later, those of inorganic molecules, were consigned by the late oncologist Prodi (1977) to “protosemiotics,” but this must surely be read as a metaphorical expression. Prodi’s term is to be distinguished from the notion “primitive communication,” which refers to the transfer of information-containing endoparticles, such as exists in neuron assemblies, where it is managed in modern cells by protein particles (see, for example, Fox 1988:91). The age of the Earth is about 4.5 billion years, while the solar system is deemed to be a little older (4.6 billion).

It becomes useful to allude briefly, at this point, to the conjoined ideas of information and entropy, which is a measure of disorder (Brooks and Wiley 1986; Wicken 1987:17-28; Wright 1988:87-91). These are mutually implicative technical terms which arguably belong on the margins of semiotics. Cosmic expansion is accompanied by a departure from a state of maximum entropy, and information (as a measure of the nonuniform, orderly properties of physical systems) evolved out of that initial state of utter chaos. Eventually, “information” came to be viewed as a measure of the number of alternative messages (Shannon 1948), and then the biophysicist Gatlin (1972) came to apply Shannon’s elegant, highly abstract, and therefore powerful theorems to a theory of living organisms. She showed that, since information in the living system is transmitted from DNA to protein along a channel of biochemical processes in the cell, it can be subjected to Shannon’s equations.

On the other hand, Yates and Kugler (1984), eschewing such terms as “information” and “communication,” because in them lies embedded the elusive property of “intentionality,” recently proposed a quite different and very promising scenario for the transition from a physical (kinetic) system to a semiotic (kinematic) system, that is, one incorporating significance.

“Meaning,” which is indeed a pivotal term in semiotics, played a crucial part in Niels Bohr’s model of a participatory universe, and significance has moved to center stage in the work of such contemporary theoretical physicists as Wheeler (for example, 1984, 1986). Wheeler’s subtle “meaning model” of nature posits a circuit whereby particles owe their definition and existence to fields, fields owe theirs to phases, phases to distinguishability and complementarity, “and these features of nature going back for their origin to the demand for meaning. . . .” Hence his dictum: “The past is theory.” In this model, meaning before the advent of life must, of course, be founded on construction: “Only by [life’s] agency is it even possible to construct the universe of existence or what we call reality” (1986:314). In sum, in Wheeler’s grand conception, physics is the offspring of semiosis, “even as meaning is the child of physics” (1984:123).

3. THE ORIGIN OF LIFE AND THE ORIGIN OF
SEMIOSIS ON THE EARTH

The question of whether there is life/semiosis elsewhere in our galaxy, let alone in deep space, is wide open; since there is not a single example, one can but hold exobiology and extraterrestrial semiotics to be twin sciences that so far remain without a subject matter.

On the other hand, research into the origin and evolution of our terrestrial biosphere has made encouraging progress, although, of course, untold unresolved problems require multidisciplinary analysis in the future (Schopf 1983). The first traces of life date from the so-called Archaean Aeon, from 3,900 to 2,500 million years ago. The story of the quest for the origins of life is detailed in Margulis and Sagan (1986a, Ch. 2), and the molecular biological revolution is then deftly spelled out by them in the next chapter, tellingly titled “The Language of Nature” (1986:59-67). Cairns-Smith has recently shown, especially in his chapter titled “Messages, Messages” (1985, Ch. 2), that semiosis is at the heart of life, since messages provide “the only connection between life now and life a million or a billion years ago” (ibid.:28). Messages are obviously the most important inheritance, since only they can persist over the vast reaches of time. All living systems are composed of carbon, nitrogen, and hydrogen compounds in water; are bounded by lipid membrane; are autopoietic systems, that is, they self-maintain their organization and function by a ceaseless exchange of matter, energy, and messages, or, as Maturana (1980:53) put it, “through their interactions recursively generate the network of productions that produced them, and . . . realize this network as a unity by constituting and specifying its boundaries in the space in which they exist.”

3.1. “THE LANGUAGE OF LIFE”

The Language of Life is the title of a book by Nobel Laureate George Beadle and Muriel Beadle (1966; the same tag was also used by Berlinski 1986). During the years following its publication, much fruitless debate ensued about whether the genetic code is (like) a language or not. Thus Jakobson (1970:437) asserted that the Beadle and Beadle title was “not a mere figurative expression,” and then went on to stress the close similarities in the structure of these “two informational systems” (ibid.:438), that is, the genetic and the linguistic. By contrast, Lees (1980), for example, argued that, although there is a very abstract and deep connection between the two, the similarities usually noted are superficial. “I advocate,” said Lees (ibid.:226), “that linguistic competence be viewed analogously to the genetic code as a mechanism invented by minds to serve as a scratch pad.”

