Book excerpt: Based on previous work that linked biosemiotics, semiotics and translation studies, this book further explores a variety of factors that play a role in social-cultural emergence. The volume, which presents a selection of papers read at a conference in 2022 with the same title as the book, engages the systems of matter-energy, biology, and significance from which and in relation to which society-culture emerges. The volume entails an interdisciplinary complex of perspectives, drawing on quantum physics and informatics as well as new materialism and a number of perspectives from semiotics and ecosemiotics in its investigations. Researchers and postgraduate students from fields such as biology, biosemiotics, semiotics, translation studies, cultural studies, new materialist thought and others, who are interested in inter- and transdisciplinary approaches to issues of society-culture, will find this book compelling reading.