BOOK REVIEW

The semiosis of life

Hoffmeyer, Jesper. Biosemiotics: an examination into the signsof life and the life of signs, Trans. Hoffmeyer, Jesperand Favareau, David. Edited by Favareau, Donald. Universityof Scranton Press, Scranton, 2008, xix + 419 pp, $US45, HB

Catherine Mills

Published online: 8 April 2010

� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Initially published in Danish in 2005, Hoffmeyer’s comprehensive introduction to

the emerging field of biosemiotics was a much anticipated publication in English,

and may well mark the coming of age of the field of theoretical biology in the

Anglo-American context. Hoffmeyer’s task is not an easy one, and nor is the

resulting text always an easy read. It straddles complex philosophical ideas

(especially about language and signification), debates in theoretical biology and the

empirical details of complex biological phenomena. But, for the most part, it does

this with considerable sophistication and clarity and provides an overarching

framework for rethinking some of the central issues in biology today. The core idea

of biosemiotics according to Hoffmeyer is that ‘‘living nature is… essentially driven

by, or actually consisting of, semiosis, that is to say, processes of sign relations and

their signification—or function—in the biological processes of life’’ (p. 4). This

construal of life as fundamentally semiotic entails a striking shift away from some

of the doxa of contemporary biology—at least as popularly understood—and the

discourses that build upon it, including humanistic discourses such as bioethics. In

particular, it rejects the popular understanding, propagated by authors such as

Richard Dawkins, that the gene is the prime mover of life processes such as

evolution. It also rejects a correlative account of biochemical information, which

reifies and decontextualises informational transference by construing it as the simple

transportation of packages from sender to receiver.

In place of these views, Hoffmeyer builds an approach to biological processes

that encompasses varying levels of complexity—from a single cell organism to the

human being—and sees them as being fundamentally integrated in a rich

semiosphere, where interpretation is the key term. Central to this approach is a

view of semiosis that draws upon the work of the founder of American pragmatism,

C. Mills (&)

Unit for History and Philosophy of Science & Centre for Values, Ethics and the Law in Medicine,

University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia

e-mail: catherine.mills@sydney.edu.au

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DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9410-7

Charles Peirce, especially his cosmology and account of ‘semeiosis’. In this, the

meaning of the sign—something that refers to some other thing—is not simply

established in a dyadic relation between sign and reference. Instead, sign relations

are necessarily triadic, involving the logical entities of the primary sign (‘repre-

sentamen’ in Peirce’s terms), the object and the interpretant, where the interpretant

is in no way restricted to the person, and in which the interpretant is determined as a

representamen of the object to another interpretant and so on. Thus, the meaning of

a sign is fundamentally dependent on ‘‘the nature and the context of its receptive

system, the sensing body—and that body’s relations with externality are mediated

continually by the active establishment and disestablishment of signs’’ (p. xiv). The

Peircian underpinning of biosemiotics is perhaps the most philosophically complex,

if not controversial, aspect of it; Hoffmeyer provides an interesting articulation of

this approach in Part One of the book, especially through the ‘‘semiotics of the slap’’

and of the skin. Even so, a clearer and more direct explication of some of the key

terms—such as the ‘‘interpretant’’ and its role—than is actually provided, would

make the subsequent discussions of code-duality and the implications of Peirce’s

‘semeiosis’ for biology more readily graspable.

One of the interesting implications of the biosemiotic approach, as Hoffmeyer

articulates it, is that the hierarchical differentiation of the human being from other

organisms on the basis of its being the uniquely semiotic creature cannot be

sustained. Rather, semiosis operates at every level of biological interactions,

including the intracellular as much as the exosemiotic communication between

individuals. This is not to say that humans are simply one animal amongst others—

but what distinguishes us is not semiotic capacity per se, but the unique capacity for

symbolic reference. Unlike the simpler practice of indexical reference, symbolic

reference allows for highly sophisticated forms of communication in which each

sign or word is embedded within complex systems of other words and sound signs

and achieves meaning within the interaction of that system and individuated

semiotic contexts (but where there is no necessary relation between word and

object/referent). This claim provides the core idea of the third and final part of the

book, where Hoffmeyer provides a fascinating, and necessarily speculative, outline

of the evolutionary origins of language. By drawing on the evolutionary

anthropological and neurobiological theory of Terrence Deacon, he suggests an

almost dialectical interaction between the capacity for symbolic reference and brain

development. Contrary to Noam Chomsky’s notion of universal grammar,

Hoffmeyer suggests that once the habit of ‘‘playing with symbols’’ took hold in a

group, this capacity became a key factor for their continued evolution. In this,

language itself underwent adaptation and development to ensure maximum

usability, while its increased use also generated evolutionary pressure on children’s

brain. He concludes that this eventually resulted in ‘‘the reconstruction of the

associative patterns of the brain in the image of the associative patterns of symbolic

language’’ (p. 296). Undoubtedly, the details of this account require clarification and

evidential support; nevertheless, it is a provocative contribution to longstanding

debates over the differentiation of the human and the non-human animal in both the

sciences and humanities.

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Indeed, Hoffmeyer’s account of the biosemiotic nature of life has a number of

implications beyond technical debates in biology. In the penultimate chapter,

Hoffmeyer indicates some of these, in areas such as aesthetics and ethics, medical

ethics and science, ecology and environment, and cognitive science. As he

acknowledges, these areas are beyond Hoffmeyer’s own expertise, and because of

that, they are perhaps the least satisfying parts of the book as a whole. In regard to

bioethics, for instance, Hoffmeyer chooses to focus on issues of abortion, and the

apparently irresolvable question of when a human life begins. He points out that

from a biological point of view, this question makes little sense; however, from a

biosemiotic point of view, what becomes significant is the point of semiotic

individuation, since ‘‘human uniqueness… is not molecular, but semiotic’’ (p. 328).

It is at this point that an ‘‘ethics of irreplaceability’’ starts to take hold, he suggests,

such that early interventions into the human embryo, either in abortion or genetic

modification, do not violate the ethics of irreplaceability. But, of course, the point of

semiotic individuation will itself be difficult to identify, especially in any principled

way but perhaps also in any particular case, since to do so would require specified

criteria that any given case would have to be tested against. Consensus about those

criteria would probably be as difficult to attain as consensus about the beginning of

human life. Consequently, the ethics of irreplaceability that Hoffmeyer suggests—

and only suggests—may do nothing to resolve these controversies.

Perhaps a more direct and obvious way that the biosemiotic view contributes to

bioethics is in its rejection of the ‘gene for’ rhetoric; for this simplification is all too

readily relied upon in bioethics, such as in arguments for human enhancement

technologies for instance. A rich biology that insists upon the semiotic complexity

of genetic interactions goes some way towards challenging the unfounded

enthusiasm of transhumanists and their philosophical allies. It may also pave the

way to a more biologically informed bioethics, especially one that is not so ready to

adopt (either explicitly or implicitly) the genocentric view proposed by Dawkins

and others. Regardless of the weaknesses of these closing reflections on the broader

implications of the biosemiotic view, this book ought to be read by all who are

interested in the current cultural value of biology.

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