The Becoming of Possibility: 12/28/25

Sunday, 28 December 2025

Evolution Without Essence: 1 Darwin — Variation Without Ground

Darwin opens the door without naming what he has undone.

He offers an account of transformation without essence, of persistence without blueprint, of order without ground — and then refuses to follow the implications where they lead.

This refusal is not a failure. It is the condition under which On the Origin of Species could be written at all.

Variation Comes First

Darwin does not begin with form, function, or purpose. He begins with variation.

Variation is not explained. It is assumed.

Individuals differ. Offspring are not identical to parents. Traits fluctuate, recombine, appear, and disappear. This restless heterogeneity is not derived from a deeper principle; it is the material with which evolution works.

Darwin does not ground variation.

He relies on it.

Selection as Constraint, Not Cause

Natural selection is often misread as an active force — a shaping hand, an optimiser, a hidden teleology.

Darwin’s own formulation is far more restrained.

Selection does not produce variation. It does not direct change. It does not foresee outcomes. It simply constrains which variations persist under particular conditions.

Selection eliminates.

It does not create.

In this sense, natural selection functions as a filter, not an engine.

Explanation Without Essence

Crucially, Darwin does not explain what a species is. He explains how populations change.

Species appear as temporary stabilisations within a moving field of variation — names for patterns that hold long enough to be recognised, not essences that precede their instances.

This is Darwin’s most radical move, and also the one he least emphasises.

There is no underlying form toward which evolution tends.

There is only differential persistence.

The Reluctant Revolutionary

Like Planck, Darwin introduces a formal necessity without embracing its ontological cost.

To make natural selection intelligible, Darwin must abandon fixed essences. But he repeatedly reinscribes them at the level of language: species, traits, functions, adaptations.

These are pragmatic necessities, not ontological commitments — but the distinction is never made explicit.

Darwin opens the door.

He does not step through.

What Darwin Refuses to Ask

Darwin does not ask what grounds variation itself.

He does not ask whether identity persists across generations in any strict sense.

He does not ask whether “the same trait” across contexts is truly the same.

He does not ask whether evolutionary explanation presupposes stable entities it cannot justify.

These silences are not oversights. They are stabilising omissions.

Variation Without Ground

From a relational perspective, Darwin’s variation is not a problem to be solved.

It is the mark of a field of possibility that cannot be reduced to underlying essences.

Variation is not noise around a signal.

It is the signal.

There is no privileged baseline from which deviation occurs. There is only differential actualisation under constraint.

Identity Deferred

If variation is primary, identity becomes secondary.

What persists across generations is not a thing, but a pattern of constraint — a lineage that holds together long enough to be named, studied, and explained.

Darwin gestures toward this, but retreats from it.

To follow it fully would be to abandon the idea that evolution tracks the history of things.

Instead, it would track the history of cuts.

The Price of Restraint

Darwin’s restraint made evolutionary theory possible.

But it also set the stage for later intolerances:

the search for the true unit of selection
the reification of genes as bearers of identity
the stabilisation of fitness as a property
the transformation of adaptation into optimisation
the quiet reintroduction of teleology

All of these can be read as attempts to restore ground where Darwin removed it.

What Changes If We Do Not Restore It?

If variation has no ground, then evolutionary explanation cannot converge on a final description.

If identity is not preserved, then lineages are not entities but trajectories.

If selection is constraint, then evolution does not explain why forms arise — only why some persist.

This does not weaken evolutionary theory.

It clarifies it.

Opening the Series

Darwin is not the endpoint of this story. He is the opening move.

By placing variation first, he makes possible an account of becoming without essence — and then declines to live fully within it.

The following posts will trace how evolutionary thought repeatedly attempts to recover what Darwin set aside: stable identity, grounded fitness, unified perspective.

Not to criticise these attempts.

But to understand what they cannot tolerate.

