From Umwelt to Mitwelt: Natural laws versus rule-governed sign-mediated Interactions (rsi’s)

Within the last decade, thousands of studies have described communication processes in and between organisms. Pragmatic philosophy of biology views communication processes as rule-governed sign-mediated interactions (rsi’s). As sign-using individuals exhibit a relationship to following or not-following these rules, the rsi’s of living individuals differ fundamentally from cause-and-effect reactions with and between nonliving matter, which exclusively underlie natural laws. Umwelt thus becomes a term in investigating physiological influences on organisms that are not components of rsi’s. Mitwelt is a term for the investigation of all rsi’s of organisms. Living organisms are never solus ipse subjects of semioses, but share common sets of rules and signs. Life depends decisively on symbiotic communities. Serial Endosymbiotic Theory proved that evolution of higher eukaryotic superkingdom was a merger of anchestral bacteria. The integration of bacterial genomes into eukaryotic genomes was also a step from analog to symbolic genetic codes. Now we know, that socalled “junk”-DNA” has higher order regulatory functions on genome architecture and protein coding DNA plays only the role of a structural vocabulary.