TEN

“Animal” in Biological
and Semiotic Perspective

Whatever else an animal may be, it is clear that each is a living system, or subsystem, a complex array of atoms organized and maintained according to certain principles, the most important among these being negative entropy. The classic statement emphasizing this fact is to be found in Schrodinger’s famous book, What Is Life? (1946:77), where he addresses an “organism’s astonishing gift of concentrating a ‘stream of order’ on itself and thus escaping the decay into atomic chaos—of ‘drinking orderliness’ from a suitable environment.”

The importance of Schrödinger’s formulation, with its stress on the generation of order, seems to me to derive from two crucial implications. First, in invoking the notion of entropy, which in statistical mechanics is fundamental to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, it authenticates that life conforms to the basic laws of physics (Ling 1984). Second, since negative entropy is closely coupled with the notion (or, more accurately, a notion) of information—that which “embodies, expresses, and often specifies order” (Medawar and Medawar 1983:205)—it demonstrates the salience of semiotics to an understanding of life. Schrodinger himself (1946:79) hints at the latter when he remarks on the power of a group of atoms—he calls them a “tiny central office”—to produce “orderly events” in the isolated cell, and then goes on to ask: “do they not resemble stations of a local government dispersed through the body, communicating with each other with great ease, thanks to the code that is common to all of them?”

If the subject matter of semiotics “is the exchange of any messages whatever and of the systems of signs which underlie them” (Sebeok 1985:1), the amount of information is “a measure of the degree of order which is peculiarly associated with those patterns which are distributed as messages in time” (Wiener 1950:21). In short, life couples two transmutative processes, one energetic or physical, the other informational or semiosic. The former has to do with the conversion of low-entropy articles, integrating energy flowing from external sources, into high-entropy waste products disgorged into other open systems; the latter points to the transformation of signs into (as a rule) more developed signs (an identification of organisms with signs that goes back at least to Peirce 1868).

There are two striking properties of life. One of these is hierarchical organization (cf. Bonner 1969; and Salthe 1985). This is a universal characteristic which life shares with the rest of the cosmos and which defines, in the overall architecture of the universe, its position on a continuum of scale between the vanishingly small (leptons, photons, and quarks) and the indefinitely large (galactic superclusters).

The second conspicuous property lies in the contrast between, and fundamental invariance in, life’s subjacent biochemistry (a virtually uniform pool of twenty amino acids) and the prodigal variety in the individual expressions thereof, the latter depending on shifts in the environmental context within the global biosphere.

Given that all animals are composed of matter in a “living state,” it is equally clear that by no means all life forms are animals. Competing definitions of life abound (for example, Miller 1978), as well as miscellaneous paradigms to account for its origin (for example, Schopf 1983), but these need not be discussed here. Indeed, such an exercise may not even serve any useful purpose, as Pirie (1937) has argued, especially considering the existence of borderline phenomena, comparable with the transition from, say, green to yellow or acid to alkaline. The supposedly ironclad distinction between life and nonlife becomes fuzzy if you look not only back far enough in time, but also in the light of recent developments in commingling and breeding life forms (including humans) with manufactured objects, as is breath takingly envisioned by Margulis and Sagan (1986b).

The place of animals among other living systems and their distinctive features do, however, require consideration. Macro taxonomy, the craft of classifying, is a vast (if not always fashionable) field of endeavor, masterfully explored in the realm of biology by Mayr (1982). However, the sole biologically valid classification of animals, since Darwin, is of subordinate classes whose members are united by common heritage or descent at one level of ancestry into superordinate classes whose members are united at the next ascending level. In Darwin’s own words, “all true classification is genealogical” (1859:420).

There are many competing representations of evolutionary relations on all levels, and all of these are doubtless provisional. For example, the Linnaean plant-versus-animal dichotomy has been argued on quite different grounds by naturalists since the eighteenth century. Mayr (1965:418-420) lists eleven clusters of distinctive features among the more important differences which have been variously adduced. This notwithstanding, he concludes by noting that “it is important to emphasize that the species of animals and plants are nevertheless essentially similar. Plants and animals are virtually identical in their genetic and cytological mechanisms.” Thus, the choice of a classification scheme is ultimately (although, of course, within limits) a personal matter. I favor the one which seems to me to provide the maximum heuristic guidance. That is the codification proposed by Whittaker (1959) and refined by him a decade later (1969).

