Re: Is FIS in semiotics?

Dear colleagues,

In my yesterday posting there were several typos and misconstructions
that, in the rush, passed through (in the opening sentence my 'mess.' was
an abbreviation for messages, applied to Edwina-Jerry's exchanges
--actually I found them quite clear and interesting; and the Table of
contents that Edwina included was very stimulating--thanks!).

To close my comments on biofunction --am affraid yesterday I crammed too
many things together-- let me return to the common ground of 'molecular
recognition'. Both in functional and evolutionary grounds, biomol.
recogn. is inherently sloppy. If it worked exactly and universally within
the 'lock and key' style described by classical enzymologists, most of the
multifunctionality, resilience, and creativity of life would disappear
--and the most sophisticate info inventions, such as cellular signaling
systems & nervous systems would be out of existence (yes, computers could
exist, so mathematicians and AL people would be happy). Then, in my
yesterday comments I was going beyond that biofunctional sloppiness and
compounding it with the amazing distribution of controlling interactions
(effectors are the clearest ones) through almost all the stages in the
�life cycle�or an enzyme or protein. Thus, emphasizing degradation, I
jumped into the 'functional void' idea. The hypothesis is that in the
cellular coupling of constructive/degradative processes, it finally becomes
easier and cheaper checking for absences... Emphasizing 'absences' may look
a bizarre idea, but I think that, properly developed, provides new grounds
to link the basic organization of collective functions by biomolecular
agents with the emergence of very high levels of control, such as the
'constraint' notion that Cristophe brought into the arena. And it may also
link with the conceptualization of biological 'abduction'...

Cellularly there are quite many caveats to make before cavalierly talking
about 'signals & meaning.' The cellular signaling system itself, the
'fabric' of signals (and not just the 'detector'), is a very fast changing
structure with a previous ontogenetic trajectory of coupling to its
changing environment. Some particular fragments of the environmental events
will be picked --abduced-- or not, as signals, depending on quite many
happenstances (the stage of the life-cycle of the cell appears as the most
prominent factor, also the presence or absence of other environmental
events). Then each tissue is capable of abducing or fabricating its
specific mixing or sampling of events --signals-- out from the same
circulatory environment, usually. What I want to emphasize is that the
cellular signaling system gets sculpted itself along the
living-communication process as a result of the amazing architecture of
inner controlling events and biofunctions that I was describing in the
above paragraph (with gene expression and protein degradation as the
crowning inner events). So, there is a combined world of
amorphous'architectures', sequential ones, collections of gradients, etc.,
that together conspire with their 'info processes' to temporarily maintain
the living cell at work.

Informationally I assume that we could negotiate, more or less, a common
path until molecular recognition. But we do not have a clear taxonomy of
the classes of biological info at work yet, even in the simplest cell (and
the 'three genera' taxonomy is but a rough delineation). So, if do not have
still a rough understanding of the different classes of 'forces' at work,
why we do not discuss how to find and to distinguish them? Otherwise our
global 'theory of force' will not advance much. I could assume that we
finally might be able to unify them, but that may be a long way from now.

Sorry if I am insisting too much on the discussion about bioinfo. I believe
it is the cornerstone of our field.

best

Pedro
Received on Thu Jul 11 14:45:09 2002