There were also somewhat parallel discussions of this issue among some molecular biologists of that time. The question of an analogy between the two codes, the endosemiotic (molecular) and the anthroposemiotic (including a verbal component) seems, however, a secondary one. What matters is that both are productive semiotic systems. This is made possible by the principle of double articulation, referred to by the Schoolmen, in linguistic contexts, as articulatio prima et secunda. In language, this concept refers (roughly) to the dichotomy between merely distinctive, or phonemic, units and significative, or grammatical, units (such as morphemes or words). Duality can of course be expressed in radically different substances: say, polymeric molecules (the four nucleotides, which can generate the proteins that manufacture everything else alive) in the one; and sound waves in the other. (Double articulation, however, by no means presupposes animation of matter; on the contrary, its fundamental realization is embodied in Mendeleev’s periodic table of elements with related electronic configurations).

3.2. ONE ENDOSEMIOTIC SYSTEMS AND BEHAVIOR

The substantive “endosemiotics” was coined by Sebeok (1985a:3). As a consequence of Jakob von Uexküll’s consistent and elaborate doctrine of signs Qerison 1986:143-144; Sebeok 1988, Ch. 10), nothing exists for any organism outside its bubble-like private Umwelt in which, although impalpably to any outside observer, it remains, as it were, inextricably sealed. The behavior of an organism—“behavior” being definable as the commerce by means of signs among different Umwelten—has as its basic function the production of nonverbal signs for communication, first of all for communication of that organism with itself. It follows that the primal universal sign relation in the ontogeny of an organism is realized as an opposition between the self (ego) and the other (alter) (see also Ch. 4, above). This elementary binary split subsequently brings to pass the second semiosic dimension, that of inside versus outside. It is this secondary opposition that enables an organism to “behave,” that is, to enter into relations to link up with other living systems in its surrounding ecosystem.

3.2.1. Variety in Endosemiosis

Thure von Uexküll wrote (1986:204): “The overwhelming majority of objective evidence of a disease belongs to those types of processes taking place within the body, which, in turn, are subdivided into subsystems (organ systems, organs, tissue, cells, cellular organelles). . . . The participants in the exchange of signs that takes place on the biological level are thus given,” and this fact is described by the adjective endosemiotic. He continued:

The sign processes use chemical, thermal, mechanical and electrical processes as sign carriers. They make up an incredible number. If one reflects upon the fact that the human body consists of 25 trillion cells, which is more than 2,000 times the number of people living on earth, and that these cells have direct or indirect contact with each other through sign processes, one gets an impression of the amount. Only a fraction are known to us. Yet this fraction alone is hardly comprehensible. . . . The messages that are transmitted include information about the meaning of processes in one system of the body (cells, tissues, organs, or organ systems) for other systems as well as for the integrative regulation systems (especially the brain) and the control systems (such as the immune system).

3.2.2. The Immune System

Semiosis being at the pivot of the immune system, terms such as “semioimmunology” and “immunosemiotics” are finding increasing application. Considering that the human immune system consists of about 1,012 cells, dissipated over the entire body, the problem immediately arises how these cells form an orderly, finely regulated functional network operating via signs consisting of chemical substances. Moreover, the immune system (units of which, the lymphocytes, although they circulate among most other cells of the body, seem to be excluded from the brain) and the nervous system are known to influence one another by means of signs. Niels Jerne, in his 1984 Nobel address, not only proposed a far-reaching model of the vertebrate immune system as exhibiting the properties of any semiotic system, but also described it as one that functions as an “openended” generative grammar: “The immense repertoire of the immune system . . . becomes a vocabulary comprised not of words but of sentences that is capable of responding to any sentence expressed by the multitude of antigens which the immune system may encounter” (1985:1058). The context for this approach was provided by Jerne’s idiotype network theory fifteen years ago, suggested by a remarkable feature of the immune system, namely, that its receptors and specific secreted products, or antibodies, not only recognize the exosemiotic world of antigenic determinants (epitopes), but also recognize antigenic determinants on the immune receptors themselves (the endosemiotic idiotopes). Jerne’s theory postulated that within the reflective symmetry of idiotopes, and so forth, formed within the organism’s immune system would be found representations, or indexical icons, of most of the epitomes of the external universe. Internal imaging, a fascinating type of biochemical mimicry performed by the immune system, is now of paramount interest to semiotics.

