In the gloomy skies of Cassington, England, a homing pigeon (Columba livia) navigates at 100 km/h. Despite his unwitty looks, this plumy pilot is no common ‘birdhead’. He is following a quirky personal map that consists of memorized visual landmarks (Meade et al 2005). The pigeon, henceforth dubbed “Jakob”, will remember and update this route for the rest of his life. Two thousand years ago, the imperial Roman army would ‘enlist’ pigeons like him to serve in their famous feathered communications service.
If he cannot read the terrain below, Jakob will rely on a type of cellular autofluorescence, a ‘super sense’ that aligns with Earth’s magnetic field. A quantum reaction occurs inside Jakob’s eyes, changing the spin of electrons in a type of retinal photoreceptors called cryptochromes (Noboru & Woodward 2021). Jakob’s eyesight is influenced by geomagnetic fields, using their orientation as a reference to find the way home.
The phenomenology of Jakob’s quantum ‘compass’ tells us something about the way our universe works, and the other way around. Understanding the strangeness of physical reality is fundamental for explaining how living beings perceive it in species-specific but analogous ways; something known as the Umwelt or the “psycho-biological uniformity” shared by the members of a species (Fraser 2007: 37). Jakob’s picture of England is not incomplete or distorted but grounded, just as well equipped as it needs to be.
In the murky waters of a Tanzanian creek, a platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) is looking for lunch. “Umberto” closes his eyes and nostrils, letting the tickling sensations in his bill guide his scanning movements. The Australian monotreme relies on a multimodal coupling of 100 thousand electroreceptors and mechanoreceptors located on his bill skin (Pettigrew 1999). This underwater ‘sixth sense’ provides Umberto with tridimensional coordinates of his invertebrate snacks, even when he cannot see them.
Umberto’s electroceptive ‘scanner’ does something far more complex than encoding the position of submerged insects and crayfish. It relies on Umberto’s ability to pertinently interpret surplus of meaning. On the one hand, Umberto’s bill makes an abbreviation or sampling of some relevant aspects of the environment. And, on the other, Umberto’s wits have a productive reference inasmuch they enhance the vividness of his sentience, augmenting his experiential Umwelt or “the phenomenal world or the self-world of the animal” (von Uexküll 1992: 319).
Beneath a meadow in Tamaulipas, Mexico, an eastern American mole (Scalopus aquaticus) is caving a new den. Far from being blind, “Plato” is mapping the loamy soil, and everything in it, with his two nostrils. Plato’s twitching nose is painting an olfactory mental picture of his surroundings. This chemo-spatial sensory system is equivalent to the stereoscopic way through which our ears integrate bilateral timing and intensity cues, determining the localization of incoming objects (Kenneth 2012).
Plato does not need his eyes to visualize what is before him. As put by Paul (Homo sapiens) “to have an image of something is to “see” it in our mind’s eye, without the presence of the actual thing” (Ricoeur 1979: 124). Plato makes sensory systems and physical systems complement each other through his “semiogenic capacity” (Hoffmeyer 2009: 188). This means that his olfactive ‘photogrammetry’ acts as a sensible medium to transform lifeless environmental features into an experience, a ‘stereo’ image, a diagram, a living metaphor of something other than itself: an object that Plato can afford to act upon now.
In the Arava Desert of Israel, an insectivore bat (Chiroptera) is on the move. “Thomas” flies swiftly, anticipating obstacles with sub-centimetre accuracy thanks to his echolocation. He was born with an innate speed-of-sound reference, encoded in his delay-tuned neurons, which are triggered by specific call–echo time delays (Amichai & Yovel 2021). In other words, this black-winged mammal interprets the Doppler Effect for the purposes of timing the presence of objects in the darkness of night. Should ambient temperature, air humidity and density change abruptly, Thomas will find it harder to move around because the atmospheric speed of sound he is habituated to will no longer be constant.
Despite their fallible nature, sensations or qualisigns are life’s primary means for aptly emulating the relevant potentialities of our world. Jakob, Umberto, Plato, and Thomas may seem to have radically different umwelten, but they all have adapted to the habits of the world through a phenomenon known as semiotic causation (Hoffmeyer 2008: 67): actions that are the effect of interpretation. Put otherwise, they realize an optional mediation between the potential and the actual, going from sensorial awareness to actions by means of choice-making. The semiotic causation of animal umwelten is so consistent that eyesight, for instance, has evolved convergently around 40 times (Schwab 2018).
