ISI Library

Annotation: This book opens a new perspective on living nature through the philosophical foundation of biology as an understanding social science. The contributions integrate the pragmatic turn of the theory of science discussion, replacing the solus ipse subject of knowledge of objectivism by the intersubjective - communicative character of thought, experience and research. A three-leveled biosemiotics investigates rule-governed sign-mediated interactions within and between organisms of all organismic kingdoms. This approach underlines the complementarity of syntactic, pragmatic and semantic rules as a precondition for adequately investigating the languagelike structure of the genetic code and the communicative organization of interacting living nature.

Identifier: 9525576019

Status: Available

Annotation: Marcello Barbieri sets out his theory that there are many more organic codes in nature than the genetic code. The existence of these codes can be used to explain the major steps in the evolutionary history of life, and processes like epigenesis and complexity generation in embryos

Identifier: 0521824141

Status: Available

Annotation: The "chicken-and-egg" enigma of how genetic information and the body intermingle in "performing life" is a fascinating challenge for biology. The "Jurassic Park Fallacy" is a more traditional interpretation, stating that all the information necessary to build a body is present in DNA; the cell is but a "juke box" playing unambiguously what is in its genetic text and tuning the performance to the environment. Anton Markos suggests a complementary approach: to assume that living beings are endowed with a capacity analogous to a human reader, who is able to extract meaning from a given text, according to her or his personal experience and cultural background. Hermeneutics was developed in the humanities as a method to achieve understanding, in a given context, of texts, history, and artwork. The author takes living beings as hermeneutical interpreters of "texts" encoded in DNA." "This book should interest scholars in both biology and the humanities. To bring both kinds of reader to a common platform, the first part compares two problem-solving strategies: the "objectivist" approach common in natural sciences and hermeneutics as used in the humanities. The second part surveys aspects of the development of twentieth-century biology, also accentuating branches that never became part of today's mainstream. The third part reviews a large body of recent evidence, which can be interpreted in favor of the author's arguments."

Identifier: 0195149483

Status: Available