Foremost among the tasks facing a semiotically-informed modeling of natural open systems is the recognition and representation of self-organization. This forces attention on process, time, and energetics to complement the conventional semiotic bias toward structure, space, and informatics. While self -organization might be captured in numerous operational idioms, we suggest that the fundamentally distinctive formal structures of (a) development (intrinsic predictability) and (b) evolution (unexpected change through change in contextual meaning) constitute thewarp and woof of virtually all observations on systems undergoing change, and that, since these represent complementary orientations toward phenomena generally, interaction of these styles of change within systems can lead to generic models of enormous utility in many fields.