As semiotics itself, biosemiotics is concerned with semantics. On the other hand, the scientific study of communication engineering led to the development of information theory, which ignores semantics. For this reason, many biologists thought that it would be useless in their disciplines. It turns out however that problems of communication engineering are met in biology and thus can only properly be dealt with using information theory. As an important example, the faithful transmission of genetic information through the ages is a difficult problem which has been overlooked by biologists. Cumulated errors in the DNA molecule due to radiations and even to its own indeterminism as a quantum object actually perturb its communication through time. A simple information-theoretic computation shows that, contrary to the current belief, the genomic memory is ephemeral at the time scale of geology. The conventional template-replication paradigm is thus not tenable. According to a fundamental theorem of information theory, error-correcting codes can perform almost errorless communication provided certain conditions are met. Faithful conservation of genomes can thus be ensured only if they involve error-correcting codes. Then the genomes can be recovered with an arbitrarily small probability of error, provided the interval between successive generations is as short (at the time scale of geology) as to almost always avoid that the number of cumulated errors exceeds the correcting ability of the code

Information Theory and Error-Correcting Codes In Genetics and Biological Evolution

Scientific and poetic communication are two forms of a more general type of human communication, belonging to the family of languages of discovery. So, there are many common features between them. This is just the reason why it is interesting to investigate the differences, the oppositions between these two types of communication. Trubetzkoy has pointed out that oppositions between relatively similar things are more interesting than oppositions between completely different things [27]. So, in English it is more interesting to study the opposition between the phonemes s and z, which are similar except for one feature (nonvoiced-voiced) then the opposition between s and n, which differ with respect to several features (strident-nonstrident, nonnasal-nasal, continuant- noncontinuant, nonvoiced-voiced).

Fifty-Two Oppositions Between Scientific and Poetic Communication

Significs: Its Tendency, Methodology, and Applications

The history of Romanian semiotics has not yet become an independent object of study in Romania. Overviews of Romanian semiotics appear, however, in Marcus (1979a) and Voigt (1979), and a general bibliography of the subject has been prepared by Mihai Nadin.1 Information concerning Romanian linguistic semiotics or semiotics of folklore can be found in Miclau (1977a) and Marcus (1975e, 1978), respectively.

Pius Servien

Papers

Le langage des sciences