The new volume in the Vienna Series in Theoretical Biology "Towards a Biosemiotic Theoretical Biology: Sign Processes and Meaning-Making in Living Systems", edited by Kalevi Kull and Donald Favareau, brings together 25 of today’s most forward-thinking biologists and philosophers on sign processes and meaning-making in organisms.

Theoretical biology is concerned with providing science with explanatory frameworks within which to fit its findings. The relatively newer field of Biosemiotics is the study of sign processes within life processes.

In the tradition of the field-changing four-volume essay collection Towards a Theoretical Biology issued by developmental biologist Conrad Hal Waddington from 1968 to 1972, this volume brings together many of today’s leading scientists to discuss what they consider to be the most important and pressing problems in our current understandings of the biological world—and how best to advance our understandings of such life processes scientifically.

Contributors:

Denis Noble, Terrance Deacon, Scott F. Gilbert, Stuart Kaufmann, Tom Froese, Erik L. Peterson, Richard I Vane-Wright, Charles Wolfe, Raymond Noble, Claus Emmeche, Alexei Sharov, Kalevi Kull, Donald Favareau, Arantza Etxeberria, Anton Markoš, Jana Švorcová, Daniel C. Mayer-Foulkes, Federico Vega, Henrik Nielsen, Karel Kleisner, David Cortés-García, Matt Kalkman, Georgii Karelin, Takashi Ikegami, and Mariana Vitti Rodrigues.
 

Publication:

Kalevi Kull & Donald Favareau (Eds.). (2026). Towards a Biosemiotic Theoretical Biology: Sign Processes and Meaning-Making in Living Systems. MIT Press.