Few scientific theories have fractured inherited metaphysics as thoroughly as Darwinian evolution. With a single conceptual move, purpose was severed from design, intention from outcome, and destiny from form. Life no longer unfolded according to a plan; it proliferated, diverged, and stabilised without foresight. And yet, more than a century later, the metaphysical consequences of this fracture remain strangely unresolved.
The Shattering of Purpose
Before Darwin, life was intelligible through purpose. Organs existed for something; species were arranged according to intrinsic ends. Evolutionary theory shattered this orientation. Variation is blind. Selection is local. Survival is contingent. There is no final cause guiding the process, no overarching direction toward perfection.
This was not merely a scientific disruption but a metaphysical one. It dissolved the assumption that form must be explained by intention. Life became a history of accidents that happened to hold.
The Return of Telos by Other Means
Yet the language of biology tells a subtler story. Traits are said to exist in order to perform functions. Organisms are described as optimising fitness. Evolutionary processes are narrated as if they were problem-solving agents, refining solutions over time.
This is not a simple mistake. It is a habitual repair. Teleology returns, stripped of metaphysical explicitness, reintroduced as metaphor, shorthand, or heuristic necessity. Purpose is denied at the theoretical level and quietly reinstated at the discursive one.
The fracture is felt, but closure is demanded.
Fitness as Sedimented Metaphysics
Nowhere is this clearer than in the concept of fitness. Ostensibly descriptive, fitness appears to measure success in survival and reproduction. Yet it functions metaphysically as a retrospective justification: what persists is declared fit, and what is fit is said to persist.
Fitness does not explain why forms arise; it stabilises their persistence after the fact. It is a name for historical holding, not a force that shapes outcomes in advance. And yet, treated habitually, it becomes a quiet substitute for purpose.
A Relational Reading of Evolution
Read relationally, evolution is not a march toward improvement nor a competition toward excellence. It is the continual differentiation of structured possibility under constraint. Variations arise within fields of relation — ecological, bodily, temporal — and some of these variations hold.
Lineages are not trajectories toward goals. They are patterns of stability within shifting conditions. What appears as direction is the sedimentation of cuts that have repeatedly worked, not the pull of an intrinsic end.
The Illusion of Progress
Perhaps the most persistent metaphysical residue is the idea of progress. Complexity increases. Intelligence emerges. Consciousness blooms. From within the lineage, this can feel inevitable.
But inevitability is a retroactive illusion. Countless branches lead nowhere. Entire worlds of life vanish without trace. What remains is not what was destined, but what happened not to fall apart.
Progress is not a property of evolution; it is a narrative imposed upon survival.
Possibility, Held Lightly
Evolutionary theory thus offers another lesson in possibility. The openness of life is real, but it is continually narrowed by habit, environment, and history. Possibility is not infinite freedom; it is structured, constrained, and locally enacted.
To recognise this is not to diminish the wonder of life, but to deepen it. Each organism is not a step toward something else, but a temporary actualisation of a field of possibilities that could have gone otherwise.
Living Without Ends
To live without telos is unsettling. It removes guarantees, final meanings, and cosmic reassurance. But it also restores attention to the present cut: the conditions that hold now, the relations that stabilise now, the possibilities that remain open now.
Evolution teaches us this quietly: life does not aim. It experiments. And in doing so, it reveals a world where meaning is not discovered at the end of the process, but enacted, locally and precariously, along the way.
The fracture Darwin introduced remains with us. The question is not whether it will be repaired, but whether we can learn to inhabit it without rushing to closure.
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