3.2.3. Metabolic Code

“Metabolic code” is an expression coined by Gordon M. Tomkins (1975) in the course of his discussion of biological symbolism and the origin of intracellular communication. Tomkins distinguished between simple and complex modes of regulation, both present in modern organisms. By the former, he meant a direct chemical relationship between regulatory molecules and their effects (equivalent to Peirce’s secondness). Complex regulation, on the other hand, involves metabolic symbols and their domains (or Peirce’s thirdness). By symbol Tomkins meant a specific intracellular effector molecule, cyclic APM, which accumulates when a cell is exposed to a particular environment (or context). This symbol stands for a shortage of carbon; and the live organism, “upon processing the symbol, behaves so as to reconcile its well-being with that environmental condition (by heading elsewhere)” (Wright 1988:104). The term is appropriate because “metabolic symbols need bear no structural relationship to the molecules which promote their accumulation”; and, since a particular environmental condition is correlated with a corresponding intracellular symbol, “the relationship between the extra-and intracellular events may be considered as a ‘metabolic code’ in which a specific symbol represents a unique state of the environment” (Tomkins 1975:761). Tomkins also pointed out that, in most multicellular organisms (that is, the eukaryotes), only certain cells are stimulated directly by the environment; but that, in higher organisms, these in turn secrete specific effector molecules (the hormones), which signal other cells, presumably sequestered from the milieu extérieur, to respond metabolically, via a high number of intermediate steps, to the initial sign. “Specifically, the metabolic state of the sensor cell, represented by the levels of its intracellular symbol, is ‘encoded’ by the synthesis and secretion of corresponding levels of hormones. When the hormones reach responder cells, the metabolic message is ‘decoded’ into corresponding primary intracellular symbols” (1975:762). It should finally be emphasized that, in many organisms, the endocrine and the nervous systems are intimately connected; thus hormone release is often a function of neural stimulation (for example, Janković et al. 1987, passim).

3.2.4. Neural Code

As Prosser (1985:118) rightly observes, “Communication is what neurobiology is about. The modes of communication include membrane conductances, patterns of neuronal spikes and graded potentials, electric coupling between cells, electrical and chemical transmission at synapses, secretion, and modification of neural function.” Moreover, over the past three decades, neurobiology has moved increasingly into the orbit of semiotics, in the guise of a distinct discipline, named Neurocommunications, regarded by its practitioners, who draw on many basic sciences, as a “meta-subject” (see Whitfield 1984:4). In brief, this new field is apt to represent the (human) mind (the “software” level) and its underlying mechanism, the brain (the “hardware” level of the biological organ which allows cognition), as a pair of semiotic engines, or computational devices for processing verbal-and-nonverbal signs. However, there remains sharp disagreement about the representation of language and nonverbal systems, ranging from Chomsky’s theory, that we are born with genetically determined “mental organs,” requiring that the rules be in some sense innate for generalization to be possible from impoverished samples, a view which received considerable support from the work of David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, who discovered just such innate connections in the visual system, as well as from the distinguished researches of Colwyn Trevarthen on the prenatal growth of brain parts in infants, to Gerald Edelman’s and his colleagues’ researches on cell adhesion molecules (CAMs); this view accepts that the general patterns of neural connections are shaped by gene action, but suggests that the exact connections of individual cells are not genetically determined. At any rate, the critical questions—how rules are programmed genetically and how they are carried out by the intricate circuitry of the brain (let alone represented in the mind)—remain unanswered at this time. Cook uses the phrase “brain code” to describe the set of fundamental rules concerning how signs are stored and transmitted from site to site within the brain, to distinguish this from “neuron code,” which is reserved for the manner in which the mechanisms by which large groups of neurons transmit “images, thoughts and feelings which we suspect are the fundamental units of our psychological lives” (1986:xiii, 2-4). Although the decipherment of the brain code remains the ultimate goal of most research in the neurosciences and psychology, in practice this often proceeds by clarification of aspects of the neural code.

