Page 51 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

EDUARDO NEIVA

the mother’s weakest point: her vessels that cannot defend themselves. The
objective of the fetus is to manipulate the mother’s physical condition to its
advantage. The limit of this manipulation is the fetus’s selfish interest: if she
dies, the fetus will suffer dire consequences, and the cost of the manipulation
will far outweigh its benefits.
The existence of compassion and co-operation is the after-effect, the after-
math of erasing or distorting a message that is inscribed biologically in every
living organism, that is ‘to explore the environment, including friends and
relatives, to maximize our proliferation’ (Williams 1992: 15).
We must present at this point an explanatory model of the predator–prey
link that informs the basic relationship of biological experience. Then, the
question is how to describe predatory processes and what conclusions could be
extracted for the understanding of human culture and human society.
It is not simple to fathom the mechanics of the predatory processes in the
natural world: predation may be universal in biological life, but its concrete
strategies are inevitably singular, local, and restricted to speci fic environments.
A successful species in one niche can face extinction in another. As detached
observers, human beings cannot know, with ease and without doubt, what goes
on in the perceptual process of a species preying on another. Thus, how could
we check our hypothesis about other species? How could we build a model
common to distinct species when each species has its peculiar mode of percep-
tion, not necessarily akin to ours? Moreover, the act of singling out a prey
demands more than mere perception. The predator searches for or avoids food
sources, because it knows what would match its purpose. How could we cope
with such a dazzling variety of cognitive processes when our hypothesis cannot
be confirmed or refuted by the testimony of predators and prey?
The grasping of predatory interaction emerges from the consideration of a
capacity present across the natural world: the semiotic faculty of representation,
in other words, the ability to produce signs. Not only in human societies, but in
nature we can see a proliferation of signs resulting from the interaction of living
and inanimate beings. Nature is a semiotic theater: just consider what happens
when shadows of twigs are projected on a wall; we have indices in direct causal
relationship. Indexical signs are unstable. The alteration of the twigs changes
the shape of the shadow, or makes it disappear. The sign is completely
dependent upon its model.
However, if we move from the inanimate realm to the universe of living
organisms, we must take into account that living beings can retain as signs,
therefore as representations, what comes indexically to their perceptual systems.
The natural world is duplicated. The receptor collects indices which are
reinterpreted as visual forms that entertain an analogical relation with what
was, an instant ago, a physical event in nature.
In terms of the animal mind, the nervous system of a living organism desig-
nates iconically its position facing another organism, possibly its prey. If it is
prey, the following will happen: the prey moves and triggers the whole process

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