Whittaker reviews the broad, conventional two-way classification of all organisms—into plants and animals—and enumerates its drawbacks, as well as those of an alternative quadripartite scheme proposed by Copeland (for example, 1956). He then puts forward a pentad of his own, which, although having certain recognized deficiencies as well, seems to me the most comprehensive and cogent system worked out thus far. Whittaker’s classification is based on a combination of two sets of distinctions, concerning respectively levels of organization and types of organization. The first is derived from the principle of hierarchy already mentioned. The second relates to three principal modes of nutrition, that is, to three different ways in which information (negentropy) is maintained by extracting order out of the environment. This second set of distinctions sorts macroscopic entities into three complementary categories, called Superkingdoms, within the pervasive latticed configuration of the terrestrial biosphere. These are—as discussed variously throughout this book—as follows:

1. Plants, or producers, which derive their food from inorganic sources, by photosynthesis.

2. Animals, or ingestors, which derive their food—preformed organic compounds—from other organisms. They may be subdivided into three classes:

(A) If they eat plants, we call them herbivores.

(B) If they eat animals that eat plants, we call them carnivores (or predators).

(C) If they eat both, we call them omnivores.

Animals are designated “ingestors” because they incorporate food into their bodies, where the intake is then digested.

3. Fungi, or decomposers in opposition to animals do not incorporate food into their bodies, but they “secrete digestive enzymes into the environment to break down their food externally and they absorb the resulting small molecules from solution” (Margulis 1981:32).

On this macroscopic scale animals can be catalogued as intermediate transforming agents midway between two polar opposite life forms: the composers, or organisms that “build up,” and the decomposers, or organisms that “break down.” Bernard (1878:1, 37) once coined a pair of slogans, paradoxically entailing both production, La vie, c’est la création, and decay, La vie, c’est la mort. Of animals, it may well be added, La vie, c’est l’entremise!¹

Most remaining life forms can be negatively defined as nonplants, nonanimals, and nonfungi. By application of the first principle of hierarchy, these fall into one of two groups:

4. Protoctists, comprising the remaining eukaryotes, all of them being micro-organisms lacking embryogenesis but displaying alimentary heterogeneity, including the familiar triad of photosynthetic, ingesting as well as absorbing species (here belong algae, protozoa, slime molds and nets, and so forth).

5. Prokaryotes, the Monera, where bacteria belong, are generally single-celled creatures which, although nutritionally diverse, are incapable of ingestion (see also Margulis and Sagan 1986a).²

Let me now consider further the classification of animals. In addition to Whittaker’s double characterization: first, by level of entitation—a term coined by the physiologist Gerard (1969:218-219) to mean “the identification of entity,” and which he considered vastly more important than the concept of quantitation—and, second, by nutritional mode, two further principles may be introduced, one embryological, the other biosemiosic. The former is stated by Margulis (1981:32) thus: “in all animals, the zygote formed by the fertilization of the female by the male gamete develops into a ball of cells called a blastula,” which unambiguously separates animals from all other forms by virtue of their development.

All animates are bombarded by signs emanating from their environment, which includes a milieu intérieur, as well as, of course, other animates sharing their environment, some conspecific, some not (for further pertinent particulars, see Sebeok 1986a, Ch. 3). Such inputs are eventually transmuted into outputs consisting of strings of further signs. This sign-process is called semiosis. The pioneer explorer of the decisive role of semiosis in the origin and operation of life processes was Jakob von Uexküll, also a preeminent founder of modern ethology. He advanced a highly original and integrated theory of semiosis in the framework of what came to be known as Umwelt-Forschung, the study of phenomenal worlds, self-worlds, or the subjective universe.³

