Natural Selection: Conditions and Consequences: 3 Mendelian Genetics and the Reconfiguration of Potential — From Variation to Inheritance

Darwin’s theory made life intelligible as a relational process of variation and selection. But what underpinned variation itself—the internal logic by which difference persisted and reappeared—remained obscure. Mendelian genetics supplied the missing relational dimension: a semiotic formalisation of potential.

1. The Rediscovery of Inheritance as Structure

Gregor Mendel’s work, largely unnoticed in Darwin’s time, reframed biological inheritance as a system of discrete relational constraints:

• Traits were transmitted not as blended continua but as structured potentials, governed by combinatorial principles.

• The organism was reconceived as a relational nexus of inherited possibilities, actualised differently in each generation.

• Variation was no longer only environmental—it was encoded potential, latent until relationally expressed.

This shifted the evolutionary problem from describing variation to mapping the semiotic architecture of potentiality itself.

2. The Gene as Semiotic Operator

The gene, in Mendel’s construal, is not a thing but a symbolic operator—a minimal unit of inherited meaning. It functions relationally, not representationally:

• Its effect depends on contextual interaction (dominance, epistasis, environment).

• It expresses potential, not destiny; its significance lies in how it participates in systemic alignment.

• It introduces a grammar of inheritance—syntax, combination, and probability replacing vital essence.

In semiotic terms, the gene became a sign of potential within a relational system of interpretation: genotype to phenotype as systemic translation.

3. The Fusion of Semiotic Layers

Darwin’s model had construed variation as phenomenal—expressed, observable, selected. Mendelian genetics introduced a metasemiotic layer—a hidden system of rules generating that variation.

• Selection operates on realised phenomena.

• Inheritance structures the field of potential phenomena.

• Together they form a dual-layered semiotic system: one actualising, the other constraining and enabling actualisation.

This relational closure redefined what it meant for life to evolve—not random change, but the systemic evolution of semiotic rules themselves.

4. Potentiality as Relational Topology

The Mendelian paradigm transformed “heredity” from metaphor to model. The relational space of life could now be described as:

• A topology of possible forms, structured by the relations among genetic elements.

• A probabilistic field, where potential configurations are delimited yet open to recombination.

• A dynamic semiotic landscape, in which selection and inheritance co-determine what can be realised.

This was not a reduction but an expansion: the discovery that life’s potential is structurally encoded, and that structure itself evolves through relational interaction.

5. From Variation to Systemic Potential

Mendelian genetics thus reconfigured the evolutionary problem:

• Darwin revealed the semiotic logic of relation (variation and selection).

• Mendel revealed the semiotic logic of potential (inheritance and constraint).

• Their synthesis defined evolution as a recursive system, where relations generate structures that in turn shape relations—a fully relational semiotic loop.

Through Mendelian formalisation, natural selection gained its internal architecture of possibility. Evolution could now be seen as the ongoing actualisation of structured potential, mediated by semiotic and relational dynamics.