Signs of Meaning in the Universe

Presents a journey through the universe of signs in search of how the natural world came to mean something to someone. This book shows that life at its most basic depends on the survival of messages, written in the code of DNA molecules, and on the tiny cell - the fertilized egg - that must interpret the message and from it construct an organism. From reviews for the bestselling Danish edition: " . . . dashing and idiomatic language that is a pleasure to read." —Berlingske Tidende " . . . an appetizer and eye opener . . . Hoffmeyer is a modernistic pioneer in the wide open spaces of the natural sciences . . . " —Politiken " . . . extremely well written and interesting manifesto for a bioanthropology . . . " —Inf. "It should be read by anyone who likes to be wiser and at the same time to be challenged in his habitual conception of the relations between culture and nature." —Weekend Avisen On this tour of the universe of signs, Jesper Hoffmeyer travels back to the Big Bang, visits the tiniest places deep within cells, and ends his journey with us—complex organisms capable of speech and reason. What propels this journey is Hoffmeyer's attempt to discover how nature could come to mean something to someone—by telling the story of how cells, tissue, organs, plants, animals, even entire ecosystems communicate by signs and signals.