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Biosemiotics and Development: Metaphors and Facts

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Abstract

As a field of scientific expertise, semiotics has the interesting property of being a relevant tool for understanding how scientists represent any domain of research, including the semiotic domain itself. This feature is particularly expressive in the case of biology, as it appears to be the case that a certain range of biological phenomena are of a semiotic character. However, it is not consensual the extent to which semiotics pervades biology. This paper deals with this issue for the particular case of developmental biology, stressing the role of semiotics-as-a-discipline in delimiting the extent of semiotics-as-a-natural-phenomenon and, specifically, in disentangling semiotic mechanisms from semiotic metaphors aimed at clarifying non-semiotic developmental mechanisms.

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Notes

  1. For some relevant loci of Peirce’s reflections on metaphors, see CP 1.367, CP 2.222, CP 2.276/7, CP 2.280, CP 2.290, CP 2.302, CP 2.306, CP 2.255, CP 2.258, CP 6.196/7. CP = Peirce, C.S. (1931–1966); reference to Peirce’s fragments is designated by CP followed by volume and paragraph number.

  2. This brings to mind Ruth Millikan’s (1984) conception of propositions as “iconic” signals for state of affairs, in the wake of Betrand Russell/Ludwig Wittgenstein’s pictorial theory of propositional meanings (Russell, 1910; Wittgenstein, 1922)

  3. “It seems to me that there is a fundamental fallacy in the use of the analogy relationship between a blueprint and the structure represented by it to represent the relationship between the genome at the zygote stage and the phenotypic adult. A blueprint is isomorphic with the structure that it represents. The ratios of lengths and widths in the blueprint are the same as those in the structure; the topographical relationships among the parts of the structure are the same as those among the corresponding parts of the blueprint; each part of the structure is represented by a separate part of the blueprint, and each part of the blueprint refers only to a specific part of the structure. It will be immediately obvious that this is profoundly different from the relationship between the genome and the phenotype of the higher animal.” (Lerhman, 1970: 34)

  4. “[…] plans and information […] have contingent developmental histories. The cognitive-causal models […] have tended to present these controls as ahistorical (or, rather, as having a phylogenetic history but not an ontogenetic one), which provide no satisfactory way of explaining either species-typical development (maturation) or the manifest flexibility and multiplicity of many developmental phenomena, save the declaration that all contingencies were somehow anticipated, or at least hypothesized, by the DNA. Fate is constructed, amended, and reconstructed, partly by the emerging organism itself. It is not known to anyone, not even the genes.” (Oyama, 2000: 137)

  5. In this paper, I disregard teleosemantic strategies aimed at preserving the intentional and/or informational properties of genes and other developmental interactants by retrospectively connecting them with the conditions under which they guaranteed the accomplishment of viable organisms in the evolutionary past. See, for example, Shea (2007) and subsequent works. In the context of this paper, the main objection that can be directed to this family of approaches is that they (assumedly) disconnect the representational properties of the entities concerned from developmental explanations, thus locating themselves out of the focus of this paper.

  6. A questioning that may perhaps be extended to the very role of the architect. For an illuminating starting point of reflection, see Rudofsky (1964).

  7. Mutatis mutandis, the argument also runs for the case of the patterning role of DNA relative to proteins. As stressed by Paul Griffiths, “the proximal effects of DNA are uniquely determined by physical laws” (Griffiths, 2001: 402).

  8. Paul Griffiths observes that “information,” as applied in developmental studies, “is a way to talk about correlation” (Griffiths, 2001: 395).

  9. The history and implications of the idea of a temporal dimension of BPM has been described as “reaction norm” by Carl Schlichting and Massimo Pigliucci (1988), and integrated into the “Extended Evolutionary Synthesis” by Massimo Pigliucci. See Schlichting and Pigliucci (1988) and Pigliucci (2010). I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this to me.

  10. This is a matter with far-reaching philosophical consequences. To refer to just one of its multiple ramifications, Hume observed that secular debates on nativism have a lot to do with taking too literally an arbitrary boundary between prenatal and postnatal life. In his own words:

    For what is meant by ‘innate’? If ‘innate’ be equivalent to ‘natural’, then all perceptions and ideas of the mind must be allowed innate or natural, in whatever sense we take the latter word, whether in opposition to what is uncommon, artificial, or miraculous. If by innate be meant ‘contemporary with ours birth’ the dispute seems to be frivolous; nor is worth while to enquire at what time thinking begins, whether before, at, or after our birth (Hume, 1748/2000: 12, note).

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Acknowledgments

This article has benefitted from a grant from the Spanish Government (FFI2017-87699-P). I am grateful for the valuable recommendations of two anonymous reviewers. I am also grateful to Tiago Rama for his insightful comments, so valuable that they deserve monographic separate consideration. Any remaining errors are mine.

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    Guillermo Lorenzo

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Lorenzo, G. Biosemiotics and Development: Metaphors and Facts. Biosemiotics 14, 479–497 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-021-09433-z

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