[Fis] "The Travellers"

[Pedro C. Marijuan]

Dear FIS colleagues,

Quite interesting exchanges, really. The discussion reminds me the times 
when behaviorism and ethology were at odds on how to focus the study of 
human/animal behavior. (Maybe I already talked about that some months 
ago.) On the one side, a rigorous theory and a strongly reductionist 
point of view were advanced --about learning, conditioned & 
unconditioned stimuli, responses, observation standards, laboratory 
exclusive scenario, etc. On the other side, it was observing behavior in 
nature, approaching without preconceptions and tentatively 
characterizing the situations and results; it was the naturalistic 
strategy, apprehending from nature before forming any theoretical scheme 
(of course, later on Tinbergen, Lorenz, Eibl-Eibestfeldt, etc. were to 
develop ad hoc theoretical schemes).

How can we develop a theory on signals without the previous naturalistic 
approach to the involved phenomena? Particularly when the panorama has 
dramatically changed after the information-biomolecular revolution. We 
have a rich background of cellular signaling systems, both prokaryotic 
and eukaryotic, to explore and cohere. We have important neuroscientific 
ideas (although not so well developed). We have social physics and 
social networks approaches to the social dynamics of information. We 
should travel to all of those camps, not to stay there, but to advance a 
soft all-encompassing perspective, later on to be confronted with the 
new ideas from physics too. The intertwining between self-production and 
communication is a promising general aspect to explore, in my opinion... 
socially and biologically it makes a lot of sense.

Semiotics could be OK for the previous generation--something attuned to 
our scientific times is needed now.

best ---Pedro

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Pedro C. Marijuán
Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud
Centro de Investigación Biomédica de Aragón (CIBA)
Avda. San Juan Bosco, 13, planta X
50009 Zaragoza, Spain
Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 (& 6818)
pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
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