If we step back from the historical specifics of Darwin’s theory, what emerges is not simply a new biological paradigm but a transformation in how relation itself is construed. Evolution, understood relationally, is not a process that unfolds in time, but a pattern that actualises through constraint — the semiotic shaping of possibility.
1. From description to construal
Natural selection did not merely describe the world differently; it made a different kind of world possible to construe. It shifted ontology from being to becoming, from fixed entities to differential relations. Species ceased to be essences and became provisional alignments within an evolving field. This was not a discovery within nature but a reorganisation of meaning — a new way of making nature mean.
2. Variation as semiotic potential
Variation, in this frame, is not random in a metaphysical sense but open in a semiotic one. It constitutes the field of potential construals — the virtual range from which actual forms emerge through systemic alignment. Every mutation, every adaptive shift, every branching lineage expresses the system’s ongoing negotiation between redundancy and novelty, coherence and divergence.
3. Selection as relational constraint
Selection is not an external force but the system’s self-referential constraint — the internal logic by which certain alignments sustain the system’s coherence. It is the semiotic mechanism by which potential becomes pattern: a filtering of the possible through the already-actualised. In human meaning systems, this corresponds to the recursive filtering of new construals through the grammars of collective sense.
4. Evolution as semiosis
When viewed relationally, evolution and semiosis are not merely analogous but structurally continuous. Both describe the reflexive actualisation of potential within constraint — the emergence of form as the trace of systemic alignment. What biology calls ‘adaptation’, the semiotic calls ‘meaning’: both are the self-organising outcome of relational differentiation.
5. What evolution made possible
By displacing essence with relation, the theory of natural selection not only redefined life but redefined intelligibility itself. It opened the way for systems theory, information theory, and the relational sciences more broadly — all heirs to this semiotic revolution. Evolution became the first general theory of how possibility becomes pattern — a logic that transcends the biological and extends into the symbolic.
In this sense, evolution is not a theory of life but a theory of meaning through life — a recognition that all stability, all coherence, all form is the historical residue of relational construal.
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