Talk:Biosemiotics

Untitled
bravo!Wblakesx (talk) 07:34, 28 September 2011 (UTC)wblakesx

Copyright problem
Hi,

Angela indicated that there might be a copyright problem with the text on biosemiotics I posted yesterday, because it is published at this link:

http://www.library.utoronto.ca/see/pages/biosemioticsdef.html

which is a page of the S.E.E.D. journal.

However, (1) I was the author of that page (with kind cunsulting help from Kalevi Kull), and (2) my entry on biosemiotics was expanded and modified, so the two entries are not identical, and (3) I hope they will diverge even more in wikipedian textual evolution, because my purpose of posting the entry to Wikipedia is that I like the idea of having made only a seed to let other people (biologists, biosemioticians and other interested parties) join and let the text grow. Symbols grow, as Peirce said. Peirce as a major inspiration for biosemiotics, and Peirce would have admired the idea of a truly collective encyclopedia.

Sincerely yours, Claus E.


 * Thanks for letting us know, and welcome to Wikipedia. Angela. 06:03, Apr 4, 2004 (UTC)

The problem is that biosemiotics in its end will say just “everything is alive”. Simply because any single movement of any single molecule could be a sign for some system. Therefore despite the good will it will not resolve Cartesian duality but simply deny the existence of physical “dead” world, saying – probably it is true – that there is only “live world”, where “death” means creation of billions of other lives, with their own signal systems. So, as soon as the basic idea could not be falsified (or it can be? Then how?), biosemiotics should not be considered as science per se, but rather as it is defined now – another perspective on the phenomenon of life. Best, D. Poltavets (denis.poltavets@gmail.com)


 * This is not correct. Thomas Sebeok, a major proponent of biosemiotics, has strongly emphasised that semiosis begins with life, and that cells are the elementary semiotic systems (also claimed by Copenhagen-Tartu School of biosemiotics). Oldekop (talk) 08:11, 5 March 2008 (UTC)
 * The fact that something can be or is used as a sign in a system does not mean that the sign is alive - it means that the system that interprets and reacts to the sign is alive. Jakob von Uexkull saw the cell as the lowest organism that was able to both interpet and react to a sign. ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 14:41, 11 February 2012 (UTC)

Request for enhancement
This sounds interesting, but is this a science? Did it make any predictions? Can someone add them to the article? --Argav &#1758; 22:12, 24 June 2007 (UTC)


 * This is difficult as the discipline tries to cope with historical events, being very close to evolutionary biology. It stresses the explanation of events leading to present state rather than predictions of events future.


 * Yes, but evolutionary biology does make testable predictions. So I'm not sure that saying 'Making predictions from this is hard, thus we can claim it's scientific without making any' is legitimate in this case.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 140.247.48.146 (talk) 23:55, 10 February 2012 (UTC)
 * I will be expanding this article over the next couple of weeks. Not all sciences make predictions. Some sciences make explanations. And what makes you think that biosemiotics aims to define itself as "a science".·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 01:21, 11 February 2012 (UTC)


 * I think a serious rewrite of this article is needed in order to make it more of a real encyclopedic article. It is very dangerous to claim something like this is a paradigm shift that changes the definition of life. That sounds more like pseudo-scientific propaganda speech then something appropriate for Wikipedia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.224.130.112 (talk) 16:57, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified 2 one external links on Biosemiotics. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20090505155523/http://home.comcast.net:80/~sharov/biosem/welcome.html to http://home.comcast.net/~sharov/biosem/welcome.html
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20040428080815/http://www.zbi.ee:80/~uexkull/ to http://www.zbi.ee/~uexkull/

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