Abstract
Our paper offers an additional dimension to the rigid view that living beings are only driven and programmed by a hierarchy of hardwired codes. We trace life at different levels of organization to the cohabitation of individuals within and between historically established lineages.
Ways of such cohabitation depends on experience of particular guilds or aggregates; they cannot be easily foretold from any basic level of description, they are distributed across all levels, and across all members of the community. Such phenomena of interactivity constitute a lived world which, we argue, represents a genuine analogy with our domain of human cultures and languages (Markoš 2002, Markoš et al. 2009, Markoš & Švorcová 2009, Markoš & Faltýnek 2011).
Examples, on which we would like to demonstrate the historically based concept of meaning, are: 1) That protein folding is not completely provided by the code but is rather dependent on the historical (evolution, ontogeny) or ad hoc (e.g. temperature, mating season, etc.) contingencies, or on the experience of the given cell/organism. 2) That chemical diacritics like epigenetic modifications like DNA methylation or histone code can be written and rewritten and how they influence the behavior within the cell. 3) That the decisive factor of ontogeny, i.e. of patterning multicellular bodies is not the mere digital representation of genes but, rather, how the gene is understood in the overall "cultural" context of the species/culture (Švorcová 2012).