Semiodynamics of Ageing: An Evo-Devo Framework for the Decline of Biological Sense-Making

Ageing research has achieved powerful syntheses by cataloguing mechanistic “causal reservoirs” (e.g., hallmark-style frameworks) and by modelling late-life vulnerability as changes in dynamical resilience and multiscale variability. Yet these approaches often leave underspecified what, functionally, deteriorates when an organism becomes less able to sustain viable engagement with its internal and external conditions. This article proposes semiodynamics as a theoretical object for ageing: the time-dependent decline of biological sense-making competence. Sense-making is analysed into a minimal four-function scaffold: discrimination (relevant difference-making under noise), transduction (faithful propagation through coherent pathways), adaptive response (flexible viability-preserving action), and organizational coherence (cross-scale integration under perturbation). A deliberately thin formalisation represents competence as a time-dependent profile, enabling principled connections to evo-devo commitments about developmental timing, canalisation and its decay, and life-history variation. The framework yields a constrained set of empirically risky consequences: structured shifts in effective noise, recovery kinetics, modular reconfiguration, and cross-scale coupling. An empirical programme is outlined that prioritises perturbation–response designs and multiscale time-series/network measures to test (and potentially falsify) the competence-decline hypothesis across taxa, domains, and interventions.