Colonial organisms such as Volvox occupy an evolutionary frontier. They illustrate that the emergence of multicellularity, division of labour, and collective behaviour cannot be understood solely through genes or fitness functions. Evolution in colonial life is the shifting of readiness landscapes: changes in distributed ability, local inclinations, and perspectival individuation that open or close pathways of actualisation.
Transitions: from unicellular to colonial horizons
The volvocine lineage offers a vivid example of gradual transitions:
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From unicells with a single aperture of readiness,
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To loose aggregates that weakly coordinate,
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To tightly integrated spherical colonies where cells enact specialised construals.
These transitions are not steps toward “more complex organisms” in a teleological sense. They are reconfigurations of potential: the colony becomes a new horizon of enactable states, with relational couplings that allow distributed action to cohere. Evolution is visible not in the parts but in the aperture itself—the set of possibilities that the system can now instantiate.
Division of labour as emergent alignment
Division of labour—somatic motility versus reproductive gonidia—is often interpreted as a functional optimisation. Readiness reframes it:
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Specialisation arises from stabilised inclinations within the colony’s ability-field.
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Cells are not preprogrammed for a “role”; they are positioned where local construals naturally bias certain enactments.
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Division of labour is therefore perspectival alignment, not top-down instruction.
Evolution tunes these inclinations. Selective pressures shape which partitions of potential are stable, coherent, and ecologically viable. The result is a colony whose local construals produce reliable, integrated behaviour.
Ecological embedding: readiness in context
Colonial life does not evolve in isolation. Its potential is constrained and enabled by the environment:
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Fluid mechanics of the medium shape how flagellar beating translates into swimming.
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Light gradients bias phototactic inclinations.
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Nutrient availability modulates metabolic readiness.
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Predation or physical disturbances select for robustness in distributed coordination.
Readiness landscapes are ecologically embedded: evolutionary shifts are responses not to genes alone, but to which patterns of distributed potential persist, reproduce, and resonate within the ecological field.
Readiness landscapes: the evolutionary field
Evolution can thus be reframed as a navigation of readiness landscapes:
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Peaks and valleys are not fitness maxima, but configurations of ability, inclination, and individuation that can be enacted coherently.
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Mutations and epigenetic changes shift the shape of these landscapes, altering which pathways of potential are accessible.
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Evolutionary “success” is the persistence of relational configurations that support robust yet adaptable enactment of collective behaviour.
Colonial transitions—aggregation, inversion, differentiation—are trajectories through these landscapes, not steps toward a predetermined organismal goal.
Integration without teleology
The relational framework resolves a classic tension: colonies are both unified and differentiated. Evolution does not force the emergence of an “organism.” Instead, it tunes:
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Ability distributions (what the colony can do),
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Inclination gradients (how local loci lean toward certain enactments),
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Perspectival alignment (how coherently these construals converge).
Selection acts on these configurations. The result is integrated, functional, and yet fundamentally relational: the colony’s unity emerges from alignment, not from instruction.
Where this leads
Evolution of colonial life is the shaping of possibility itself. By tracking shifts in ability, inclination, and individuation, we can observe how multicellular collectives emerge, diversify, and adapt without invoking teleology, organismal preordination, or genetic determinism.
The next post will explore individuality in this light: how perspectival alignment provides a graded, measurable account of what it means for a colony—or a cell—to be “individual” within a distributed system of readiness.
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