Beyond the Selfish Gene: A Relational Reframing of Evolution — Introduction: From Narratives of Agency to Distributions of Persistence

This series examines a set of deeply entrenched habits in how evolutionary theory is described, taught, and intuitively understood.

At first glance, evolutionary biology appears to be populated by familiar kinds of things:

• genes that replicate
• organisms that survive and reproduce
• populations that evolve under selection
• environments that exert pressure
• forces that shape outcomes over time

These descriptions are not simply convenient—they are almost unavoidable in everyday scientific discourse. They organise complexity into manageable forms, allowing us to communicate, reason, and build further explanations.

However, beneath this surface lies a recurring conceptual pattern:

explanations that begin without agents, forces, or discrete controlling entities tend to reintroduce them in narrative form.

Genes become actors.

Organisms become centres of control.

Selection becomes a selecting mechanism.

Forces become drivers of change.

Populations become collections of interacting things.

What begins as a relational or statistical description is gradually re-expressed as a story about entities doing things to other entities.

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The Aim of the Series

This series does not attempt to reject evolutionary theory.

Rather, it aims to reframe how its core concepts are construed by tracing and interrogating the narrative structures that underpin them.

Across the essays, we progressively unsettle several foundational assumptions:

• that genes are agents rather than patterns within distributions
• that organisms are primary units rather than stabilised configurations
• that selection is an active process rather than a descriptive pattern
• that forces are required to account for evolutionary change
• that entities are the primitives from which explanation begins

Instead, the series develops an alternative orientation:

evolution is best understood as the transformation of distributions of variation under structured constraints of persistence.

In this framing:

• what persists is not a set of privileged entities, but patterns within distributions
• what changes is not the actions of agents, but the shifting structure of those distributions
• what we call “selection” is not something that selects, but a description of differential persistence
• what we call “organisms” and “genes” are not fundamental actors, but stabilised regularities within relational fields

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A Shift in Explanatory Mode

The guiding move of the series is a shift from:

entity-centric, narrative explanation

to:

distributional, relational description

This shift has several consequences:

• Agency is no longer assumed as the default explanatory primitive
• Forces are no longer required as causal drivers
• Entities are no longer treated as ontologically primary, but as abstractions over recurring patterns
• Processes are understood as transformations of distributions, not actions performed by objects

Narrative remains useful as a communicative tool, but it is no longer taken as a literal reflection of how evolutionary processes operate.

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The Narrative Instinct

A central theme running through the series is what can be called the narrative instinct in scientific explanation.

This is the tendency to:

• reintroduce actors where none are required
• convert statistical regularities into causal stories
• frame constraints as forces
• treat distributions as populations of interacting entities

This instinct is not a flaw in scientific practice.

It is a structural feature of how explanation is rendered intelligible.

However, when unexamined, it can lead to:

explanatory narratives that obscure the very relational structures they aim to describe

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What This Series Is—and Is Not

This series is:

• an exploration of alternative ways to construe evolutionary phenomena
• an examination of the conceptual layers embedded in scientific language
• a critique of implicit narrative commitments in explanatory discourse
• an attempt to make visible the distinction between description and narrative reconstruction

It is not:

• a rejection of empirical findings in evolutionary biology
• a proposal to discard existing terminology entirely
• a claim that narrative should be eliminated from scientific communication

Rather, it is an invitation to distinguish between:

the structures we observe

and the stories we tell about those structures

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The Underlying Orientation

Across all essays, a consistent orientation is maintained:

what evolves is not entities acting through time, but distributions of variation transforming under constraints of persistence.

From this perspective:

• genes, organisms, and populations are not foundational actors, but stabilised patterns within relational configurations
• selection is not an agentive process, but a descriptive account of differential persistence
• causation is not the transmission of force, but the structuring of conditions that shape which configurations endure
• explanation is not the discovery of hidden agents, but the articulation of how distributions change over time

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Closing Orientation

The goal of this series is not to replace one set of terms with another, but to make visible the conceptual commitments that accompany the terms we already use.

By tracing how agency, force, and entities reappear within evolutionary narratives, we can begin to see explanation itself as something that operates at multiple levels:

• a level of relational structure, where distributions and constraints are primary
• and a level of narrative reconstruction, where those structures are rendered intelligible through agents, actions, and outcomes

Recognising the distinction between these levels allows us to use narrative without being constrained by it.

In doing so, evolutionary theory can be approached not as a story about things that act, but as a study of:

how patterns persist, transform, and differentiate across the space of possibilities.