thought this bit about "code duality" and the biosemiotics take on the analog and the digital might be of interest here. Wonderful to read this kind of work Alan, Thanks!
lq Life, then, exhibits a non-trivial, semiotic, interaction between two co-existing messages, the analogly coded message of the organism itself and its redescription in the digital code of DNA. This principle has been termed code-duality (Hoffmeyer and Emmeche 1991). As analogly coded messages the organisms recognise and interact with each other in the ecological space, while as digitally coded messages they (after eventual recombination through meiosis and fertilisation in sexually reproducing species) are passively carried forward in time between generations. The essence of heredity is ‘semiotic survival’ . The joint emergence on our planet of life and code-duality brought us from the sphere of difference to the sphere of distinction, i.e. information in the sense of Gregory Bateson's famous definition: "a difference which makes a difference" (Bateson 1970), which is in fact quite close to a sign in the sense of Peirce. Sebeok’s prophesy that “a full understanding of the dynamics of semiosis may in the last analysis turn out to be no less than the definition of life” is worth mentioning in this connection (Sebeok 1979).
