British Library Electronic Table of Contents (United Kingdom)

As Darwin portended but failed to develop, and of which Gould made much, the forensic evidence of evolution points toward Punctuated Equilibrium rather than Phyletic Gradualism; however Gould?s empirical postulation has long suffered from its lack of a testable theoretical basis. This is rectified by the work of Jaroslav Flegr and the Frozen Plasticity Theory, a hypothesis with striking application within semiotic theory and hence to questions of epistemology and ontology. The consequences of applying FPT within Biosemiotics is this: when any particular sign carries a great range of interpretation (semiotic polymorphism) combined with a high degree of mutually supportive referencing (semiotic pleiotropy), that sign is less likely to exhibit plasticity?less able to find new expressions capa...