Frederik and lists,
Thank you for the clear answers. I am enjoying NP
and am impressed by its scholarship. I think
there is still one issue that is most important for biosemiotics.
At 06:48 PM 12/26/2014, Frederik wrote:
Linear discrete storage is of paramount
importance but still only one side of the coin -
the other being spatial information, e.g. in
visual, continuous icons. One of the early
important papers in biosemiotics (by Hoffmeyer
and Emmeche, in Semiotica, around 1990) made the
point that information inheritance in biology is
double. One part is the discrete information in
the genes - the other the continuous information
incarnated in the structure of the cell.
HP: The empirical issue is: How important for
evolution are continuous dynamic icons? Of course
evolution has discovered all kinds of epigenetic
inheritance effects.This has been a hot topic
since Lamarck. Today there is even a Journal,
<http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/ngi>Non-Genetic
Inheritance, (only one issue per year!). A
critical review of "soft inheritance" is in
<http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/279/1740/2913>Proc.<http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/279/1740/2913>Roy.<http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/279/1740/2913>Soc.<http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/279/1740/2913>B
6/28/2012 by Dickins and Rahman.
FS: So here I (with Hoffmeyer and Emmeche)
disagree with Howard: the egg cell itself forms
part of the inherited information (in gendered
organisms) - in simpler organisms, the cell
structure is inherited by the simple duplication of it.
HP: What structures making up an egg are not
under genetic control? Clearly the atoms, C, N,
O, H, etc. are not. They are fixed parts of any
gene-controlled molecule. But when a cell divides
do you want to say carbon atoms in the new cells are inherited?
In any case, this is not the fundamental
biosemiotic issue. From the physicist's point of
view (e.g., Boltzman, Schrödinger, von Neumann,
Wigner, et al) life is a fundamental problem
because it increases or maintains intricate,
non-statistical structured order in a very noisy
universe -- noise which causes all other ordered
structures to eventually dissipate, or dissipate
faster than life (eventually, nothing escapes dissipation).
The first level answer was grasped by Darwin.
There must be a heritable memory that maintains
structures (growth and metabolism). But this
answer still has the noise problem. Why is the
memory reliable? The second level answer should
be a biosemiotic principle. It is supported by
all kinds of evidence: The only sufficiently
reliable evolvable memories are discrete linear
symbol systems. That is not the only condition.
To be evolvable in an open-ended sense, the
symbol system must form a language with unlimited
expressive power (e.g.,
<https://www.academia.edu/2081540/The_physical_basis_of_coding_and_reliability_in_biological_evolution>Pattee<https://www.academia.edu/2081540/The_physical_basis_of_coding_and_reliability_in_biological_evolution>,
1968 to
<https://www.academia.edu/3144895/The_Necessity_of_Biosemiotics_Matter-Symbol_Complementarity>2007).
Hoffmeyer and Emmeche have a point, but the
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world_hypothesis>RNA
Model now appears as a good origin possibility.
One more question. I can see that the Peircean
triad of symbol, index, icon makes sense for
weathercocks, but I need examples of how it could
add to the current (parsimonious) description of
genetic expression in single cells. What are the index and icon vehicles?
Howard
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