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  1. Macroevolutionary Freezing and the Janusian Nature of Evolvability: Is the Evolution (of Profound Biological Novelty) Going to End?Jan Toman & Jaroslav Flegr - 2018 - Biosemiotics 11 (2):263-285.
    In a macroevolutionary timescale, evolvability itself evolves. Lineages are sorted based on their ability to generate adaptive novelties, which leads to the optimization of their genotype-phenotype map. The system of translation of genetic or epigenetic changes to the phenotype may reach significant horizontal and vertical complexity, and may even exhibit certain aspects of learning behaviour. This continuously evolving semiotic system probably enables the origin of complex yet functional and internally compatible adaptations. However, it also has a second, “darker”, side. As (...)
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  • The Manufacture of Chance: Firstness as a Fixture of Life.Gerald Ostdiek - 2014 - Biosemiotics 7 (3):361-376.
    Whereas Peirce’s logic drove him to postulate a primitive sentiency of physical matter, this essay argues that life exhibits behavior that is radically discontinuous from its preconditions; e.g., life manufactures chance by semiotic means. A sign being something that stands for another thing to a mind, signs are brought into existence only by acts of ‘reading.’ Peirce argued that this action is an element of physics, and thus the entire universe ‘lives.’ This essay postulates a degenerate form of Firstness that (...)
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  • The Self as Social Artifice: Some Consequences of Stanislavski.Gerald Ostdiek - 2012 - Biosemiotics 5 (2):161-179.
    Practice commonly develops independent of theory: only rarely does some heritable informational structure knowingly emerge. With this in mind, Biosemiotic theory is well served by an informed synthesis with Constantin Stanislavski’s theatrical technique. For it is not enough merely to catalog signage by studying the consequence of its function, we also seek to generate signs with knowing intent. This implies more than the strategic use of signs, which all complex living things do, and of which our many subjective selves emerge. (...)
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  • Me, Myself, and Semiotic Function: Finding the “I” in Biology.Gerald Ostdiek - 2016 - Biosemiotics 9 (3):435-450.
    This essay argues that stable, heritable, habituated semiotics on one scale of life allows for opportunism, origination, and the solving of novel problems on others. This is grounded in how interpretation is neither caused nor determined by its object, such that success at interpretation simply cannot be defined by any comparison between an interpretation and its object. Rather, an interpretation is a reciprocated incorporation of a living thing and its environment, and successful if it furthers the living, interpreting thing. By (...)
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  • Creativity: Self-Referential Mistaking, Not Negating. [REVIEW]Victoria N. Alexander - 2013 - Biosemiotics 6 (2):253-272.
    In C. S. Peirce, as well as in the work of many biosemioticians, the semiotic object is sometimes described as a physical “object” with material properties and sometimes described as an “ideal object” or mental representation. I argue that to the extent that we can avoid these types of characterizations we will have a more scientific definition of sign use and will be able to better integrate the various fields that interact with biosemiotics. In an effort to end Cartesian dualism (...)
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