The Living Sign. Reading Noble from a Biosemiotic Perspective

The author argues that the reductionist illusions of the Modern Synthesis, which Noble criticizes in his target article, are to a large extent resulting from a mere syntactical notion of biological information, neglecting the pragmatic and semantic dimension of information. Although the syntactical notion, introduced by Shannon, has been applied with much success in information theory and computer technologies, it is too narrow to understand biological reality. Biosemiotics can help to clarify the problems identified by Noble, and offers a more adequate biological information concept, which not only may help to overcome these problems in the life sciences, but may also serve to integrate natural-scientific and humanities approaches to life.