Although Umwelt research has focused almost wholly on animals, including humans (for example, Sebeok 1979b), plants are also discussed, contrastively if briefly, and there have been allusions even to plasmodial slime molds—now in a phylum of the Protoctista, although classified by Uexküll and others among the fungi (Uexküll 1982:357). As Uexküll maintained (ibid.:33f.), and Krampen (1981) later greatly elaborated, plants differ from animals in that they lack a “functional cycle” (Thure von Uexküll 1980, Ch. 3) which would link receptor organs via a mesh of nerve fibers to effector organs. They are rather immersed directly in their habitat. The relationships of a plant with its habitat, or casing, “are altogether different from those of the animals with their Umwelts.” However, Krampen (1981:203) concludes that the “vegetative world is nevertheless structured according to a base semiotics which cuts across all living beings, plants, animals, and humans alike.” He argues that while plants exhibit predominantly indexical signs, in animals both indexical and iconic signs appear, whereas human sign-processes encompass the entire gamut from indexicality via iconicity to symbolicity.⁴ However this may be—and in my opinion the entire subject cries out for more empirical investigation—it is already obvious that one must suppose, at least as a working assumption, that there are bound to be substantive differences among the several branches of biosemiotics (or biocommunication, as in Tembrock 1971): endosemiotics (Thure von Uexküll 1980:291, 1986:204), zoosemiotics (Sebeok 1963), phytosemiotics (Krampen 1981), and, in posse, mycosemiotics.⁵

These and related subfields are very unevenly developed. The literature of zoosemiotics alone—even discounting human communication—is so prodigious that no summary can be attempted here, although one point pertinent to the topic of this chapter perhaps does need to be emphasized.

It seems to me beyond reasonable doubt that the symbiotic theory of the origin and evolution of cells is correct. This means that eukaryotic forms composed of nucleated cells—including such advanced forms as animals—evolved in consequence of certain symbioses between ancestral prokaryotes in the Proterozoic Aeon, by about 800 million years ago, and thereafter continued to diversify (see Margulis and Sagan 1986a, esp. Chs. 8, 9).

“Symbiosis,” including commensalism, mutualism, and so forth, is plainly a form of semiosis: “mutual cooperation is often facilitated by simple forms of communication between the participants,” as The Oxford Companion puts it, with undue caution (McFarland 1982:540). Biologists appear reluctant to describe it as such, yet the most obvious fact about symbionts is that they are types of communicants. They are organisms of different species living together, in ceaseless informative commerce, for most of the life cycles of each, and to their mutual benefit. “Semiochemical effects occur between organisms of all types” (Albone 1984:2; for the sharing of semiochemicals in human bonding-related behavior, see Nicholson 1984). Their exchanges are accomplished by chemical messengers of precision and subtlety; the topics of their “conversations” have to do largely with territory or reproduction. The exosemiotic chemical signals yoking micro-organisms together—hormonal and chemical neurotransmitters—evolved in life forms such as animals into specialized and localized endosemiotic cells within the body tissue (Krieger 1983:977). Such cells facilitate exceedingly complex mutual communicative interactions between the immune and nervous systems, known as “neuroimmunomodulation.” Research in this area has far-reaching clinical as well as philosophical implications, some of which I have reviewed elsewhere (Sebeok 1981b).

Mayr (1982:146) defines taxonomy as “the theory and practice of delimiting kinds of organisms and of classifying them.” However, this kind of enterprise, fathered in its evolutionary perspective by Darwin, is but a segment of the far more venerable as well as unbounded science of systematics which, as Simpson (1961; cf. Mayr 1982:145) taught it, has diversity as its subject matter. Systems of classification may depend on a whole variety of alternative, presumably complementary, approaches. For example, given that multiple biochemical pathways emerged for the biosynthesis of chlorophyll, plants can be reclassified according to how they fabricate their photosynthetic pigments. As Lowenstein (1984:541), for one, has cogently claimed, comparisons based on DNA or on proteins can be vastly fecund, especially when it comes to “the inclusion of extinct species in phylogenies, the identification of species in fossil studies and museum collections, and broad systematic analysis of living animals and plants.”

