Introduction: Ending Without Replacing
This series has been deliberately critical. It has taken evolutionary psychology at its word, followed its explanations to their limits, and shown where they close inquiry rather than extend it.
What it has not done is offer a rival theory of behaviour, cognition, or mind.
That restraint is intentional.
The aim of this final post is not to replace one explanatory framework with another, but to show how a relational ontology reframes the very questions evolutionary psychology believes it answers.
1. Relation as Primary
A relational ontology begins from a simple but far‑reaching commitment:
Relations are not secondary connections between pre‑existing entities; they are constitutive of what entities are.
On this view, individuals are not self‑contained bearers of traits that then interact. They are nodes in structured fields of relation, actualising possibilities made available by those fields.
This shift is decisive.
Questions framed in terms of what is inside the individual give way to questions about what relations make this phenomenon possible.
2. Meaning Is Constituted, Not Inherited
From a relational perspective, meaning does not travel through history as a latent content waiting to be expressed. It is constituted in present relations:
linguistic,
social,
institutional,
symbolic.
Biology and history matter—but as constraints on what can be actualised, not as carriers of meaning themselves.
To ask why an action means what it does is not to ask about its ancestral origin, but about the relations that make it intelligible now.
This reframing does not deny evolution. It relocates it.
3. Explanation Without Essence
Relational explanation does not seek hidden inner essences to stabilise behaviour. It traces how regularities emerge, persist, and transform through structured relations.
What evolutionary psychology calls “human nature” appears here as sedimented relational patterning—durable, influential, but never necessary or exhaustive.
Explanation remains accountable to contingency.
4. Systems as Open Theories of Possibility
In a relational ontology, systems are not causal machines that generate outcomes. They are theories of possible instances: structured spaces that specify what can count as a phenomenon.
To explain an instance is to show how it is made possible within such a system, not to reduce it to a hidden cause.
Crucially, this form of explanation does not end inquiry. It invites re‑entry.
If relations change, possibilities change. If meanings shift, phenomena shift.
5. Why Explanation Must Remain Open
Meaning‑bearing phenomena are not solved once and for all. They are continually re‑actualised in new contexts.
Any explanation that claims finality—whether through biology, history, or essence—mistakes stability for closure.
A relational account resists that temptation. It treats explanation as orientation rather than termination, as a way of keeping phenomena intelligible without exhausting them.
Conclusion: Saying Less to See More
This series has argued that evolutionary psychology explains too much too quickly, and in doing so, explains away the very phenomena it seeks to understand.
A relational ontology proposes no counter‑myth. It offers a different discipline of explanation—one that keeps relations visible, meaning constitutive, and inquiry open.
What it would say instead is therefore best expressed negatively:
Not that behaviour is written inside us, but that it is made possible between us.
Saying more than this, for now, would be premature.
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