Abstract
To explore how molecules became signs I will ask: “What sort of process is necessary and sufficient to treat a molecule as a sign?” This requires focusing on the interpreting system and its interpretive competence. To avoid assuming any properties that need to be explained I develop what I consider to be a simplest possible molecular model system which only assumes known physics and chemistry but nevertheless exemplifies the interpretive properties of interest. Three progressively more complex variants of this model of interpretive competence are developed that roughly parallel an icon-index-symbol hierarchic scaffolding logic. The implication of this analysis is a reversal of the current dogma of molecular and evolutionary biology which treats molecules like DNA and RNA as the original sources of biological information. Instead I argue that the structural characteristics of these molecules have provided semiotic affordances that the interpretive dynamics of viruses and cells have taken advantage of. These molecules are not the source of biological information but are instead semiotic artifacts onto which dynamical functional constraints have been progressively offloaded during the course of evolution.
Highlights
When Erwin Schrödinger (1944) pondered What is Life? from a physicist’s point of view he focused on two conundrums: how organisms maintain themselves in a far from equilibrium thermodynamic state and how they store and pass on the information that determines their organization
By 1958 when Francis Crick (1958) first articulated what he called the “central dogma” of molecular biology it was taken for granted that that DNA and RNA molecules were “carriers” of information
It has demonstrated that the constraints constituting a recursively self-maintaining molecular system provide the mnemonic, instructional, and normative attributes that we identify with biological information
Summary
When Erwin Schrödinger (1944) pondered What is Life? from a physicist’s point of view he focused on two conundrums: how organisms maintain themselves in a far from equilibrium thermodynamic state and how they store and pass on the information that determines their organization. What may have initially been a metaphor became difficult to disentangle from the chemistry.1 In this way the concept of biological information lost its aboutness but became safe for use in a materialistic science that had no place for what seemed like a nonphysical property. Both approaches only consider the properties of the communication medium itself and ignore all referential and functional properties Shannon acknowledges this when he follows this by immediately pointing out that “Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. The sequence of nucleotides in a DNA molecule is just a molecular structure considered outside the context of a living cell For this structure to be about something there must be a process that interprets it.
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