In short, all organisms—especially plants, animals, and fungi—pertain at once to a plurality of codes, each of which is capable of being transmuted into every other. To paraphrase a striking passage from one of Levi-Strauss’s latest books (1985:228), “like a text less intelligible in one language than in several, from many different versions, rendered simultaneously, there might flow a sense richer and more profound than each of the partial and distorted meanings that any single version, taken in isolation, might yield to us.”⁶ Although his observation was meant to apply to myths, viewed as formulaic networks, the same surely holds for groupings of animals into at once biologically relevant assemblages and anthropologically as well as semiotically relevant folk arrangements, such as were discussed, for instance, for English animal categories by Leach (1964) or, to adumbrate the “meaning of life” in assorted African societies, by Willis (1974). Levi-Strauss (1962:57, 59 [1966:42-43]) has remarked on the “evidence of thought which is experienced in all the exercises of speculation and resembles that of the naturalists and alchemists of antiquity and the middle ages. . . . Native classifications are not only methodical and based on carefully built up theoretical knowledge. They are also at times comparable, from a formal point of view, to those still in use in zoology and botany.” Thus, it is hardly surprising that Aristotle classified whales as fish and that, despite their replacement in 1693 by John Ray (refined by Linne in 1758) into that class of vertebrates biologists call the Mammalia, infraclass Eutheria, order Cetacea, most laymen still believe that whales are, indeed, fish. Whales are, of course, both, and other entities—such as Moby Dick—to boot.

The transience from code to code can become critical. In certain societies a plant can substitute for an animal, as a cucumber for an ox in the well-known case of the Nuer (Evans-Pritchard 1956) and, as elsewhere in Africa, a token of a plentiful animal species can take the place of a religiously prescribed but rare one. A fortiori a beast can stand in, symbolically, for a human in a sacrificial rite. Nor should one overlook liminoid creatures belonging to overlapping codes—Turner (1974:253) singles out the centaur Cheiron as a classical prototype epitomizing such liminality—which render the would-be cataloguer’s chore so wearisome. Just how much they do so is beautifully explored in Vercors’s penetrating novel centering on an imaginary creature named Paranthropus erectus (Bruller 1953).

Brown (1984) is concerned with folk zoological life forms. Appendix B to his book contains a rich source of lexical data on zoological life-form coding from more than 220 globally scattered languages, postulating six stages of terminological growth, ranging, for example, from no zoological forms to a mammal-“wug” (that is worm + bug) dichotomy, on to a bird-fish-snake trichotomy, and so forth.

To appreciate what counts as an animal for humans, and in what ways, finally requires a concentrated semiotic enquiry, which can only be hinted at in the following paragraphs. An animal is upgraded to a cultural object, an object of value, as a by-product of structuring, ordering, and classifying: the animal, in short, becomes a marker in MacCannell’s (1976:110) sense, a chunk of concentrated information, a signifier segregated from a signified by virtue of “the superimposition of a system of social values” (ibid.:119). From this point of view it seems promising to consider the many and varied circumstances under which humans may encounter animals. In what follows I shall identify and briefly comment on some of the most common situations. The following list is presented in no particular order, and is certainly not all-embracing. Moreover, the different situations are not necessarily exclusive, and may partially coincide.

1. The human as predator. Human beings prey upon or even annihilate animal species, for different reasons. Some, like antelopes, may be hunted down as game; certain carnivores, such as the East African crocodile, are condemned as “vermin” (a distancing label, discussed by Serpell [1986:159-162] under the heading of justificatory “misrepresentation”); primates are overused in medical research; marsupials are killed for their hides; and cetaceans are exploited for their oil. In effect, every time a population of animals is exterminated, the draining of the gene pool is concurrently and irreversibly accompanied by the elimination of a unique communicative code.