Near the Congo River, “Frans”, a wild chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes), is anticipating and planning tomorrow’s breakfast type and location (Janmaata et al 2014). In the Fujian province, “Konrad”, a European bee (Apis mellifera ligustica), is translating and learning the interspecific dancing dialects from his Chinese colleagues (Apis cerana cerana) (Su et al 2008). In the grasslands of southwestern Colorado, “Noam”, a prairie dog (Cynomys socialis), is alarming his coterie about incoming intruders, their size, looks, and trajectory (Martinelli 2010). In the Sahel desert in Mali, the elephant “Julia” (Loxodonta Africana) is teaching younger members of the herd a traditional route and method to find water during drought times (Fishlocket al 2016). Off the coast of western Australia, “Roland” (Orcinus orca) is teaching his pod how to hunt down adult blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus), something never seen before in the Anthropocene (Totterdell 2022).
These are eye-opening examples of life’s intrinsic biosemiotic value, which lies in its virtually unlimited interpretative freedom. In the words of Jesper (Homo sapiens): “the most pronounced feature of organic evolution is not the creation of a multiplicity of amazing morphological structures, but the general expansion of ‘semiotic freedom’, that is to say the increase in richness or ‘depth’ of meaning that can be communicated” (Hoffmeyer 1996: 61).
Somewhere on Earth, 3.5 billion years ago, a complex community of protoeukaryotes are adapting to a broad range of moderate temperatures. It is LUCA (the Last Universal Common Ancestor). Rather than being a simple, primitive, hyperthermophilic prokaryote, LUCA thrives by being a morphologically and metabolically diverse form of symbiosis (Weiss et al 2016). LUCA, however, is genetically redundant, and represents the unrealized potentialities of what Frederik (Homo sapiens) calls “semiotic evolution” (Stjernfelt 2012). In other terms, LUCA is expanding its own agency or the “interpretive variability and semiotic freedom of the cell (freedom understood here as a loosening of the rigid causal bonding of one signal to one response)” (Hoffmeyer 2009: 154).
The hydrogen of LUCA’s watery cradle could be traced back to gases formed in interstellar nebulas (Wu et al 2018). The raw building blocks of LUCA’s DNA (nucleobases and chiral molecules) might have been delivered by UV-irradiated asteroids found in distant star-forming regions (Pizzarello & Yarnes 2018). LUCA is the heir of 14 billion years of structural evolution in the universe, but it is just one chapter in the undiscovered book of abiogenesis. It hides the most wonderful story of all, awaiting to be unveiled: the molecular origin of the ability to feel (Deacon 2021). From puddles to oceans, and from caves to the sky, LUCA’s progeny will evolve soaring flight at least four times (Norberg 2016).
In Saskatchewan, Canada, an indigo bunting (Passerina cyanea) is migrating during a moonless night. “Victoria” is tracking the Milky Way’s rotating glow, along with the constellations’ Gestalt patterns. She uses them as visual cues to navigate towards warmer habitats (Emlen 1967). Victoria is the fleeting ashes of the very stars that guide her way, for the iron in her body has a celestial origin in supernovas.
In Tartu, Estonia, a suspicious hooded crow (Corvus cornix) is hiding food caches inside his secret pantries and fridges. “Endel” will episodically remember the future expiration date and exact location of each buried snack, anticipating which items to retrieve first (e.g. fast-decaying worms), and which items to retrieve later (e.g. mussels and hazelnuts) (Berrow 1992). Endel’s theftproof food-storing techniques developed within a social game of deception and theory of mind (Emery & Clayton 2001). This tool-assisted game of “semethic interaction” (Hoffmeyer 2009: 189) started being developed 17 million years ago by corvid ancestors, since the mid-Miocene, way before humans attributed themselves the invention of society, culture, and technology.
Three million years ago, Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) is looking at her reflection in a pond of fresh water. It is a moment of awe and wonder. Not only she has the sensorial possibility of seeing such an image, but also, she is able to eventually correlate it with her actual co-presence in front of the water. The aesthethic becoming of an image into a presence is caused, however, by a projection, a self-recognition or inference that the moving picture ‘out there’ corresponds to something more general (herself). From now on, every time she recognizes her characteristic image in the pond, she will already have anticipated it as an instantiation or replica of herself. Her reflection has become more than a visualization or an icon, and even more than a correlation or index. It has naturally become a symbol, an assertion or argument about her own existence.
Somewhere on a “pale blue dot”, somewhere “on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam” (Sagan 1997), a primate writes:
“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.”
Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812).
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Foto: Kuvatõmmis