The Biology of Signification

Signification is not a term one often meets in biological literature, and few scientists seem to have paid much attention to the question of how there can possibly be such a thing as signification in the world. According to Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language (1996), to signify means: “to make known by signs, speech or action” or “to be a sign of.” That signification in this sense is constitutive for human life is hard to deny, since the very act of denying it would itself be a linguistic and thus significative act. Being linguistic animals, we are incurably suspended in a world of signification. But language is not the only or even the primary key to the world of signification. Small children do not speak, but it would be absurd to claim that they are not yet conscious about things around them. Most of the time, in fact, our understanding of what goes on is based on the myriad of nonlinguistic signs entering our perceptive fields. Even when our consciousness is not aware of it, our body and brain continue to interpret the world around us, alerting our consciousness only when necessary. The science devoted to the exploration of this world of signification is called or the theory of signs or semiotics (from the Greek for “sign,” sēmeion). Due to tradition and to the influential work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who was exclusively concerned with that peculiar sign system which is language [1], semiotics generally has been considered a part of the humanities, but there seems to be no good reason to believe that only human beings are admitted into the world of signification. The existence of signification therefore challenges biological theory to find out what are the roots for this phenomenon in pre-human nature. This challenge has been met often enough by a reductive strategy, in which semiotic processes are identified as signals unambiguously releas-