Guenther Witzany

From 1987 to 1990 I developed a theory of communicative nature:  Living Nature is structured and organized by language and communication within and among organisms. This means that besides human language and communication every organism in all domains of life within its population is competent to generate interactions with signals. These sign-mediated interactions we term biocommunication. The biocommunicative approach investigates both communication processes within and among cells, tissues, organs and organisms and nucleotide sequences as code, i.e. language-like text, which follows in parallel three (3) kinds of rules: combinatorial (syntactic), context-sensitive (pragmatic) and content-specific (semantic). Theory of biocommunication  is the first and only theory that integrates all domains of life empirical in a non-reductionistic and non-mechanistic way.

Self and Society – Plants communicate to organize and coordinate behavior
As in all organisms, the evolution, development, and growth of plants depend on  communication processes. These communication processes are signal-mediated interactions and not simply an “exchange of information”. Therefore, identification of meaning functions of signaling molecules depends on investigation of interactional context in which signaling occurs. Plants actively sense their environment on different levels within their plant body (intra-organismic) and interact with same, related, and nonrelated plants (inter-organismic); with non-plant organisms such as fungi, bacteria, viruses and animals (trans-organismic).  Communicative interactions initiate self/non-self sensation (identity), the basic competence for community formation.  Sensory data have to be processed and memorized  which includes learning from the past to better adapt and to avoid the reproduction of always the same. Interactive response involves decision, organization of appropriate signaling molecules and coordination of all steps and sub-steps especially in the root zone- and root stem-communication. Biocommunication means there will be no coordination and organization of plant organisms without signaling processes.