As zoologist Richard Dawkins (1999: 3) has pointed out:
If nerves carry information about the world as it is now, genes are a coded description of the distant past. … The genes that survive down the generations add up, in effect, to a description of what it took to survive back then, and that is tantamount to saying that modern DNA is a coded description of the environments in which ancestors survived.
As he says (1998: 239):
A species […] builds up, over the generations, a statistical description of the worlds in which the ancestors of today’s species members lived and reproduced. That description is written in the language of DNA. It lies not in the DNA of any one individual but collectively in the DNA […] of the whole breeding population.
So let’s now use SFL theory to reconstrue Dawkins’ model in semiotic terms.