The idea of a teleosemantic approach to genetic information was developed in an early form by Sterelny et al. (1996); see also Maclaurin (1998). The eminent biologist John Maynard Smith took a similar approach, when he tried to make sense of his own enthusiasm for informational concepts in biology (Maynard Smith 2000; and see also the commentaries that follow Maynard Smith’s article). Eva Jablonka has also defended a version of this idea (Jablonka 2002). Her treatment is more unorthodox, as she seeks to treat environmental signals as having semantic information, along with genes, if they are used by the organism in an appropriate way. Nick Shea has developed the most sophisticated teleosemantic treatment of genes to date (see Shea 2007a,b, 2011, 2013).