If variation and selection describe the preconditions for evolution as a process, then the theory of natural selection reframed these as systemic relations — not as forces acting on matter, but as constraints on the propagation of possibility. Once the world was construed in these terms, a cascade of new relational consequences followed.
1. The emergence of population thinking
Where pre-Darwinian biology imagined species as natural kinds, the theory of natural selection displaced this essentialism. Populations became the units of explanation — not because they had an independent reality, but because they instantiated the field of variation across which selection operated. What counted as an ‘individual’ or a ‘trait’ was thus contextually defined: meaning emerged from relational differentiation, not from intrinsic properties.
2. Temporality and accumulation
Selection introduced temporality as a semiotic ordering principle: the cumulative alignment of differential survival. Time, in this sense, was not an external backdrop but the trace of relational actualisations — a record of constraints and affordances that shaped subsequent possibility.
3. Functional explanation without teleology
The theory made it possible to speak of function without invoking purpose. Function became an emergent effect of relational fit: a phenomenon’s persistence signalled its systemic alignment, not its design. Meaning, correspondingly, shifted from intention to consequence — an ontological move that still reverberates in semiotic theory.
4. From mechanism to system
By treating variation and selection as mutually conditioning processes, Darwinian thought opened the way for systemic models of life. Organisms and environments were no longer independent entities in causal sequence, but dynamically coupled aspects of one evolving system. This reciprocity prefigured later developments in cybernetics, autopoiesis, and ecological thought — all of which can be seen as elaborations of Darwin’s relational ontology of change.
5. The semiotic consequence
Most profoundly, natural selection revealed that form itself is historical: what something is depends on the network of differentiations through which it has been stabilised. The biological became semiotic — a system of constraints, feedbacks, and adaptive meanings that continually re-actualise the possible. Evolution thus became not merely a theory of life, but a paradigm for understanding how meaning evolves through relation.
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