Evolution Without Essence: 5 The Intolerance of Lineage

Evolution traces patterns across time.

Lineages are the narratives we impose on these patterns: sequences of ancestors and descendants, threads of persistence through variation, carriers of identity across generations.

Yet the very idea of lineage is profoundly uncomfortable.

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Lineage as Explanatory Necessity

Evolutionary explanation depends on something persisting:

• traits must appear in descendants to be selected

• variation must accumulate along a path to be meaningful

• adaptive histories require continuity

Lineages seem indispensable. They promise coherence, intelligibility, and continuity.

And yet, they are never fully given.

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The Illusion of Continuity

Lineages are stabilised through naming, categorisation, and abstraction.

• species lineages are delineated by convention

• genealogies trace ancestry selectively

• developmental histories are reconstructed retrospectively

Each of these operations imposes identity where, ontologically, it is fragile.

The continuity we read in lineages is rarely a property of the material itself.

It is a consequence of our cuts.

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Where Tensions Emerge

The intolerance of lineage manifests in the discomfort with:

• identity across generations (non-identity)

• novelty (genuine emergence)

• distributed selection (no single unit bears the full story)

• relational fitness (dependent, context-specific)

Lineage insists on persistence. Evolution insists on becoming.

The clash is structural.

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The Usual Repairs

Science attempts to stabilise lineages in several ways:

• designating species or clades as units of inheritance

• privileging gene-centred or organism-centred continuity

• retrofitting ancestral traits to impose coherence

• smoothing apparent discontinuities through narrative

Each strategy protects intelligibility. Each obscures the relational nature of becoming.

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Lineage as Cut, Not Thing

From a relational perspective, lineages are not entities.

They are patterns of constraint that persist long enough to be named and studied.

Persistence is not absolute.

It is selective.

It depends on context, interaction, and the particular cuts made in the field of possibility.

Lineages do not exist independently of description.

They are enacted.

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The Price of Refusal

The intolerance of lineage drives persistent explanatory habits:

• overemphasis on species, genes, or groups

• attempts to “trace back” novelty as though it were latent

• teleological narratives of adaptation or optimisation

• retrospective projection of order onto historical processes

These strategies are intelligible. But they conceal what evolution itself teaches: persistence is relational, provisional, and constrained.

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Lineages as Participation

Relational ontology reframes lineage not as a substance that endures, but as a participation in a field of constrained possibility.

The “story” of a lineage is not a mirror of reality.

It is a cut, a perspective, a partial actualisation among many.

Persistence is not given.

It is exercised.

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Where the Evolutionary Series Arrives

Through variation, fitness, units, novelty, and now lineage, the intolerances of evolutionary thought converge.

Each intolerance reflects an attempt to impose stability where the relational field is constitutive:

• perspective resists neutrality

• incompleteness resists closure

• non-identity resists preservation

• plurality resists singular explanation

• lineage resists projection of enduring essence

The evolutionary series does not resolve these tensions.

It allows them to be seen, together.

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Evolution as Field of Constrained Possibility

The final move is relational.

Evolution is not a story of optimisation, nor a catalogue of persistent entities, nor a linear march of adaptation.

It is a field of constrained possibilities, in which:

• variation actualises within limits

• fitness operates relationally

• units are provisional

• novelty emerges

• lineages are patterns of sustained constraint

Understanding evolution is not about locating a final explanation.

It is about seeing the cuts, the constraints, and the selective actualisations that make the living world intelligible.