Yogi Hale Hendlin at roundtable 'Ecosemiotics is Community'

Or, more simply put, he endeavours to give a philosophical fundament to the relations between the general species of humans, animals and plants.

The animal-centric lens of individual organisms, supercharged by the individualizing demands of capital especially in neoliberalism, renders an atomized understanding of nature and culture far more extreme than anything Democritus could cook up with his atom concept. Biologists in the Modern Synthesis took up this constricted (mis)understanding of Darwin’s theory of evolution to see life as little more than competition and conflict all the way down.

The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) and ecosemiotics, however, tell a different story. As Gilbert, Sapp, and Tauber (2012) elicit, comparing humans to multispecies lichen, we’ve never been individuals. We have always been holobionts, 100% at the mercy of our symbionts skin-in and skin-out (endo- and -exosemiotically). Drawing from EES and biosemiotics, this talk will look at how interspecies communication works to establish health for all members of a given ecology. In order to achieve symbiosis, organisms work with each other to avoid domination by a single species or types of parasitism which destroy the basis for life in that habitat, leading to dysbiosis. This interspecies ‘balance of powers’ relationship ensures that habitats and their constituents evolve together, harmoniously, according to an evolutionary treadmill (frequency-dependent selection).

Rather than seeing this paradox of co-evolution as something that must be overcome through human control and domination, we can instead focus on how through ecological vulnerability, the biosemiotic community evolves in service to principles higher than a species-centric one, which as de Tocqueville reminds us, is really ‘self-interest properly understood.’ This last point will be explored in detail.