Signs of the times

A man in a hut high above the North Wales coast points his telescope towards a similar hut 15 km to the west. He suddenly sees an array of shapes being hoisted up a mast above the hut. He notes the shapes and the angles of their display and creates the same array on the mast above his hut. And 15 km to the east someone is carefully watching and will repeat the display. This is the 1820s and the Holyhead telegraph — across eight stations the message of an approaching ship in the Irish Sea will be sent 160 km within ten minutes to ship owners, port authorities, traders and insurers in Liverpool who will have hours of notice of the arrival of a vessel in port. It's a neat example of semiotics, the creation of symbols with meaning unassociated with their physical structure, and a novel optical communication system. The telegraph did not last long, with the advent of electricity, but neatly illustrates the subject of semiotics, which has got ever more complex and significant as human society and communications have developed. The signs that constitute the raw material of semiotics are not only words but gestures, sounds, objects, images or anything that represents or stands for something else. Semiotics, which is not so much a discipline as a collection of analytical tools, has a following among theorists working in the arts, media, linguistics, sociology, philosophy and other branches of learning. Whether the sign in question is part of an advertisement or a novel, a picture or a piece of music, the semiotician's underlying assumptions are broadly similar: that meaning is not a fixed inherent property of the sign, but something read into it. Unless it is actively decoded, we may fail to understand the conscious or inadvertent intentions of its creator. Over recent years, as with many areas of human activity, some biologists have taken an interest in the possible evolutionary origin of semiotics. One researcher who had a long-standing interest Features There is growing interest in the precise role of information within biological systems and some biologists are looking to learn from semiotics. Nigel Williams reports. Signs of the times in information and semiotics was evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith. Discussing regulatory genes in a series of lectures he gave at the London School of Economics, shortly before his death, he described how such signalling systems …