Beyond the Selfish Gene: A Relational Reframing of Evolution — 6 From Process to Distribution: Evolution Without Entities or: Why “things” are the last abstraction we should question

Evolutionary discourse is usually populated by entities:

• genes
• organisms
• populations
• environments

These are treated as the basic units that:

• interact
• persist
• change over time

But this entity-based framing is not the only way to describe what is going on.

In fact, it may be the least fundamental.

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0. The Default Ontology: A World of Things

The standard picture assumes:

evolution is the interaction of discrete entities undergoing processes

On this view:

• entities are primary
• processes are what entities do
• change is the result of interactions between entities

This is intuitive, but it carries an implicit commitment:

that “things” exist prior to the patterns they participate in

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1. Flipping the Order: From Entities to Distributions

An alternative framing begins not with entities, but with:

distributions of variation

Instead of asking:

what are the entities doing?

we ask:

how is variation distributed across instances, and how does that distribution change?

In this view:

• what we call “genes” are loci within a distribution of replicable sequences
• what we call “organisms” are relatively stable configurations within a distribution of coordinated processes
• what we call “populations” are statistical groupings of variants across time and space

Entities become:

stabilised patterns within distributions, not primitives

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2. Processes Without Things Doing Them

If we remove entities as primary, what happens to processes?

Processes no longer belong to objects.

Instead, they are:

transformations within distributions over time

So rather than:

entities undergoing processes

we have:

distributions evolving through changes in their internal structure

This shift removes the need to treat processes as actions performed by objects.

Processes become:

descriptions of how distributions change

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3. The Gene Revisited (Without Entity Status)

Consider the gene again, as introduced in The Selfish Gene.

Traditionally:

• a gene is treated as an entity that replicates
• that entity is embedded in an organism
• and subject to selection pressures

But in a distributional framing:

• “genes” are not primary entities
• they are recurring patterns within a space of possible sequences
• their persistence is a property of how those patterns are distributed across replication events

What we call a gene is:

a region of stability within a broader distribution of variation

Not a thing that persists, but:

a pattern that persists across instances

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4. Organisms as Stabilised Configurations

Similarly, what we call organisms are:

• not fundamental units
• but clusters of coordinated processes that recur with sufficient stability to be tracked as units

From earlier discussion in The Organism as Aftereffect, the organism is:

an inferred boundary around a relatively coherent region of interacting processes

In distributional terms, an organism is:

a locally stable attractor within a space of possible configurations

Not an entity that undergoes evolution, but:

a pattern that appears within evolving distributions

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5. Populations as the Primary Locus of Description

In this reframing, populations are no longer collections of entities.

They are:

the distribution itself

What evolves is not individuals, but:

the statistical structure of variation across instances

So evolution becomes:

a change in the distribution of configurations over time

This is closer to a statistical description than an object-based one.

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6. Selection Reframed (Again, but Final Form)

With entities removed as primitives, “selection” also changes character.

There is no selector.

No mechanism acting on objects.

Instead:

selection is the observed shift in a distribution toward regions associated with greater persistence

It is not an operation performed on entities.

It is:

a pattern of reweighting within a distribution

Selection is therefore not something that happens to things.

It is:

what a distribution looks like as it changes under constraints

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7. Causation Without Entities

Earlier we removed forces.

Now we remove entities.

What remains of causation?

Causation becomes:

the structured transformation of distributions under constraints of persistence and variation

No objects are required to carry causal power.

No agents are required to initiate change.

Causation is not something transmitted between things.

It is:

the way distributions evolve given their internal structure and constraints

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8. Why Entity-Based Thinking Persists

Entity-based thinking persists because it:

• aligns with perception (we encounter bounded objects)
• simplifies communication (nouns are efficient)
• supports narrative structure (actors, actions, outcomes)

But these are pragmatic advantages, not ontological necessities.

At the level of explanation, entities can obscure more than they reveal.

They encourage us to ask:

• what are the things doing?
  when a more precise question would be:
• how is the distribution structured, and how does it change?

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9. What Replaces Entities

If entities are not fundamental, what takes their place?

Not other entities.

