Natural Selection through the Lens of Relational Ontology: 1. From Individuals to Population Fields

Classical biology begins with a seemingly innocent assumption.

Life is organised around individuals.

Organisms are taken to be the primary units of biological reality:

• they are born
• they persist
• they reproduce
• they die

Everything else—species, populations, ecosystems—is treated as a higher-level aggregation of these primary units.

Natural selection, on this view, operates on individuals (or genes, in more recent refinements), favouring those with traits that improve survival and reproduction.

Relational ontology does not deny that individuals are real.

It denies that they are primary.

And in doing so, it shifts biology away from an ontology of discrete entities toward an ontology of population-level relational fields undergoing constrained differential actualisation over time.

The hidden metaphysics of the individual

The concept of the individual carries more metaphysical weight than it appears to.

It presupposes:

• bounded identity
• internal coherence
• persistence through change
• clear separation from environment
• intrinsic properties

An organism is assumed to be something that has traits and interacts with an external world.

But each of these assumptions begins to soften under closer biological scrutiny.

Boundaries between organism and environment blur.

Identity becomes metabolically and developmentally distributed.

Persistence becomes a process, not a state.

And “traits” turn out to be deeply context-sensitive expressions of developmental and ecological interaction.

Relational ontology does not treat these as edge cases.

It treats them as clues.

From bounded individuals to relational continuities

What biology actually describes, at multiple scales, is not a set of self-contained units interacting externally.

It describes:

• continuous metabolic exchanges
• developmental trajectories shaped by environmental coupling
• reproductive chains linking temporally distributed instances
• ecological dependencies that cross organismal boundaries

The “individual” is not eliminated here.

It is re-situated.

Rather than being a self-contained entity, it becomes a temporarily stabilised node within a larger relational continuity.

What appears as an organism is a relatively coherent phase in a broader field of biological processes.

Population as primary relational object

Once this shift is made, a different unit of analysis becomes more fundamental:

the population.

But even “population” must be carefully reformulated.

It is not a collection of individuals.

It is:

a structured field of relational actualisations distributed across time, in which organismal forms are temporarily stabilised under constraint conditions

This is crucial.

A population is not a set of things.

It is a dynamic distribution of:

• developmental trajectories
• reproductive couplings
• ecological interactions
• and survivability constraints

In other words:

a population is a relational field of biological actualisation, not an aggregate of discrete entities.

Individuals as stabilisation events

Within this framework, individuals do not disappear.

They become something more precise and less ontologically privileged:

temporary stabilisations of a population field under local constraint conditions.

An organism is:

• a momentary coherence
• a bounded phase of developmental continuity
• a locally stabilised trajectory within a broader relational space

Its apparent discreteness is the result of relatively stable boundary-maintaining processes (immune systems, membranes, regulatory networks), not an indication of fundamental ontological isolation.

Relational ontology reframes individuals as:

emergent coherence zones within a continuous field of biological relational processes

Why “interaction” is the wrong primitive

Classical evolutionary thinking often describes organisms as interacting with environments.

But “interaction” already assumes pre-existing separable entities.

Relationally, this is backwards.

What exists is not interaction between pre-formed units.

It is:

the co-actualisation of organismal and environmental constraints within a single relational field

Organism and environment are not two independently existing systems that later meet.

They are analytically separable aspects of a single coupled system of biological actualisation.

The boundary between them is not ontologically given.

It is operationally enacted.

Environment as distributed constraint structure

The environment is therefore not an external container.

It is:

• climate patterns
• resource distributions
• predation structures
• microbial ecologies
• physical and chemical constraints
• and historical contingencies of prior population activity

But more importantly, it is not “outside” the organismal domain.

It is the constraint field within which organismal forms are differentially actualised and stabilised.

Relational ontology reframes environment as:

the structured set of constraints that partially determines the space of viable biological actualisations

This removes the last vestige of organism–world dualism.

There is only a single relational ecology of co-actualisation.

From individuals to distributions of form

Once individuals lose ontological primacy, what remains is not a void, but a different kind of object:

distributions of biological form across time.

Species, traits, morphologies, behaviours—all become:

• patterns of stability
• across iterative cycles of relational actualisation
• under shifting constraint regimes

A biological system is no longer a collection of individuals exhibiting traits.

It is a temporally extended distribution of stabilised relational configurations.

What we call “organisms” are cross-sections through that distribution.

Why this matters for evolution

This shift is not merely descriptive.

It reconfigures the very question natural selection answers.

Instead of:

Why do certain individuals survive?

we move to:

Why do certain relational configurations stabilise across iterative population-level actualisations under environmental constraint?

Selection is no longer an external filter acting on individuals.

It becomes:

the emergent structuring of a population field through differential stabilisation of relational forms over time

This is not metaphorical.

It is a change in ontological granularity.

The disappearance of biological atoms

Classical biology implicitly seeks “atoms” of life:

• organisms
• genes
• replicators
• units of selection

Each is an attempt to locate a smallest stable bearer of biological reality.

Relational ontology suggests a different conclusion:

there may be no atomic units of life at all in the classical sense.

Only:

• stabilised relational processes
• across nested and overlapping temporal scales
• forming transiently coherent patterns we retrospectively identify as individuals, traits, or species

Why this is not dissolution into vagueness

A natural concern arises here: does this collapse biology into undifferentiated flux?

No.

Because the population field is not amorphous.

It is highly structured by:

• developmental constraints
• ecological coupling
• reproductive dependencies
• metabolic limits
• historical path dependence

What changes is not structure, but where structure is located.

Structure is not inside individuals.

It is distributed across relational fields that individuals temporarily stabilise.

Closing the individual

What emerges, then, is a quiet but profound shift in biological ontology.

Individuals do not disappear, but they lose their status as fundamental units of explanation.

In their place appears:

a structured population field of relational actualisations, within which organismal forms arise, stabilise, and dissolve under constraint.

The organism is no longer the starting point of biology.

It is one of its outcomes.

And once that reversal is accepted, the rest of evolutionary theory can begin to be rewritten without the hidden assumption that life is built from pre-given individuals moving through an external world.