2. The human as prey. Human beings become the casualties of animals’ depredations: for example, human malaria is caused by any of four sporozoites (parasitic protozoans). Each is transmitted from human to human by a female Anopheles mosquito, which injects saliva containing plasmodian sporozoites as it bites (even today, more people die every year of mosquitoborne disease than from any other single cause; cf. Stanier et al. 1985:646). Another forceful illustration is provided by Geist’s speculations on the prehistoric bears of native North America and their possible role in delaying human colonization of that continent (Geist 1986).

3. The human as “partner.” Human beings coexist with animals in some sort of partnership (see Katcher and Beck 1983), as, for example, in a purely guest-host relationship (such as aquarium fish with their master) or in a nexus of mutual dependence (such as in beekeeping; a seeing-eye dog working in the service of a blind person; dogs used for hauling, such as Arctic sled dogs; dogs or cheetahs used for tracking; birds as fishing partners, such as a cormorant catching fish for a Japanese fisherman in exchange for a food reward matching the size of the catch; or as hunting partners, such as the raptors described by Frederick II [1194-1250] in his classic and innovative account. De arte venandi cum avibus; pets as therapists [Beck and Katcher 1983, Ch. 8; Serpell 1986, Ch. 6]; and the like).

A special set of subproblems in this category can be identified when animals are used as sexual partners by either men or women, a phenomenon known as “cross-species attachment” (Money 1986:75f.). Bestiality, or the carnal exploitation of animals, has been known at least since Apuleius (cf. an “ancient pre-Columbian custom among Indians of the Caribbean coast of Columbia,” cited by Money [ibid.], “that associates the attainment of manhood with the exercise of copulating with donkeys”). Zoophilic acts, involving cattle, horses, or donkeys, dogs, monkeys, or barnyard fowl, are a common theme of pornographic literature; there is also a variant called “formicophilia,” “in which arousal and orgasm are dependent on the sensations produced by small creatures like snails, frogs, ants or other insects creeping, crawling, or nibbling the genitalia and perianal area, and the nipples” (ibid.). In some urban environments, animals are used as social facilitators, or catalysts; thus, dogs are used by European female, as well as male, streetwalkers to assist in striking up conversations with potential clients. The curious Western phenomenon of pet cemeteries could further be mentioned here.

4. Sport and entertainment. Animals have been long and variously used for human amusement: in Roman circuses (gladiators wrestling with big cats), bullfighting rings, alligator wrestling, cockfights, and frog-jumping contests. Here, too, belong horse and dog races and, perhaps marginally, birdwatching, (urban) pigeon feeding, and, more generally, safaris with photographic intent.

5. Parasitism. This may work in either direction:

(A) The activities of humans in relation to the reindeer, for instance, can be described as those of a social parasite; interspecific associations, in relation to parasitism and other concepts, are discussed by Ingold (i98o:3of.). He writes: “It is a matter of personal experience, since when I was first in the field in Lapland, an old reindeer named Enoch made a habit of coming round, at 11 o’clock every morning, to visit the place where I regularly urinated outside my cabin” (personal communication).

(B) Each of us has about as many organisms on the surface of our skin as there are people on earth. The mite Demodex, crab lice, fleas, and bedbugs are a few samples of the teeming miniature parasitic population sharing the ecological niche constituted by human bodies (Andrews 1976).⁷

6. Conspecificity. An animal may accept a human as a conspecific; this is also known as “zoomorphism.” As early as 1910, Heinroth described the attachment of incubator-hatched greylag goslings to human beings. These goslings reject any goose or gander as parent objects, opting instead to look upon humans as their exclusive parents. Many other hand-reared birds were later found to have transferred their adult sexual behavior toward their human caretakers. Morris and Morris (1966:182f.) recount attempts by a “fully humanized” female panda, Chi-Chi, to mate with her keepers; and the sexual advances of a male dolphin, Peter, toward his female trainer, Margaret Howe, are recorded in her published protocol (Lilly 1967:282). The latter episode is represented as an accomplished, although fictional, aquatic congress in Ted Mooney’s 1981 novel, Easy Travel to Other Planets (cf. also 3 above).

