Menu Close

ISI Library

A unified academic catalogue for books, journal articles, book chapters, proceedings papers, conference abstracts and semiotic research materials.

A unified academic catalogue for books, journal articles, proceedings papers, collection articles and semiotic research materials. Search across the full database; results are shown with pagination.

Clear
Advanced search
Showing 1–2 of 2 records
Book 2002.0

Readers of the book of life

Anton Markoš

Dependent title
contextualizing developmental evolutionary biology

Biology / Biosemiotics Oxford University Press 0195149483 Available

View details

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

Journal Article 1999

Natural selection and Maxwell’s demons: A semiotic approach to evolutionary biology

Luis Eugenio Andrade

In: Semiotica 1999, Issue 2024-01-04 00:00:00

Pages
133-150

Semiotica DOI: 10.1515/semi.1999.127.1-4.133

View details

Identifier: DOI: 10.1515/semi.1999.127.1-4.133

Open source