The evolutionary series does not offer final answers. It does not declare a privileged unit, locate the “true” fitness, or define the essence of novelty. It refuses closure.
And yet, it offers something equally rigorous: a vision of evolution as a field of constrained possibility, where patterns persist, actualise, and transform — not as objects with intrinsic identity, but as emergent outcomes of relational cuts.
Variation, Fitness, Units, Novelty, and Lineage
Across the series, five pressures converge:
-
Variation Without Ground — the restless heterogeneity that precedes selection, unanchored by essence.
-
The Intolerance of Fitness — the refusal to accept that differential persistence is relational, contextual, and emergent.
-
The Intolerance of the Unit — the demand for a bearer of selection, resisted by the distributed nature of evolutionary processes.
-
The Intolerance of Novelty — the compulsion to reframe emergence as recombination, rather than allowing genuine difference.
-
The Intolerance of Lineage — the insistence on persistent entities across time, resisted by non-identity and relational persistence.
Each intolerance is an attempt to stabilise explanation, to preserve coherence, and to protect intelligibility. Each is also a refusal: of relationality, of incompleteness, of becoming.
What Evolution Refuses
Evolutionary thought has long struggled with the implications of what it describes:
-
No entity persists fully; identity is partial and context-dependent.
-
Novelty is not reducible; emergence cannot be entirely explained retrospectively.
-
Selection is not localised; it is distributed across interacting constraints.
-
Fitness is relational; it is not a property to be possessed, only a pattern to be enacted.
Science often responds to these pressures with compensatory measures: adaptationist narratives, gene-centrism, optimisation metaphors, hierarchical units. These strategies make evolution palatable — but they obscure its relational character.
Evolution as Relational Discipline
From a relational perspective, evolution is not about discovering fixed truths.
It is about observing how possibilities are constrained, actualised, and patterned.
-
Variation is the material of possibility.
-
Selection is the articulation of constraint.
-
Units are provisional lenses through which patterns are seen.
-
Novelty is the emergence of previously unactualised possibilities.
-
Lineages are patterns of persistence enacted through relational cuts.
Explanation is not the enumeration of essences. It is the disciplined tracing of relations.
A Field, Not a Map
The evolutionary landscape is not a terrain to be fully mapped.
It is a field in which:
-
multiple patterns coexist, intersect, and diverge
-
relational constraints shape outcomes without determining them
-
persistence and change co-occur, without reducing one to the other
-
explanation is partial, perspectival, and accountable
The field does not yield a single, privileged description. It allows multiple, overlapping, and mutually incompatible perspectives — all disciplined by relational actualisation.
What This Concludes
The evolutionary series does not offer closure.
It does not resolve debates over units, fitness, novelty, or lineage.
It does something more subtle: it shows how the very intelligibility of evolutionary explanation depends on what is repeatedly refused — the relational, the incomplete, the emergent, the distributed, the provisional.
To see evolution fully, one must see the intolerances and let them speak together.
Becoming Without Essence
If quantum theory taught that phenomena are relationally cut and constrained, evolution teaches that life itself is relationally patterned.
Persistence, change, emergence, and selection are not accidents or defects. They are the actualisation of possibilities within a field of constraints.
To read evolution relationally is not to simplify. It is to attend to the discipline of participation: the patterns that hold, the possibilities that unfold, and the cuts through which explanation is enacted.
No comments:
Post a Comment