This essay theorizes significance in conjunction with selection, and thereby provides a general theory of meaning. It treats processes of significance and selection in conjunction with processes of sieving and serendipity, and thereby systematically interrelates the key factors underlying emergent forms of organized complexity. It theorizes codes in conjunction with channels, and thereby links shared cultural representations and networked social relations. And it develops the consequences of such conjunctions for various domains, at various scales--ranging from biosemiotic processes like animal-signal systems and natural selection, to technocognitive processes like lawn-mowers and Turing machines. In part, it is meant to meaningfully reframe the relations among the sub-fields of anthropology: linguistic, biological, cultural, and archeology. And in part, it is meant to show the non-reductive relations between the concerns of anthropologists and a variety of allied disciplines: linguistics and psychology, cognitive and computer science, evolutionary biology and complexity theory.