New book on biosemiotics

A must reading for all in the biosemiotics community:

Jesper Hoffmeyer:
Biosemiotics. An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs
Scranton University Press, 2008.

The book consists of three parts and a postscript. Part one contains a general discussion of the biosemiotic project as a strategy in life science and Part two contains a detailed exposition of biosemiotics as it may be employed in the understanding of life processes at different levels of animate nature. Part 3 addresses the radical consequences that the biosemiotic perspective will have on our thinking in a range of other areas: i.e., the origin of language, ethics, aesthetics, biomedicine, environmental understanding, health, cognitive science and biotechnology. In the Postscript is given a brief account of the historical development of the discipline, as well as a prognosis for its future growth.

See more about the book here.

Book on Gregory Bateson, Science and Peirce

Some of you may not have heard of this new book on Gregory Bateson as a precursor to biosemiotics:

A Legacy for Living Systems

Gregory Bateson as Precursor to Biosemiotics

Hoffmeyer, Jesper (Ed.)

Series: Biosemiotics , Vol. 2

2008, X, 290 p., Hardcover
ISBN: 978-1-4020-6705-1

Keywords:

• Biosemiotics
• Evolution
• Gregory Bateson
• Meaning
• Mind

About this book:
Gregory Bateson’s contribution to 20th century thinking has appealed to scholars from a wide range of fields dealing in one way or another with aspects of communication and epistemology. A number of his insights were taken up and developed further in anthropology, psychology, evolutionary biology and communication theory. But the large, trans-disciplinary synthesis that, in his own mind, was his major contribution to science received little attention from the mainstream scientific communities.

This book represents a major attempt to revise this deficiency. Scholars from ecology, biochemistry, evolutionary biology, cognitive science, anthropology and philosophy discuss how Bateson's thinking might lead to a fruitful reframing of central problems in modern science. Most important perhaps, Bateson's bioanthropology is shown to play a key role in developing the set of ideas explored in the new field of biosemiotics. The idea that organismic life is indeed basically semiotic or communicative lies at the heart of the biosemiotic approach to the study of life.

The only book of its kind, this volume provides a key resource for the quickly-growing substratum of scholars in the biosciences, philosophy and medicine who are seeking an elegant new approach to exploring highly complex systems.

Contents:
Introduction: Bateson the precursor; J. Hoffmeyer
1. Angels fear revisited; M.C. Bateson
2. From thing to relation. On Bateson's bioanthropology; J. Hoffmeyer
3. What connects the map to the territory; T. Cashman
4. The pattern which connects pleroma to creature; T. Deacon, J. Sherman
5. Bateson’s method: double description; J. Hui, T. Cashman, and T. Deacon
6. Gregory Bateson's relevance to current molecular biology; L. Bruni
7. Process ecology: Creatura in an open universe; R.E. Ulanowicz
8. Connections in action – bridging implicit and explicit domains; T. Shilhab, C. Gerlach
9. Bateson: biology with meaning; B. Goodwin
10. Gregory Bateson's 'uncovery' of ecological aesthetics; P. Harries-Jones
11. Collapsing the wave function of meaning: the epistemological matrix of talk-in interaction; D. Favareau
12. Re-enchanting evolution: transcending fundamentalisms through a mythopoetic epistemology; G. Mengel
13. Bateson and Peirce on the pattern that connects and the sacred; S. Brier
14. Bateson, Peirce and the sign of the sacred; D. Eicher-Catt

Biosemiotic Books

One obvious way to use this blog is to inform about new books on biosemiotics and its history, and related topics! Thus this piece of information I got:

Treasure Your Exceptions. The Science and Life of William Bateson
by Alan G. Cock and Donald R. Forsdyke (2008)

- many Biosemioticists are deeply interested in Gregory Bateson and his wife Margaret Mead. Our new biograph of Gregory's father, William Bateson, will be released by Springer, New York, in August. While far less comprehensive than David Lipset's superb biography of GB, there are some new twists that may be of interest. For more information please see http://post.queensu.ca/~forsdyke/book04.htm

