Mentions in Alexei Sharov´s farewell editorial in Biosemiotics

Alexei Sharov has written a farewell editorial for Biosemiotics, for which he has been an Editor-in-Chief for about 10 years. The editorial is entitled "Following developments of biosemiotics", and includes some passages I really appreciate mentioning me, our joint work, and some initiatives of mine.

Excerpts:

"Many prominent scientists and philosophers in biosemiotics, such as Kalevi Kull, Jesper Hoffmeyer, Donald Favareau, Howard Pattee, Karel Kleisner, Prisca Augustyn, Morten Tønnessen, Anton Markoš, Stanley Salthe, Bruce Weber, Frederik Stjernfelt, Paul Cobley and others, supported the journal and published their articles in the initial years."

"In 2014, Marcello Barbieri transferred most of editorial duties to a new team of editors, that included me, Timo Maran, and Morten Tønnessen, and we took full charge as Editors-in-Chief in 2015. Our first joint editorial titled “Towards Synthesis of Biology and Semiotics” outlined our vision of the state and future of biosemiotics and its representation in this journal. We wrote:

The main idea of biosemiotics is that life and semiosis are coextensive. Here semiosis is understood as a sign process or sign exchange, where signs stand for something else in some respect or capacity. In particular, life has a semiotic nature because it is based on endless interpretation of environmental cues and transfer of life-related functional meanings vertically across generations and horizontally to neighboring organisms. Semiotic processes help organisms to perform their functions, preserve their habits and pursue their agendas through generations (Sharov et al., 2015): 1–2)."

"I am thankful to Morten Tønnessen for suggesting two new activities that helped to invigorate the relations between the journal and readers. First, it was the establishment of the Annual Biosemiotic Achievement Award in 2014 for the novelty and relevance to biosemiotics. And the second was the Biosemiotics Glossary Project, which started with the article on semiotic agency (Tønnessen, 2015), and then continued the discussion with the terms: umwelt, semiotic threshold, and intentionality. An important part of this project is answering questionnaires and statistical analysis of results which reflects the range of opinions within the biosemiotics field."

"Also we published the special issues “Can quantitative approaches develop bio/semiotic theory?” edited by Dan Faltýnek and Ľudmila Lacková, “Agency and (the Built) Environment” by Tim Ireland and Paul Cobley, “Biosemiotics of waste” by Yogi Hendlin, and “Umwelt Theory and Phenomenology” by Carlo Brentari and Morten Tønnessen."

"I enjoyed my work as Editor-in-Chief of Biosemiotics for many reasons. First, biosemiotics has been my major interest and activity for 36 years, although I combined it with my regular jobs in ecology, molecular biology, and bioinformatics. Second, I like helping young authors to improve their manuscripts, as well as interacting with reviewers. And third, my editorial job stimulated reading related publications, and I learned about new discoveries and theories in various fields of biology and the humanities. This knowledge helped me to write a book together with Morten Tønnessen Semiotic agency: Science beyond mechanism (Sharov & Tønnessen, 2021)."