7. Insentience. An animal may define a human as a part of its inanimate Umwelt, as when young birds will perch on the keeper’s head or even on his or her outstretched arm, as though it were a branch. Fascinating behaviors of this sort were extensively analyzed by Hediger (1969:81-83), who explains one of the tricks performed by snake charmers on the basis of this principle of misapprehending a human limb for an insensate substrate. According to Hediger, mammals such as the koala may also regard humans as a place for climbing, and make use of them accordingly. Especially intriguing is Hediger’s discussion (ibid.:91-95) of the “centaurlike fusion” of man and motor vehicles, especially in the context of biggame reserves, and of how wild animals view such relatively novel combinations.

8. Taming, defined as the reduction or possibly total elimination of an animal’s flight reaction from man, may be deliberately induced. This is an indispensable precondition for both training and domestication. In the latter, not only the care and feeding, but most particularly the breeding, of an animal—or the communication of genetic information from one generation to the next—have to some degree come under human control. When the biologically altered domesticated animal breeds out of control, it is referred to as “feral,” as opposed to “wild.”

9. Training of animals by humans may take one of two counterpolar forms:

(A) A rat forced to swim under water to escape drowning is taught to take the alley in a submerged Y-maze when the correct decision is indicated by the brighter of two alleys; a porpoise is brought under behavioral control to locate and retrieve underwater objects. Such efforts are called apprentissage, loosely rendered as “scientific” or “laboratory training” (cf. Silverman 1978) or, in German, wissenschaftliche Dressur.

(B) A horse is taught to perform a comedy act for the purposes of exhibition (cf. Bouissac 1985, Ch. 4); a porpoise is taught to play basketball. Such efforts are called dressage, or circus (namely, oceanarium) training, or höhere Dressur (as with the Lippizaners of the Spanish Riding School).

Note that apprentissage and dressage are fundamentally distinct ways of shaping behavior, although from a semiotic point of view they constitute complementary measures, in particular as regards their pragmatic import. This distinction was intuitively appreciated by Hediger as early as 1935, in his dissertation, and was later materially advanced in several of his published writings (for example, Hediger 1979:286). For instance, Hediger insightfully emphasized that apprentissage entails a reduction of the animalman nexus to as close to zero as feasible. Dressage, conversely, requires a maximum intensification of the ligature, with the richest possible emotional involvement. This is one dimension of semiotic variation.

Apropos dressage, Breland and Breland (1966:108) relate an arresting informal observation concerning the emotional component of a parrot’s vocalization. In the exhibition in question the bird picks up a toy telephone, holds it up to his ear, and says “Hello!” Afterward he receives a peanut, it was noted that every time the bird said “Hello!” “the pupils of his eyes contracted and dilated remarkably.” The sign is emitted solely in an emotionally charged situation, for the pupil-size cue may not occur if the bird is “talking” merely for peanuts (kindred observations have been made of domestic cats).

A second dimension of semiotic variation lies, in Hediger’s words, between “Dressur ohne Affektaufwand” (or without affective display) and “Dressur mit bedeutendem Affektaufwand” (or with significant affective display).

Many other juxtapositions of human and animal could fruitfully be examined; concerning some of these there of course already exist more-or less-substantial studies. These areas include the representation of animals in mythology, oral and written literature, cartoons, on the stage and in the performing arts generally (especially the cinema and television), and in the shape of dolls, puppets, toys, and robots. Animals are often featured, by design, in magazine and TV advertising.

Moreover, countless studies deal with interactions between humans and particular sets of demarcated animals, individual anthropomorphic animals, and classes of exploited captives, such as primates (Erwin et al. 1979), or species in the aggregate (Clutton-Brock 1981; Craig 1981; Houpt and Wolski 1982, Ch. 2), birds in general (Murton 1971), and horses in particular (Lawrence 1985). A synthesis of this vast literature, especially in its fascinating semiotic ramifications, is long overdue.

Saint Augustine was once asked: what is time? He answered: “If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one that asks, I know not.”

To recapitulate, the central purpose of this chapter is to inquire what, broadly speaking, an animal is. That question ought to be preceded by another: what is life? Although there may not be an absolutely rigorous distinction between inanimate matter and matter in a living state, it is clear enough that animates undergo semiosis, that is, they exchange, among other items, messages, which are strings of signs.