On the Intolerances of Scientific Thought: 4 The Intolerance of Plurality

Scientific thought often presents itself as pluralistic. Competing models, rival theories, alternative formalisms, and provisional interpretations are treated as signs of vitality rather than weakness.

And yet, plurality is rarely tolerated as a condition.

It is endured only as a phase.

Plurality as Temporary Disorder

Multiple descriptions of the same domain are permitted — provided they are understood as incomplete, provisional, or awaiting unification.

Plurality is framed as a symptom of epistemic limitation:

insufficient data
immature theory
unresolved disagreement
lack of mathematical elegance
historical contingency

The expectation is clear.

Plurality must converge.

The Promise of Reconciliation

Scientific explanation is guided by a powerful promise: that divergent descriptions ultimately describe the same thing, and that their differences will eventually be reconciled at a deeper level.

This promise does important work. It sustains cooperation, justifies competition, and motivates synthesis.

But it also constrains what counts as acceptable plurality.

Descriptions may differ — but not irreducibly.

When Plurality Refuses to Collapse

Some pluralities persist stubbornly:

incompatible formalisms with equivalent predictive success
mutually exclusive descriptions that cannot be combined
interpretations that resolve different constraints at the cost of others
models that work only within limited domains
perspectives that cannot be simultaneously held

These pluralities are not accidents. They are structural.

And they are deeply uncomfortable.

The Usual Strategies

When plurality will not collapse, scientific thought tends to manage it rather than accept it:

by ranking descriptions hierarchically
by designating one as fundamental and others as derivative
by treating some as merely instrumental
by postponing resolution to future theory
by appealing to metaphysical commitments outside the science itself

Plurality is not allowed to stand on its own terms.

It must be disciplined.

The Cost of Intolerance

The intolerance of plurality is not merely methodological. It reshapes ontology.

By insisting that only one description can ultimately be correct, scientific thought often erases the role of perspective in articulating phenomena. Differences in description are treated as differences in access to a single underlying reality, rather than as different cuts through a field of possibility.

Plurality becomes competition, not coexistence.

Relational Plurality

Relational ontology treats plurality differently.

Plurality is not a failure to agree on what is. It is the consequence of the fact that no single construal can exhaust a domain of possibility.

Different descriptions do not merely approximate the same reality from different angles. They actualise different aspects of a structured potential.

They are not rivals.

They are selective.

Incompatibility Without Error

From this stance, incompatibility does not imply that one description must be wrong.

Mutually exclusive descriptions may each be internally coherent, empirically adequate, and ontologically disciplined — while remaining irreconcilable.

This is not relativism.

It is constraint.

Each description carries conditions under which it holds, and limits beyond which it cannot go.

Plurality and Responsibility

Plurality places a burden on the theorist.

If no single description can dominate without remainder, then choice becomes explicit. One must take responsibility for the cuts one makes: what is foregrounded, what is suppressed, what is rendered salient, what is left unactualised.

Plurality cannot be dissolved into neutrality.

The Fear Beneath the Intolerance

At its deepest level, the intolerance of plurality reflects a fear that without ultimate reconciliation, understanding fragments.

But fragmentation is not the only alternative.

Coherence need not be singular.

A field can be structured without being unified by a single view.

The Field Revisited

What scientific thought often seeks is not merely explanation, but closure.

Plurality resists closure.

It insists that understanding may consist in navigating a landscape of constrained possibilities rather than arriving at a final map.

This is difficult to accept — not because it weakens science, but because it redefines its ambition.

Plurality as Condition

Relational ontology does not resolve plurality. It makes room for it.

The world does not present itself as a single, fully articulable order awaiting description. It presents itself as a field that can be cut in multiple, incompatible, but disciplined ways.

Plurality is not a stage to be overcome.

It is the mark of participation.

After the Intolerances

Taken together — perspective, incompleteness, non-identity, and plurality — these intolerances trace a single tension.

Scientific thought excels at description.

It struggles with the idea that description itself is constitutive.

Relational ontology does not oppose science. It reframes what science is doing when it succeeds.

