Phylogenetics has inherent utility in evolutionary developmental biology (EDB) as it is an established methodology for estimating evolutionary relationships and for making comparisons between levels of biological organization. However, explicit phylogenetic methods generally have been limited to two levels of organization in EDB—the species and the gene. We demonstrate that phylogenetic methods can be applied broadly to other organizational levels, such as morphological structures or cell types, to identify evolutionary patterns. We present examples at and between different hierarchical levels of (...) organization to address questions central to EDB. We argue that this application of “hierarchical phylogenetics” can be a unifying analytical approach to the field of EDB. BioEssays 27:1158–1166, 2005. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Few other social technologies and institutions are more consequential to human societies than money. Yet money remains a deeply perplexing phenomenon. On the one hand, it is a pan-human system of valuation, but on the other, it is conventional and variable in its uses. While it is controversial if money instantiates a fully-fledged sign system, it is rife with semiotic capacities. To present an illuminating analysis of money is thus a test case for the Motivation & Sedimentation Model (MSM) of (...) meaning making, with roots in the phenomenology of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Using MSM, we analyze two origin accounts of money: the commodity money account evidenced in archaic and classical Greek coinage, and the credit money account exemplified by early findings in Mesopotamia. Both accounts focus on the interactions between the three levels of MSM: the pre-signitive Embodied, the cultural Sedimented, and the interactional Situated levels of meaning and propose different series of “loops” to account for the genesis of money. Despite key differences in the two origins, both imply semiotic processes operating according to motivated, and hence non-arbitrary, conventions developing within institutional formations that ultimately influenc present-day concepts of money. (shrink)

Autism is characterized by repetitive behavior and difficulties in adopting the viewpoint of others. We examine a communicative phenomenon resulting from these symptoms: non-prototypical direct speech for non-reports involving an actual utterance from previously produced discourse (e.g. quoting somebody’s words to refer to them,Pascual 2014). We video-recorded the naturalistic speech of five Brazilian children with autism, five typically developing children of the same mental age, and five of the same chronological age. They all used so-calledfictive speech(Pascual 2014,Dornelas & Pascual 2016) (...) for narration, expressing needs, and referring to individuals and events (e.g. sayingGoal!for ‘playing soccer’). Such verbatim fictive speech originated in specific prior interactions or in socio-communicative or socio-cultural knowledge. We found considerable differences in the three groups in the frequency and degree of creativeness of fictive speech as opposed to it representing standard linguistic formulae or echoing previously produced speech word by word. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2017 Heft: 215 Seiten: 119-141.