Biosemiotics

Jakob Johann von Uexküll's theoretical biology, published in 1920, was to a large extent also a philosophical work.

Best known for introducing the notion of Umwelt, Uexküll was one of the pioneers of the field of biosemiotics, which studies communication within and between living organisms in terms of signs and codes conveying distinct interpretable meanings.

Biosemiotics emphasizes that an organism doesn't respond indiscriminately to the physical world, since only certain signals from its environment have a biological significance for it.

For each species, there is a range of wavelengths of light, frequencies of sound, odors, and tastes that are relevant and meaningful to it, and that it can interpret and respond to.

This was a major theoretical innovation in how it is possible to build a scientific understanding of life from a very general meaning-making perspective.

Haldane's prescient theoretical thinking across many fields of biology goes on to show once again that mechanistic theories have preceded many of the major biological discoveries rather than arriving later as explanations of already known empirical facts.

This is true of all sciences, but it especially struck me while researching the history of theoretical biology and this idea that each of its new branches invented its own language to make sense of biological phenomena.

Biosemiotics speaks in terms of biological signs and meanings, while the abstractions of population genetics are on the level of allele frequencies and fitness landscapes.