Anton Markos – författare

The "egg-and-hen" engima - how the genetic information and the body intermingle in "performing life" is a challenge for biology. The "Jurassic Park Fallacy" is a more traditional interpretation, stating that all the information necessary to build a body is present in DNA; the cell is but a "juke box" playing unambiguously what is in its genetic text, and tuning the performance to the environment. A. Markos suggests a complementary approach: to assume living beings as endowed with a capacity analogous to a human reader, who is able to extract meaning from a given text, according to her/his personal experience and cultural background. Hermeneutics was developed in the humanities as a method to achieve understanding, in a given context, of texts, history, and artwork. The author takes up living beings as hermeneutical interpreters of "texts" encoded in DNA. This interpretation is based on the experience of the cell (cell lineage, species), and negotiated with present environmental cues.

The book covers the possible story of emergence of life and its subsequent evolution, emphasizing the necessary evolutionary step negotiation of a common "language set" which kept all inhabitants in the biosphere together, ensuring a basic level of understanding among them. The book focuses on "protocols of communication" (both genetic and epigenetic) representing norms shared and understood across the whole biosphere, enabling a plethora of holobiotic relationships. Cooperative nature of organismal evolution and epigenetic processes as a major force in evolution are also covered. Topics discussed are illustrated in detail on selected casuistics.

The book covers the possible story of emergence of life and its subsequent evolution, emphasizing the necessary evolutionary step negotiation of a common "language set" which kept all inhabitants in the biosphere together, ensuring a basic level of understanding among them. The book focuses on "protocols of communication" (both genetic and epigenetic) representing norms shared and understood across the whole biosphere, enabling a plethora of holobiotic relationships. Cooperative nature of organismal evolution and epigenetic processes as a major force in evolution are also covered. Topics discussed are illustrated in detail on selected casuistics.

It has been nearly 150 years since Darwin published On the Origin of Species, and his theory of natural selection still ignites a forest of heated debate between scientific fundamentalists on the one hand and religious fundamentalists on the other. But both sides actually agree more than they disagree, and what has long been needed is a third way to view evolution, one that focuses more on the aspect of life and “being alive”, one that can guide us through, and perhaps out of, the fiery thicket. This book, a seminal work in the burgeoning field of Biosemiotics, provides that third way, by viewing living beings as genuine agents designing their communication pathways with, and in, the world.Already hailed as the best account of biological hermeneutics, Life As Its Own Designer: Darwin’s Origin and Western Thought is a wholly unique book divided into two parts. The first part is philosophical and explores the roots of rationality and the hermeneutics of the natural world with the overriding goal of discovering how narrative can help us to explain life. It analyzes why novelty is so hard to comprehend in the framework of Western thinking and confronts head-on the chasm between evolutionism and traditional rationalistic worldviews. The second part is scientific. It focuses on the life of living beings, treating them as co-creators of their world in the process of evolution. It draws on insights gleaned from the global activity of the Gaian biosphere, considers likeness as demonstrated on homology studies, and probes the problem of evo-devo science from the angle of life itself.This book is both timely and vital. Past attempts at a third way to view evolution have failed because they were written either by scientists who lacked a philosophical grounding or New Age thinkers who lacked biological credibility. Markoš and his coworkers form an original group of thinkers supremely capable in both fields, and they havefashioned a book that is ideal for researchers and scholars from both the humanities and sciences who are interested in the history and philosophy of biology, biosemiotics, and the evolution of life.

This monograph intertwines the two themes of historiography and evolutionary biology and shows that both activities are analogous in their practices; they are spinning stories about the past and thus constructing the world to suit the present of a given community as well as, if necessary, the construction of its tilting into the future. This book presents the history and methodology of both branches of historical narrative and demonstrates them through case studies. Alongside the activity of historiographers and evolutionary biologists, this text questions whether individual lineages also constitute their world in analogous ways. This book provides a brief characterization of the biosemiotics that seeks to answer the question. It appeals to students and researchers in these cross disciplinary fields.