4. SEMIOSIS IN THE SUPERKINGDOMS

According to one standard scheme for the broad classification of organisms (after R. H. Whittaker, also discussed elsewhere in this book, passim; cf. Margulis and Schwartz 1988), five Superkingdoms are now distinguished: protists (including microbes composed of nucleated cells); bacteria; plants; animals; and fungi. In each group, distinct but intertwined modes of semiosis have evolved, some of which are better understood than others. Brief indications of general principles are given below, but no detailed discussion is possible in this chapter.

4.1. THE MICROCOSMOS

Microcosmos is the title of a superb book (Margulis and Sagan 1986a) portraying four billion years of microbial evolution which, of course, is still in progress, both around, within, and, indeed, as us—human bodies, for instance, are composed of one hundred quadrillion (100,000,000,000,000,000) bacterial cells, and our endosemiotic systems, including the nervous system, are all derived from intercommunicating aggregations of bacteria. The microcosmos began to evolve four billion years ago, in the Hadean Aeon, out of debris of supernova explosions, spread to land 1.3 billion years ago (in the Protozoic Aeon) as composite organisms, and these microcosmic collectives evolved into our plant and animal ancestors a mere 0.8 billion years ago (in the Proterozoic Aeon). According to the modern view of semiosis in the microcosmos, or bacterial semiosis, all bacteria on Earth constitute the communications network of a single superorganism whose continually shifting components are dispersed across the surface of the planet. Sonea and Panisset (1983:85) liken in extent the bacterial world to a global computerized communications network, possessing an enormous data base—more than the brain of any mammal—which functions in a manner reminiscent of human intelligence. Bacterial social life takes three forms: localized teams, the global ensemble itself, and a body interacting with eukaryotes (Sonea 1988:42-43; 1990:639-662). Each of these types of associations is characterized by its appropriate form of semiosis, a rapid and continuous shuffling, which seems unrestricted by physical, chemical, or geographic boundaries of energy, matter, and signs.

4.1.1. Symbiosis

The quintessentially semiotic concept of symbiosis (Füller 1958; Margulis 1981; Margulis and Sagan 1986a, esp. Chs. 8, 9)—together with such subsumed concepts as parasitism, mutualism, commensalism, and the like—is the key to semiosis in the microcosmos. The term refers to the living together of individuals of two or more species for most of the life cycle of each, and this cohabitation is clearly “often [in fact, invariably] facilitated by simple [?] forms of COMMUNICATION [sic] between the participants” (McFarland 1982:540). Symbiotic alliances, in due course, became permanent, converting organisms (namely, prokaryotes, which share a kind of immortality, but at the expense of lacking individuality) into new, lasting collectives (namely, eukaryotes, which, on the contrary, pursue individuality, but at the expense of an existence between the two poles of sex and death) that are more than simply the sum of their symbiotic parts. In brief, all visible organisms evolved through symbiotic unions between different microbes, which subsequently co-evolved as wholly integrated communities, enduring sharing of cells and bodies; such mergers of diverse organisms can be regarded as thoroughly interwoven living “corporations” (Margulis and Sagan 19863:127), harmoniously coordinated by means of nonverbal (and, in the case of hominids, also verbal) signs. These authors believe that “the concepts and signals of thought are based on chemical and physical abilities already latent in bacteria,” and are then moved to ask: “Could the true language of the nervous system . . . be spirochetal remnants, a combination of autocatalyzing RNA and tubulin proteins symbiotically integrated in the network of hormones, neurohormones, cells, and their wastes we call the human body? Is individual thought itself superorganismic, a collective phenomenon?” (ibid.:150-151). Although their hypothesis is not proven, it is most congenial with modern semiotic thinking, as is their additional extrapolation, that perhaps “groups of humans, sedentary and packed together in communities, cities, and webs of electromagnetic communication, are already beginning to form a network as far beyond thought as thought is from the concerted swimming of spirochetes” (ibid.:153). It is fascinating that as semiotically informed a student of the “information society” as Beniger suggests the same kind of “integrative machinery we might build from the spare parts amassed by our various disciplines” (1986:105; semiotics and semiosis are discussed on pp. 89-90), and traces the beginnings of what he calls “the control revolution” to the DNA as a three-dimensional control model (ibid.:112-118).

