Adolf Portmann (27 May 1897 – 28 June 1982) was a Swiss zoologist who focused the study of life based on its appearances, ranging from morphological to semiotic aspects.
He thought that our sentimental connection with organisms, e.g., flower, butterfly, bird, cat, dog or whale, shows that we share a secret.
[5] The forms that make up the exterior of living things stand out to the extent that they conceal an inner dimension (Innenwelt) from which their Umwelt is contemplated, and eventually transformed.
According to Portmann, animals are "characters" or "vector" objects, as they point from their interiority with "intention", revealing non-utilitarian functions, as there is room for capricious desires which manifest in elegant ways.
According to Portmann, if aesthetic forms serve a purpose, it is to reveal the organism's interiority—its inaccessible world—which partially becomes palpable in its skin, shell, horns, feathers, and habits.
Presence Portmann highlighted how life forms somehow privilege external symmetry despite the asymmetry of their internal organs.
It is as if the organism "knows" it is being observed, thus presenting its best aspect, which explains the greater symmetry and ornamentation of the exterior and the concealment of the asymmetries and "ugliness" of the interior.
Based on this idea, Portmann defined, in German, the concept "eigentliche Erscheinungen" which translates to 'current appearance' or 'act of presence' in English.
Neo-Darwinism arrived at the notions of honest and dishonest from the concept of natural selection thus Mullerian and Batesian mimicries were established.
However, Neo-Darwinism completely ignored the subjective (semiotic) charge of the notions of honest and dishonest, ultimately inevitable in the explanation of mimicry.
Portmann was influenced by the structuralist and phenomenological atmosphere that emerged in the early twentieth century,[6] with figures like Edmund Husserl.
[7] Portamann's fundamental contribution to Biosemiotics is to propose that the organism possesses an inner wealth of meanings that are not directly accessible to the scientist but are appreciated in their appearance.
Uexküll had already rebelled against the view of the organism as a mere conglomerate of mechanisms that respond to external stimuli, like a machine that dispenses soft drinks.
Uexküll's notion of Umwelt, assimilated and adapted by Portmann, liberates biological thought from the constraints of classic mechanics, giving way to the symbolic.
Natural selection does not explain why, for example, the black-and-yellow coloration pattern persists among tigers, certain snakes, and bees, even though these species have lifestyles that are largely disconnected from each other.
Natural selection is a possible rationalization within the human Umwelt that follows the logic of survival, while orthogenesis recognizes that things are perceived by the organism as they are, within an interpretative framework structured by conventions filled with meanings, whether these are arbitrary or not.
Adolf Portmann has attracted the attention of a significant and growing group of anthropologists captivated by his orthogenetic and anthropomorphic vision of life.
His critique of neo-Darwinism used as a background in his design of a biological framework to approach the interiority of Homo sapiens gained special attention from anthropologists.
Although the fetus undergoes the maturation of motor coordination and sensory organs in the womb, the human being is, at the moment of birth, comparatively helpless.
Orthogenesis In 1960 Adolf Portmann published a work entitled "Der Pfeil des Humanen: über P. Teilhard de Chardin" where he aligns his own thoughts with the proposal of the French paleontologist.