Natural Selection: Conditions and Consequences: Introduction — Natural Selection as Relational Reorientation

The theory of natural selection stands as one of the most radical shifts in how humans have construed the living world. Yet its significance is not confined to biology. It represents a deeper reorganisation of how relation, potential, and actuality are understood — a semiotic reorientation that made possible a new ontology of life.

Before Darwin, life was largely imagined through essence and design: species were stable categories, functions were purposes, and variation was noise. What Darwin introduced was not simply a mechanism but a grammar — a new way of reading change as constitutive rather than accidental. Variation and selection became not empirical observations but relational operators: the means by which the possible is continuously actualised through systemic constraint.

This series, Natural Selection: Conditions and Consequences, explores the relational and semiotic foundations of this shift.

Rather than recounting the historical details of Darwin’s work, it examines what made such a theory possible — and what the theory, in turn, made possible for thought.

Across the series, we trace how the concept of selection reconfigures:

• The ontology of form — from fixed essence to relational stability;

• The logic of explanation — from purpose to consequence;

• The temporality of life — from cyclical creation to cumulative differentiation;

• The relation of life to meaning — from representation to reflexive construal.

Seen in this light, natural selection becomes less a discovery about life than a discovery within life — a theory that life itself produces as it comes to know its own conditions of possibility.

The posts that follow map this reorientation: from the conceptual and semiotic preconditions that made Darwin’s insight intelligible, to the far-reaching consequences that have since unfolded through science, philosophy, and meaning itself.