4.2. OVERVIEW OF THE PLANT-ANIMAL-FUNGUS TRICHOTOMY

These three categories—plants, animals, and fungi—distinguished by taxonomers according to the nutritional patterns of each class, that is, three different ways in which information (negentropy) is maintained by extracting order out of their environment, are complementary. Plants are the producers, which derive their food from inorganic sources by means of photosynthesis; animals, or ingesters, are the transformers, deriving their food, preformed organic compounds, from other organisms; fungi are the decomposers, which break their food down externally and then absorb the resulting small molecules from solution. On this macroscopic scale, we have two polar-opposite life forms: the composer plants, or the organisms that build up, and the decomposer fungi, or the organisms that break down; animals, which became supreme experts at semiosis in interactions among their many cells, among themselves, and with members of other life forms, can be seen as intermediate transforming agents midway between the other two. In passing, the remarkable parallelism between this systematists’ P-A-F model and the classic semioticians’ O-S-I model should be noted (but cannot be here explored).

4.2.1. Phytosemiotics

The semiosic principles of the vegetative world were most thoroughly discussed, under the designation “phytosemiotics,” by Krampen (1981; cf. Thure von Uexküll 1986:211-212). He argues that these are different from those of the animal world, “in that the absence of effectors and receptors does not allow for the constitution of [Jakob von Uexküll’s] functional cycle [see p. 54 above], of object signs and sign objects, or of an Umwelt,” but that the vegetative world “is nevertheless structured according to a base semiotics which cuts across all living beings, plants, animals, and humans alike” (Krampen 1981:203). Although plants are able to distinguish “self” from “nonself,” they are otherwise brainless solipsistic systems. However, plants “don’t really need brains,” for, as Margulis and Sagan (1986a:174-175) picturesquely point out, “they borrow ours. They have a strategic intelligence that resides more in the chemistry of photosynthesis and the ploys of the genes than in the tactics of the cerebral cortex; we behave for them.” Plant semiosis, as a matter of fact, incorporates the ancient microcosmos, a circumstance that accounts in part for botanical success. A “unifying theory of intercellular communication” has recently been developed (Roth and LeRoith 1987), which aims to explain at a single stroke the many coincidences involving plant molecules and animal (including human) cells, by showing that both the endocrine system and the nervous system descended from a common, more generalized evolutionary ancestor. This theory provides the explanation, as well, for scores of coincidences in cellular communication in plants and in animals, for instance, accounting for the efficacy of various medicinal herbs and modern plant-derived drugs, and such circumstances as the presence of an insulinlike substance in spinach and that truffles produce molecules identical to a steroid in boars, and the fact that sows detect and seek out even deeply buried truffles. Plants also have significant interactions with fungi as well as with animals (Krampen also described some conspicuous examples of the latter.) There is, however, a great deal of curious folklore about plant communication, the scientific basis of which remains to be investigated (see, for example, Montalverne 1984).

4.2.2. Mycosemiotics

The general features of fungi are presented by Burnett (1968). Mycologists agree that all fungi are heterotrophic organisms, the vast majority of which are constructed of more or less microscopic, cylindrical filaments (hyphae), with well-designed cell walls; but they disagree as to their taxonomic limits. Semiosis in fungi is not yet well understood, but the interactions of fungi with other organisms are basically known (ibid., Ch. 12): these can occur without actual contact, by secretion or leakage, and by other means as well. Fungi communicate with green plants (especially their roots), with algae, in particularly dense engagements (which have produced up to about 20,000 species of lichens), with warm-blooded animals (to which they are pathogenic), and with insects; “the essential steps in the establishment of any interaction appear to be governed by contact reactions and/or nutritional relationships” (ibid.:359), and competition among them is fierce. One of the most fascinating forms of semiosis was found in an excitingly relevant model species called Dictyostelium discoidium (which many, although not all, taxonomers class with the fungi). This was described in a classic paper by Bonner (1963):

Slime-mold cells [join to form an organism] in each life cycle. At first they are single amebocytes swimming around, eating bacteria, aloof from each other, untouching, voting straight Republican. Then, a bell sounds, and acrasin is released by special cells toward which the others converge in stellate ranks, touch, fuse together, and construct the slug, solid as a trout. A splendid stalk is raised, with a fruiting body on top, and out of this comes the next generation of amebocytes, ready to swim across the same moist ground, solitary and ambitious.

