ORIGINAL PAPER Introducing Dynamics into the Field of Biosemiotics A Formal Account with Examples from Language and Immunology Joachim De Beule & Eivind Hovig & Mikael Benson Received: 20 April 2010 / Accepted: 24 August 2010 / Published online: 17 September 2010 # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 Abstract Coding plays a universal and pervasive role in biological organization, in forms such as genetic coding (DNA to protein translation), RNA processing, gene regulation, protein modification, cell signalling, immune responses, epigenetic development and natural language. Nevertheless, the ways and means by which organic codes are formed and used are still poorly understood. A formal model is presented in this paper to investigate the emergence of conventional codes among code users. The relationship between the formation and the usage of codes is discussed, and a biological mechanism involving coding is identified in the context of the immune system. Keywords Semiotic dynamics . Artificial chemistry . Mathematical modeling . Organic codes Biosemiotics (2011) 4:5–24 DOI 10.1007/s12304-010-9101-1 J. De Beule (*) Artificial Intelligence Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussel, Belgium e-mail: joachim@arti.vub.ac.be J. De Beule Iridia lab, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Brussel, Belgium E. Hovig Department of Tumor Biology, Institute for Cancer Research, The Norwegian Radium Hospital Montebello, Oslo, Norway E. Hovig Department of Informatics, The University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway M. Benson Unit for Clinical Systems Biology, Queen Silvia Children’ s Hospital Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden