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The Korean Society for Biotechnology and Bioengineering (한국생물공학회)
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A Linguistic Approach to Communication Strategies of Biological Systems

생물체의 정보소통전략에 대한 언어학적 접근

  • Kim, Soo-Yeon (Department of English Language and Literature, Sejong University) ;
  • Oh, Duk Jae (Department of Integrative Bioscience and Biotechnology, Sejong University)
  • 김수연 (세종대학교 영어영문학과) ;
  • 오덕재 (세종대학교 바이오융합공학과)
  • Received : 2017.02.02
  • Accepted : 2017.02.23
  • Published : 2017.03.31
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Abstract

The completion of the Human Genome Project that identified all 3 billion base pairs in the human genome can be seen as a step towards understanding the relay of information and intention within an organism, or in other words, the language of life. The faculty of human language, key to differentiating humans from other animate species, works for conveying information to others by mapping meaning to sound based on syntactic structures. This resemblance between life and language has not gone unnoticed; the literature on RNA transcription and translation research regularly uses linguistic metaphors and the biolinguistic perspective of language has also been studied. By examining the biological characteristics of language and the linguistic characteristics of life, this study aims to identify key mechanisms shared between the two systems in order to promote a stronger connection between them. It furthers this goal by pointing out two general messages to which these mechanisms aim, productivity and accuracy, and discovers what lesson these messages give to a human society geared for sustainability.

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References

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