Abstract
A cluster of similar trends emerging in separate fields of science and philosophy points to new opportunities to apply biosemiotic ideas as tools for conceptual integration in theoretical biology. I characterize these developments as the outcome of a “relational turn” in these disciplines. They signal a shift of attention away from objects and things and towards relational structures and processes. Increasingly sophisticated research technologies of molecular biology have generated an enormous quantity of experimental data, sparking a need for relational approaches that could help to find recurrent patterns in the mass of data. Earlier conceptions of relational biology and cybernetics, once deemed too abstract and speculative, are now resurrected and applied by means of new computational and simulation tools. I think this receptivity should be extended to incorporate nets of semiotic relations as heuristic guides for discerning global patterns of interactions in living systems. In this article I review aspects of systems biology and new directions in evolutionary theory, focusing on the role of circular and downward causation in relational structures and dynamical networks. I also indicate promising avenues of integration of some ideas of biosemiotics with those emerging from these new currents in biology. Relational developments in biology bear a telling similarity to a parallel relational turn presently manifest in the philosophy of science, rooted in the philosophy of physics and mathematics and in different varieties of structural and informational realism. The recognition of the relational nature of reality within these disciplines entails a tacit repudiation of nominalistic biases in science that have hindered the reception of semitiotic conceptions in biology. In previous investigations I explored connections between two kinds of relational structures: the networks of self-referential circular loops that appear pervasively in living systems, and the triadic relational structures that Peircean semiotics places at the basis of all semiotic transactions. Current relational views in the sciences seem oblivious to the difference between dyadic and triadic relations. Incorporating this essential distinction from biosemiotics into other fields could be a first step in seizing the opportunities opened by the relational turn for a renewal of biology and of natural philosophy in general, across disciplinary boundaries.
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Notes
Several recent monographs review the basic ideas and methods of systems biology, with different philosophical biases (see e.g. Kitano 2001, Konopka 2007, and Rigoutsos and Stephanopoulos 2007). Denis Noble’s The Music of Life: Biology beyond the Genome is a very readable non-technical introduction and eloquent manifesto (Noble 2006).
Philosophical issues concerning special forms of causation in living systems underlie the systems approach. Recent analyses and key references concerning top-down causation can be found in Auletta et al. 2009. Mossio et al. 2009 offer a review and a new analysis of the relation of Rosen’s conception of “closure to efficient causation” and the issue of computability, backed by an extensive bibliography.
Structural realism encompasses a group of related positions in the philosophy of science that coincide in emphasizing the role of relational structures, both in nature and in our theories about nature, updating and reassessing the arguments of some 19th and 20th century thinkers, such as Poincaré, Duhem, Weyl and Cassirer, whose ideas are closely associated with the importance of focusing on relational notions. Current debates about structural realism stem from a seminal article by Worrall (Worrall 1989). An excellent review of issues and positions is given in Ladyman 2009. An important form of structural realism of special interest for biosemiotics is presented in Floridi 2008. Fernández 2008 considers other issues relating Peirce’s philosophy, structural realism and biosemiotics.
Category theory was incipiently applied by Robert Rosen in his earlier versions of relational biology. A recent introduction to the subject with possible applications to biology can be found in Ellerman 2007. Further discussions on the possible role of these and related mathematical notions in the structure of systems biology are presented in Bailly and Longo 2006.
There are several interpretations of quantum mechanics that fall under this rubric. They have diverse origins but they seem to converge into the same basic idea for overcoming the interpretational problems of the theory: subordination of the notion of objects to that of relational systems. Physical states exist only in relation to other states, including that of the “observer” (which does not need to be a human being or even an organism). A recent review by two prominent advocates is given in Laudisa and Rovelli 2008.
In ecosystems the circuits of nutrients, energy and other transports are usually depicted as trophic networks, or separated following the major cycles (nitrogen, carbon, water), or as global processes, such as primary production and respiration. At present many authors postulate a global time directionality impressed by an ultimate thermodynamic constraint, the maximization of entropy production (see e.g. Ulanowicz 2004, Kleidon 2009, and Trefil et al. 2009).
Under the heading of “Peirce’s modal shift” Robert Lane analyzes in detail the tangled interconnections of these issues in Peirce’s later thought. See Lane 2007.
In a review of Meyerson’s La déduction relativiste Einstein praises the author because he rightly insists “... on the error of many expositions of relativity which refer to the ‘spatialization of time’. Time and space are fused in one and the same continuum, but the continuum is not isotropic. The element of spatial distance and the element of duration remain distinct in nature…The tendency he denounces, although often latent, is nonetheless real and profound in the mind of the physicist, as is unequivocally shown by the extravagances of the popularizers and even of many scientists in their expositions of relativity.” (Einstein in 1928, cited by Stachel 2007).
Peirce refers implicitly on several occasions to the self-referential nature of semiosis but I have not been able to find any explicit articulation of this important issue. The most explicit declaration I have come across reads: “The same form of distinction [as that of immediate and dynamical object] extends to the interpretant; but as applied to the interpretant, it is complicated by the circumstance that the sign not only determines the interpretant to represent (or take the form of) the object , but also determines the interpretant to represent the sign. Indeed in what we may, from a point of view, regard as the principal kind of signs [dicisigns], there is one distinct part appropriated for representing the object, and another for representing how this very sign itself represents that object [my emphasis].” (From a 1906 letter to Lady Welby, included in Peirce 1998, 477–478).
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Acknowledgements
I thank Victoria Alexander, Marcello Barbieri, John Collier, Don Favareau, Peter Harries-Jones, Kalevi Kull, and Charls Pearson for helpful comments, discussions and improvements of previous versions of this paper.
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Fernández, E. Taking the Relational Turn: Biosemiotics and Some New Trends in Biology. Biosemiotics 3, 147–156 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-010-9084-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-010-9084-y