Fitness
Fitness

Summary/Abstract: The concept of fitness as it is used in evolutionary biology carries with it a strong flavour of sociomorphic modelling. Every facet and quality of an organism is transposed to one absolute and quantitative measure of success: the number of viable offspring. Jesper Hoffmeyer makes an attempt to domesticate the fitness concept in semiotics by introducing the term semiotic fitness, which is defined as the measure of success of an organism in interpreting information, using its biological inheritance for doing so, and in relation to the given ecological context. With this new perspective, the center of activity has clearly shifted – for while in classical evolutionary biology, an organism remains the passive object of selection pressures, in Hoffmeyer’s interpretation, ‘life’ becomes the centre of active interpretation and translation. This shift makes the concept of semiotic fitness harbour a certain affinity with James Mark Baldwin’s (1896) concept of organic selection or F. John Odling-Smee’s (1998) concept of niche construction.

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