Colonial Readiness: Life at the Boundary of the One and the Many: Conclusion: Life as Field, Possibility as Event

Colonial readiness reframes the central questions of biology:

• What is an individual? Not a discrete entity, but a locus of perspectival alignment.

• What is development? Not programmatic execution, but relational reconfiguration of potential.

• What is behaviour? Not mechanistic output, but enactment of distributed readiness.

• What is evolution? Not the selection of preformed entities, but the reshaping of landscapes of potential.

By replacing representational metaphysics with a relational ontology, the series dissolves long-standing debates about organism versus collective, discrete versus continuous individuality, and teleology in development. Volvox is not an edge case; it is a window into life itself, a living demonstration that the boundary between the one and the many is not a line, but a fold in a field of possibility.

In the final mythic vignette, Liora and the spinning globe remind us that life is both relational and perspectival, coherent yet distributed, actualised yet open. Readiness offers a framework not only for understanding colonial organisms but for rethinking what it means to be alive: a dance of potential made real, moment by moment, across distributed loci of perspective.

Colonial life, and the relational lens it demands, shows us that biology is not about parts or wholes—it is about the ways that possibilities are enacted, perspectively, in the world.