The sign carrier is cAMP (the ubiquitous molecule adenosine monophosphate), identical with the one Tomkins (1975) described in his article on the metabolic code and which has assumed the twin functions of (physiological) epinephrine action and (semiotic) mediation of the intracellular actions of almost all those hormones that interreact with the cell membrane or, in the case in point, signify starvation. The aggregation of the slime molds in single-cell form is coordinated by a sign system involving the cAMP receptor, the structure and activity of which is now clear (Klein et al. 1988). Significant homologies link the cAMP to sensory processes in higher organisms. The latest findings support the possibility that this relatively simple eukaryotic chemotactic semiosic system and various vertebrate sign systems evolved from a common ancestor. (For fuller details of this remarkable story of cell-cell semiosis by cAMP, the earliest symbolic vehicle uncovered thus far, and the implications thereof for eukaryotic chemotaxis in general, see Devreotes 1982; and, in layman’s terms, Wright 1988:196.) The same molecule is at work as a “second messenger” secreted by human liver cells as soon as epinephrin molecules (“first messengers”) bind to them. Second messengers of this sort are common in humans, mean different things in different contexts, but their basic Grundbedeutung (in Jakobson’s sense) is always “emergency.”

4.2.3. Zoosemiotics

The term “zoosemiotics” dates from 1963 and is discussed, in some detail, in Sebeok 1972. Observe that it denotes semiosis in animals inclusive of the nonverbal semiosic component in man, in contrast to the anthroposemiosic component, which necessarily and additionally implicates language; for convenience, however, only the languageless creatures will be considered in this section. The literature on this subject—virtually nonexistent before the early 1960s—has since grown hugely: Sebeok’s 1968 survey ran to almost 700 pages; his 1977b survey ran to more than 1,100; and it would now require a multivolume encyclopedia to encompass the accumulated scholarship. At the same time, no one has quite succeeded in producing a synthesis, in a biologically informed as well as semiotically interesting way, of the essential principles, taking fully into account what we know both of intraspecific, let alone the interspecific, aspects of how animals communicate. (Some useful texts on intraspecific communication are Smith 1977; Lewis and Gower 1980; and Bright 1984. Varieties of interspecific semiosis, with special emphasis on interactions between humans and animals, are discussed in Chapter 10 of this book, where further references can be found.) One overblown topic that received exaggerated media attention in the 1960s and 1970s, but which has proved a false trail and has since become essentially moribund, focuses on the search for verbal semiosis in four species of Great Apes, and perhaps in certain pelagic mammals as well. (For critical reviews of the mythology of language-endowed animals, see Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok 1980; Umiker-Sebeok and Sebeok 1981; and Sebeok 1981a, Ch. 8.)

Recent instructive researches in animal communication tend to view groupings—in particular, in such social animals as some insects, dolphins, wolves and lions, and of course primates—in a holistic way, as global semiosic systems. For example, honeybee colonies are now perceived as possessing a “collective intelligence,” but one that arises from fundamentally decentralized sign processing (cf. Seeley and Levien 1987). Complementing the traditional description of the operation of a honeybee colony as one wherein each bee processes information in serial fashion (say, in evaluating flower patches one at a time), the colony as a whole is seen as working in parallel (say, with many patches being rated at once). The analogy is to the massively parallel computers many artificial intelligence researchers are now using, on the assumption (which is in good conformity with neurophysiological facts) that the human brain is a fundamentally social structure, its semiosic capacity arising from the interaction of many relatively simple sign processors.

