Natural Selection: Conditions and Consequences: 2 The Semiotic Revolution of Natural Selection — Nature as Selector and Systemic Signifier

Darwin’s theory of natural selection did not merely describe a mechanism; it transformed the semiotic ontology of life. The concept of “nature” ceased to be a static backdrop and became an active field of relational alignment, in which difference and survival are co-constituted.

1. Selection as Relational Process

“Selection” had previously implied intentional choice: breeders selecting traits, humans choosing outcomes. Darwin’s genius was to extend the metaphor beyond intention—to treat selection as an emergent property of relation.

• Nature “selects” through differential survival, not through will.

• The semiotic act shifts from agency of the chooser to agency of relation.

• Meaning arises in the interaction itself—between organism, environment, and constraint.

Thus “natural selection” names not a force but a systemic construal of how potential becomes actual.

2. Variation as Semiotic Potential

In Darwin’s framework, variation is not deviation but distributed potentiality. Each organism embodies a configuration of traits whose relational value is defined contextually:

• A trait’s significance is not intrinsic—it depends on ecological and systemic alignments.

• The environment is not passive—it functions as semiotic context, conferring relational meaning on variation.

• Survival, therefore, is a semiotic event: the co-actualisation of organism and world.

Variation and selection together form a semiotic circuit—potential and constraint continually redefining one another.

3. The Shift from Form to Process

Darwin’s relational turn transformed biology’s grammar:

• Life could no longer be described in the vocabulary of forms and essences; it required a syntax of processes and relations.

• “Species” became a temporal construal—a pattern of persistence within flux.

• “Adaptation” became the alignment of relational potential and contextual constraint, not design or intention.

This linguistic and conceptual shift is as important as the theory itself: it marks the moment when life became intelligible as a semiotic system, not merely a physical one.

4. Nature as Semiotic Field

Darwin’s natural selection instantiated a new ontology of nature:

• Nature is not the stage but the field of signification in which life’s meanings unfold.

• Every interaction—predation, mating, mutation—is a semiotic negotiation of survival, an exchange of information, constraint, and possibility.

• The boundaries of “organism” and “environment” blur: each construes and is construed by the other.

This was the semiotic revolution at the heart of Darwin’s insight—an inversion of the explanatory order from form to relation, from substance to alignment.

5. The Relational Consequence

Once nature could signify relationally, evolution became intelligible as a process of systemic self-articulation. The theory of natural selection revealed that:

• Life is a meaningful system, governed by differential constraints rather than external design.

• Evolution is the history of relational semiotics actualising itself.

• “Fitness” is not a fixed measure but the coherence of relation within context.

Darwin’s contribution, then, was not simply a biological model but a semiotic paradigm—an ontology in which relation, variation, and context together define what it is for life to become.