Book intro

I'll like to tell a bit about the book Introduction to Biosemiotics: The New Biological Synthesis, edited by Marcello Barbieri (Springer Verlag, 2006, ISBN: 978-1-4020-4813-5). As a hardcover edition (the only form for the present) it costs $ 189 (139,95 €).
The book - dedicated to the memory of Thomas Sebeok and his vision of a synthesis of biology and semiotics - is addressed to students, researchers and academics who are not familiar with biosemiotics and want to know more about it. It is a highly qualified introduction to this new field because it is written by many of its major contributors. At the same time, it contains the most recent developments in the basic issues of biosemiotics and provides therefore a fairly accurate portrait of the present state of the art.
The book is divided into three parts. The first is dedicated to a brief historical account and the last to a few research applications, whereas the central, and longest, part of the book is devoted to theoretical issues. This is because the real obstacle to biological progress, today, is not lack of data but a pervasive theoretical paradigm that continues to deny the semiotic nature of life, or to pay only lip-service to it, thus depriving the biological codes of all their revolutionary potential.
Biosemiotics is truly a new biological “synthesis” because it brings together biology and studies of sign systems (semiotics, linguistics, communication studies) and effectively brings down the old divide between the “Two Cultures”. Its main challenge is to introduce meaning in biology, on the grounds that organic sign action, codes and processes of interpretation are fundamental components of the living world. Biosemiotics has become in this way the leading edge of the research in the fundamentals of life, and is a young exciting field on the move. This book wants to bring it out of the small niche in which it has been developed so far and make it available to all those who are prepared to accept the challenge raised by the discovery of the genetic code and of biological meaning.
Here is the Springer link to the book, and here is the list of contents:

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CONTENTS

Editorial : Marcello Barbieri: The Challenge of Biosemiotics

PART 1 – Historical points

Chapter 1 Don Favareau: The Evolutionary History of Biosemiotics
Chapter 2 Tuomo Jämsä : Semiosis in Evolution
Chapter 3 Marcello Barbieri: Has Biosemiotics come of age? – and Postscript

PART 2 – Theoretical Issues

Chapter 4 Howard Pattee : The necessity of Biosemiotics: Matter-symbol complementarity
Chapter 5 Stanley Salthe: What is the Scope of Biosemiotics? Information in Living Systems
Chapter 6 Jesper Hoffmeyer: Semiotic Scaffolding of living systems
Chapter 7 Kalevi Kull: Biosemiotics and biophysics – the fundamental approaches to the study of life
Chapter 8 Marcello Barbieri: Is the Cell a Semiotic System?
Chapter 9 Stefan Artmann : Computing Codes versus Interpreting Life
Chapter 10 Anton Markos, Filip Grygar, Karel Kleisner, and Zden_k Neubauer: Toward a Darwinian biosemiotics. Life as mutual understanding
Chapter 11 Tommi Vehkavaara: From the Logic of Science to the Logic of the Living. The relevance of Charles Peirce to biosemiotics
Chapter 12 Marcel Danesi: Towards a Standard Terminology for (Bio)semiotics
Chapter 13 Gérard Battail : Information theory and error-correcting codes in genetics and biological evolution

PART 3 – Biosemiotic Research

Chapter 14 Marcella Faria: RNA as code makers: a biosemiotic view of RNAi and cell immunity
Chapter 15 Luis Emilio Bruni: Cellular Semiotics and Signal Transduction
Chapter 16 Stephen Philip Pain: Inner Representations and Signs in Animals
Chapter 17 Johannes Huber and Ingolf Schmid-Tannwald: A Biosemiotic Approach to Epigenetics: Constructivist Aspects of Oocyte-to-Embryo Transition
Chapter 18 Dario Martinelli: Language and interspecific communication experiments: a case to reopen?

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