Review
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
Product Description
For three and a half billion years the living creatures of the natural world have been engaged in an increasingly complex and extensive conversation. Cells, tissue, organs, plants, animals, entire populations and ecosystems buzz with communication, incessantly emitting and receiving signals. These signs have been there as long as life itself. They make up the semiosphere, a sphere like the biosphere, but one constituted of messages - sounds, odors, movements, colors, electrical fields, chemical signals - the signs of life. 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. He 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. What propels this journey is Hoffmeyer's attempt to discover how nature could come to mean something to someone. In fact, "someone" is a principal character of this book, while we confront the question of how "something" could become "someone."