5. HOMINID FORMS

Cartmill, Pilbeam, and Isaac (1986) present a convenient, concise survey of developments in paleoanthropology during the last one hundred years. Hominid forms, which evolved out of the australopithecines, are commonly recognized in terms of three principal anatomical features: gradually increasing brain size; the modification of the limb and pelvic bones in adaptation to fully upright walking (“bipedal locomotion”); and a reduction in sexual dimorphism (that is, the difference in body size between males and females). Other important arguments derive, besides from fossils, from the archeological record. Forms which have thus far been identified include Homo habilis (“handy man,” 2.4 to 2.0 million years ago), first described in 1964, which is now generally recognized as a transitional form ancestral to all later Homo. H. habilis is the first hominid with a distinctly enlarged brain (600-800 cm³). It appears virtually certain that habilis had language, although not speech. (This corresponds, if roughly, to the distinction between Kognition and Sprache drawn in Muller 1987). Language at its inception was not used for exterior communication, but only as an interior modeling device. Members of early hominid species communicated with each other by nonverbal means, in the manner of all other primates (for details, see Sebeok 1986c and Sebeok 1989a). Homo erectus (“upright man,” over 1.5 million years ago) had a brain volume of 800-1,200 cm³ and a far more elaborate tool kit, including fire, and there is no doubt that it had language (yet not speech). Hominids from the upper Middle Pleistocene, starting about 300,000 years ago, with brain volumes of about 1,200-1,400 cm³, were our own immediate archaic sapiens (“wise man”) ancestors, with even more elaborate tools (for example, hafting), ritual burials, and central-place foraging. Evidence for rule-governed behaviors indicates that they not only had language but manifested it in the form of speech as well. Archaic sapiens divided into at least two subspecies, only one of which, modern sapiens sapiens (that is, ourselves), has continued to flourish, since about 40,000 years ago, with an average brain capacity of 1,500 cm³. (The latter, it is thought, also replaced H. sapiens neanderthalensis in Europe 35,000 years ago.) Thus verbal semiosis, or language-as-a-modeling-system—a modeling system being a tool wherewith an organism analyzes its surroundings—having emerged on the scene perhaps 2.5 or 3.0 million years ago, now survives solely in H. sapiens sapiens (a species that appeared only some 100,000 to 40,000 years ago), and seems always to have been an exclusive property of the genus Homo (Sebeok 1986a, 1986b); Jerison’s observation (1986:155), and attendant discussion, of a “uniquely human experience” (meaning species-typical) which arose “from our use of a cognitive system as a communication system” is right on the mark. The exaptation of language into speech and, later still, into other linear manifestations, such as script—all topics that belong to anthroposemiotics—will not be discussed here, except to call attention to an important observation by Gould and Vrba (1982:13) that applies a fortiori to the relationship of language as a biological adaptation (its historical genesis) to its current added utility as a communicative tool: “Most of what the [human] brain now does to enhance our survival lies in the domain of exaptation.” As to why this process of exaptation took several million years to accomplish, the answer seems to be that the adjustment of a species-specific mechanism for encoding language into speech, that is, producing signs vocally, with a matching mechanism for decoding it, that is, receiving and interpreting a stream of incoming verbal/vocal signs (sentences), must have taken that long to fine-tune, a process which is far from complete (since humans have great difficulties in understanding each other’s spoken messages). Hence Geschwind’s remark (1980:313) “that the forerunners of language were functions whose social advantages [that is, communicative function] were secondary but conferred an advantage for survival [the modeling function]” appears well taken.

6. BIOCOMMUNICATION, AND SOME IMPLICATIONS

The comprehensive (German) term Biokommunikation was employed by Tembrock (1971) to cover the flow of semiosis in the world of the living. While the domain of semiosis is essentially the same, it can also encompass, in any communicative loop, a human artifact, such as a computer, a robot, or automata generally. Moreover, the bold futuristic vision of Margulis and Sagan (1986b:44), according to which it is inevitable that human life and nonliving, manufactured parts will commingle in new “life-forms” within the next few decades, with molecules that, instead of turning into cell material, “would turn [energy] into information,” by a novel progression referred to as “cybersymbiosis,” likewise opens doors for an extension of evolutionary semiosis thus far into an eventual “cybersemiosis.”

6.1 THE GAIA HYPOTHESIS

“The Gaia hypothesis” refers to a unified planetary world view proposed by James Lovelock in 1979. According to this controversial hypothesis, the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, and the lithosphere interact with the biosphere of Earth, each being a compound component of a global unitary autopoietic, that is, a homeostatic self-regulating system. In this view, all living entities, from their smallest limits to their largest extent, including some ten million existing species, form parts of a single symbiotic ecological body dubbed Gaia. Greenstein (1988) is concerned with the more general proposition of the existence of a symbiosis between the universe on the one hand and life on the other. Should a view, along these lines, of a modulated biosphere prevail, it would in effect mean that all message generators/sources and destinations/interpreters could be regarded as participants in one gigantic semiosic web; and, if so, this would at the very least affect the style of future semiotic discourse.

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A somewhat different version of this chapter appears in Semiotik: Ein Handbuch zu den zeichentheoretischen Grundlagen von Natur und Kultur, ed. Roland Posner, Thomas A. Sebeok, and Klaus Robering (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, in press).