Paying heed, first, to biologically valid (meaning strictly genealogical) classificatory schemes, five major life forms were distinguished, among which, on the macro-level, the mediating position of animals between plants and fungi was accentuated. The critical relevance of Umwelt-Forschung to an understanding of animals was mentioned, but was not further developed. The recalcitrant term Umwelt had best be rendered in English by the word “model” (as recently expounded in Sebeok 1986c). The biologist’s notion of symbiosis, it was also suggested, is equivalent to the philosopher’s notion of semiosis.

Turning back to systematics, of which taxonomy is but one component, animals were reassessed from the standpoint of folk classification. In this perspective it was argued that an animal always belongs at once to a multiple array of codes, some natural, or “scientific,” others disparately cultural. Far from being irreconcilable, such codes complement one another. Therefore, it is perfectly in order, as one illustration, to regard a whale as being simultaneously a mammal and a fish, as well as, moreover, an enigmatic creature of man’s imagination.

The anthropological, or semiotic, definitions of “animal” acquire concreteness and saliency within different types of man-animal confrontation, but their enumeration cannot be carried out exhaustively in the compass of a brief essay such as this. Nevertheless, even the very incomplete and preliminary listing attempted here may serve to elicit further investigation.

Notes

1. In semiosis, signs tend to function in a trinity of mutually exclusive classes as the intermediate transforming agents between “objects” and “interpretants.” This is highly pertinent to Peirce’s man-sign (more broadly, animal-sign) analogy. (For a recent discussion by an anthropologist, see Singer 1984, esp. pp. 1-2, 55-56, 61.)

2. It is at present unclear whether the recently discovered thermophilic (“black smoker”) bacteria of the East Pacific Rise, employing symbiotic chemosynthesis, thus surviving in utter independence of the sun (that is, of photosynthesis) and seemingly constituting the only closed geothermal (terrestrial) ecosystem not integrated with the rest of life, can or cannot be grouped with “ordinary” bacteria (see Baross and Deming 1983; and Jannasch and Mottl 1985). The giant worms subsisting, by absorption, upon these microbial symbionts thus also derive their energy from underwater volcanoes, not sunlight.

3. Among his many writings, Jakob von Uexküll (1982), creatively amplified by his elder son, Thure, is both one of the most important and one of the most readily accessible in English. (See also Thure von Uexküll 1980:291-388, “Die Umweltlehre als Theorie der Zeichenprozesse; Lorenz 1971:273-277; and Sebeok 1979b, Ch. 10.)

4. Peirce’s trichotomous classification of signs into iconic, indexical, and symbolic is fundamental in semiotics. It has been discussed by many commentators, notably Burks (1949), Ayer (1968:149-158), Sebeok (1975), and, most recently, Hookway (1985, Ch. 4). (See also the entries under each of these three lemmata; and Joseph Ransdell’s article on Peirce, in Sebeok 1986b.)

5. See Bonner 1963 for semiosis in the Acrasieae—however classified, they must be reckoned aggregation organisms par excellence. (See also Stanier et al. 1985:5437)

6. “Comme un texte peu intelligible en une seule langue, s’il est rendu simultanément dans plusieurs, laissera peut-être émaner de ces versions differentes un sens plus riche et plus profond qu’aucun de ceux, partiels et mutilés, auqel chaque version prise à part eût permis d’accéder.”

7. In the framework of Jakob von Uexküll, the ecological niche could best be described as “Umwelt-from-outside,” from the standpoint of the observer of the subject concerned.

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This chapter was written at the invitation of Tim Ingold for presentation at the World Archaelogical Congress, Southampton, England, September 1986. The theme of the session at which it was delivered was “Cultural Attitudes to Animals, including Birds, Fish and Invertebrates” It was published in What Is an Animal? ed. Tim Ingold (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 63-76. A version was published in my volume of Japanese essays on zoosemiotics, Doubutsu Kigouron-shu (Tokyo: Keiso Shobo, 1989).