Not mirroring the world.

But participating in its becoming.

On the Intolerances of Scientific Thought: 3 The Intolerance of Non-Identity

Scientific thought is deeply invested in the persistence of things.

Entities may interact, transform, decay, or combine — but something must remain the same. An electron, a gene, a species, a system, a state: whatever else changes, identity is expected to endure.

When it does not, discomfort follows.

Identity as Silent Requirement

Identity is rarely foregrounded as an assumption. It operates instead as a background necessity.

Measurement presumes that what is measured before and after remains, in some sense, identical. Explanation presumes that causes and effects belong to the same thing across time. Laws presume that what they govern persists as the same kind of entity under varying conditions.

Without identity, comparison collapses.

And so identity is protected.

Permitted Change

Scientific descriptions are generous with change — provided it is change of state, not change of being.

A system may evolve continuously. It may transition discretely. It may fluctuate stochastically. It may even bifurcate.

But these are all framed as changes of something.

The identity of the thing itself is preserved as a condition of intelligibility.

Where Non-Identity Appears

Non-identity enters scientific thought in subtle, destabilising ways:

when a system cannot be re-identified across scales
when temporal evolution does not preserve state equivalence
when individuation depends on context or interaction
when boundaries shift under description
when what counts as the “same” entity depends on how it is described

In these moments, identity is no longer given.

It must be negotiated.

The Usual Response

When non-identity threatens coherence, scientific thought tends to respond by stabilising identity elsewhere:

at a deeper level
in underlying variables
in invariant structures
in conserved quantities
in abstract mathematical objects

Identity is displaced rather than relinquished.

What cannot be preserved phenomenally is preserved ontologically.

The Cost of Preservation

This manoeuvre restores explanatory continuity — but at a price.

By insisting that something must remain identical, scientific thought often obscures the role of description in producing stability. Identity appears as a feature of the world rather than as an effect of construal.

The question “what is the same?” is treated as prior to description, rather than as answered by it.

Relational Identity

Relational ontology reverses this priority.

Identity is not a primitive. It is an outcome.

What counts as the same entity depends on the cut by which a phenomenon is articulated — the relations made salient, the contrasts drawn, the scale adopted, the purposes enacted.

An entity does not persist despite these cuts.

It persists through them.

And persistence is always partial.

Non-Identity Without Collapse

To accept non-identity is not to deny regularity or stability. It is to refuse the demand that stability be absolute.

An entity may be sufficiently identical for one construal and not for another. It may persist across some transformations and not others. It may be re-identified without being fully preserved.

This is not a failure of description.

It is a feature of participation.

Why Non-Identity Is Intolerable

Non-identity threatens a powerful intuition: that the world consists of things which are what they are independently of how they are taken up.

If identity depends on construal, then the idea of a fully determinate world “in itself” becomes unstable.

What persists is not substance, but coherence under constraint.

This is difficult to accept.

Identity and Explanation

Explanations often promise to tell us what something really is. Non-identity undermines this promise.

If an entity does not remain fully itself across contexts, then no single description can exhaust it. Explanation becomes local, situated, perspectival.

This is not relativism.

It is responsibility.

The Refusal Revisited

The intolerance of non-identity mirrors the intolerance of incompleteness.

In both cases, scientific thought resists the idea that something essential may not be fully preservable: not total description, not stable identity.

And in both cases, the resistance takes the form of ontological reinforcement.

Non-Identity as Condition

Relational ontology does not resolve non-identity. It lives with it.

Entities are not self-identical substances traversing time. They are patterns of constraint that hold — provisionally, contextually, relationally.

Identity is not what grounds relation.

Relation is what sustains identity.

What Follows

If identity is not given, and incompleteness is structural, then the final intolerance emerges naturally.

Scientific thought struggles not only with perspective, incompleteness, and non-identity — but with the idea that no single perspective can reconcile them.

The next post will turn to this directly:

The Intolerance of Plurality.