But:

distributions, constraints, and patterns of persistence across variation

These are not objects.

They are:

• statistical structures
• relational configurations
• dynamically maintained regularities

They describe how “things” appear, persist, and change—without requiring that “things” be primary.

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10. The Final Shift in Perspective

Across this series, a consistent transformation has occurred:

• Genes → not agents, but patterns within distributions
• Organisms → not controllers, but stabilised configurations
• Selection → not a process with a selector, but a pattern of differential persistence
• Forces → not drivers, but metaphorical overlays on constraints
• Entities → not primitives, but abstractions over recurring structure

What remains is a shift from:

a world of interacting things

to:

a world of evolving distributions of variation under constraint

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Closing Statement

Evolution does not require entities as its foundation.

Entities are one way of describing what we observe when distributions stabilise into recognisable patterns.

But they are not the starting point.

They are:

the outcome of a particular way of carving up continuity into discrete units

When that carving is relaxed, what emerges is not a void, but a different kind of intelligibility:

one in which persistence, variation, and constraint replace objects, agents, and forces as the primary explanatory terms.

Beyond the Selfish Gene: A Relational Reframing of Evolution — 5 Without Forces: Rethinking Causation in Evolutionary Narratives or: Why “pressure,” “drive,” and “force” are doing more work than we admit

Evolutionary explanations often sound physical.

We hear about:

• selection pressures
• evolutionary forces
• adaptive drives
• constraints acting on populations

The vocabulary borrows heavily from mechanics.

But this borrowing is not neutral.

It quietly imports a causal architecture that evolution does not require.

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0. The Intuitive Picture: Forces Acting on Things

In classical mechanics, causation is often imagined as:

forces acting on objects, producing change

This model includes:

• entities that persist (objects)
• forces that act upon them
• interactions that generate movement or transformation

It is a powerful and precise framework—for physics.

But when imported into evolutionary discourse, it reshapes how processes are imagined.

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1. The Language of “Selection Pressure”

Consider the phrase:

selection pressure

It suggests:

• an external force acting on a population
• pushing it toward certain outcomes
• shaping its trajectory over time

This metaphor is so entrenched that it often goes unnoticed.

But what is actually being described?

Not a force in the physical sense.

Rather:

a statistical regularity in which certain variants persist more successfully than others under given conditions

There is no pushing.

There is no directing.

There is only:

differential continuation across a structured field of variation

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2. What the Force Metaphor Adds

The “force” metaphor contributes:

• a sense of directionality
• an intuitive causal mechanism
• a story of interaction between entities and influences

It allows us to say:

“the environment exerts pressure on organisms”

But this phrasing risks reifying the environment into:

an agent-like entity applying influence

Whereas what is actually present is:

• a set of conditions
• within which certain configurations persist more readily than others

No force is required to describe this.

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3. The Residue of Mechanistic Thinking

The persistence of force-based language reflects a deeper inheritance from mechanistic worldviews.

In that worldview:

• entities are acted upon
• forces transmit influence
• change is the result of interactions between discrete objects

Evolutionary theory, however, operates differently.

It does not primarily describe:

interactions between objects under force

It describes:

distributions of variation under constraints of persistence

The “movement” we observe is not driven by a force in the system.

It is the changing composition of what continues to exist.

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4. Rethinking Causation Without Forces

If we remove forces from the picture, what remains of causation?

Not nothing—but something less intuitive.

Causation becomes:

the structuring of conditions under which certain outcomes are more likely to persist than others

In this framing:

• causes are not pushing events into existence
• they are configurations that enable or inhibit continuation

So instead of:

force → effect

we have:

configuration → differential persistence

This is less cinematic, but more precise.

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5. The Case of “Adaptation”

“Adaptation” is often described as if organisms are being shaped by external pressures.

But without forces, adaptation can be reframed as:

the accumulation of variants that persist under recurring constraints

No organism is being “pushed” toward a goal.

No environment is “driving” a response.

