History of Biosemiotcs

Emerging from the need for an interdisciplinary approach that may facilitate the explanation of complex phenomena about information and interpretation (i.e. phenomena of semiosis), biosemiotics – or the study of signs and meaning in living organisms – includes to this day different theoretical stances revolving around some shared principles and key theories. Therefore, tracing its historical development requires to factor in the complexity of the events and concepts that have paved the way to the more unified and homogenous field of study that biosemiotics is today. While bearing in mind that the two precursors of the discipline – Charles Sanders Peirce and Jakob von Uexküll – come from the fields of semiotics and biology respectively, the main great credit for developing biosemiotics should be given to Thomas Albert Sebeok. In the history of biosemiotics, after an initial pioneering phase of parallel but stand‐alone studies (1961–1977), the second phase (since 1977) brought to a unification under common principles. Seminal for the formulation and establishment of the fundamental principles were the yearly conferences devoted exclusively to biosemiotics – called Gatherings in Biosemiotics – and the publications of scholarly research in several prestigious journals.