Towards a Biosemiotic Theoretical Biology: Sign Processes and Meaning-Making in Living Systems

First Paragraph: Reproduction is widely regarded as a key concept in biology and considered fundamental to life as we know it. However, it is often framed narrowly in terms of heredity (primarily genetic transmission) and epistemically confined to measuring differential fitness. This reductive perspective fails to account for the material and relational causal processes involved in organismal continuity and renewal. In a broad sense, reproduction is the process through which living entities produce new individuals of their kind. However, the phenomenon of biological renewal is expressed through various terms rooted in different theoretical traditions. These include generation, reproduction, replication, regeneration, and reconstitution, each offering different, though often overlapping, views of the process. The term “reproduction” emerged in biology in the mid-eighteenth century, replacing “generation” and shifting the view of life from isolated creation of entities to lineage-based continuity (Etxeberria, 2023; Jacob, 1970). Whereas reproduction encompasses organismallevel processes of generating offspring, later on, with the development of molecular biology, it was often overtaken by “replication,” which focuses on the copying of genetic material (Wilkins and Bourrat, 2022). In contrast, recent philosophy of biology argues, from a developmental point of view, that reproduction includes the entire process throughout an organism’s life cycle, not just gamete or zygote formation (Griesemer, 2016). This broader perspective extends to concepts like “regeneration,” which used to refer to the restoration of lost or damaged organs and limbs, but now includes ecosystem recovery (Maienschein and MacCord, 2022). Lastly, “reconstitution” refers to phenomena of system recreation beyond lineage or genealogical continuity in holobionts and microbial symbioses; it emphasizes the dynamic interplay of relationships and processes that restore phenotypic variants through time (Veigl et al., 2022).