Life is rarely as tidy as our categories presume. Colonial organisms, from the elegant Volvox spheres to their diverse volvocine relatives, inhabit a zone that is neither singular nor fully divisible, neither organism nor mere aggregation. They expose the limitations of standard biological thinking, which insists on binaries: cell versus organism, part versus whole, individuality versus collectivity.
This series proposes a different lens: readiness. Readiness is not a mechanism, a program, or a property. It is structured potential actualised perspectivally. It is the relational field that a system inhabits, modulated locally and integrated globally, through the interplay of ability, inclination, and individuation.
By following the volvocine example, the series traces how colonies enact behaviour, develop, and evolve—not as executions of genetic instructions, but as events of relational alignment. From phototaxis to inversion, from division of labour to evolutionary transitions, colonial life exemplifies possibility actualised in distributed, perspectival form.
The series moves from the conceptual foundations of readiness, through the mechanics of behaviour and development, to evolutionary and theoretical implications, concluding with a mythic vignette that crystallises the ontology in narrative form.
No comments:
Post a Comment