What we observe is:

a stabilised alignment between a configuration and its conditions of persistence

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6. Why Force Language Persists

Force-based language persists because it:

• preserves a sense of intelligibility
• aligns with everyday causal intuitions
• compresses complex distributions into simple narratives

It allows us to speak as if:

something is doing something to something else

Even when the underlying description does not require such an ontology.

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7. The Cost of the Metaphor

The cost is subtle but significant.

Force metaphors tend to reintroduce:

• directional causation with implicit targets
• external drivers acting on passive entities
• a layered structure of influence and response

This can lead to explanatory habits where:

we mistake a pattern of persistence for the effect of a driving influence

In doing so, we risk attributing agency or quasi-agency to abstract conditions.

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8. A Non-Force Alternative

A cleaner description avoids force altogether:

Variation exists within a structured set of conditions.

Some variants persist longer or reproduce more successfully than others under those conditions.

Over time, the distribution shifts toward those that persist.

No force is invoked.

No push is required.

No driver is needed.

Only:

differential persistence across structured variation

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9. Causation as Constraint, Not Impulse

In this reframing, causation is better understood as:

the role of constraints in shaping which configurations can continue

Constraints are not forces.

They do not act.

They delimit possibilities.

They define:

• what can persist
• what cannot
• and under what conditions transitions occur

Causation becomes:

the organisation of possibility space, not the transmission of force

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10. What Gets Rewritten

Removing forces rewrites several familiar phrases:

• “selection pressure” → structured conditions of differential persistence
• “driven by the environment” → persistence shaped by environmental constraints
• “adaptive response” → stabilised configuration under recurring conditions

None of these require a force.

They require only:

variation, constraint, and persistence

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Closing Reflection

Force language makes evolution feel like a process with momentum.

But the phenomena themselves do not require momentum in that sense.

What we observe is not:

a system being pushed through time

but:

a shifting distribution of what continues to exist under changing constraints

Once forces are removed, the narrative loses its sense of propulsion.

What remains is quieter, but more exact:

not a world of things being driven,

but a world of configurations that persist or do not.

Beyond the Selfish Gene: A Relational Reframing of Evolution — 4 Selection Without Selectors or: What remains when selection is no longer something that selects

“Selection” is one of those words that seems to explain everything while quietly assuming too much.

It sounds procedural. Neutral. Scientific.

But grammatically, it carries a hidden passenger:

a selector.

Something that selects.

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0. The Hidden Structure in “Selection”

In ordinary usage, “selection” implies:

• an agent (who selects)
• a criterion (by which selection is made)
• an act (the selecting itself)
• an outcome (what is selected)

This structure is deeply embedded in the verb form.

Even when the agent is omitted, it is still implicitly present.

So when we say:

“natural selection”

we are not just naming a process.

We are invoking a structure that, by default, resembles:

an invisible selecting mechanism operating over candidates

This is the first conceptual distortion.

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1. The Original Move: Removing Intentional Selectors

In evolutionary theory associated with Charles Darwin, “selection” was introduced to explain differential survival and reproduction without invoking design.

The key step was:

remove intentional selectors (no designer, no planner)

What remained was:

differential persistence across variants

This was already a major conceptual shift.

But the language of “selection” remained in place.

And with it, a subtle ambiguity.

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2. What the Term Still Smuggles In

Even after removing intentional agents, “selection” still suggests:

• a filtering process
• a preference among alternatives
• a mechanism that “chooses” outcomes

This is where the trouble begins.

Because the word “selection” implies:

something doing the selecting

So even in a non-teleological framework, the grammar reintroduces:

a selector without a face

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3. The Reinterpretation That Dawkins Makes

In The Selfish Gene, the explanatory focus shifts to replicators.

Selection is no longer framed as something organisms experience, but as:

a statistical outcome of replication differences among genes

Crucially:

• no selecting agent is required
• no decision-making process is involved
• no preferences are instantiated

Selection becomes:

a descriptive shorthand for patterns in persistence

Not an operation performed by anything.

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4. Dissolving the Selector

If we remove the implicit agent from “selection,” what remains?

Not an action.

Not a process in the agentive sense.

But a pattern:

some variants persist more than others under given constraints

That is all.

There is no:

• chooser
• evaluator
• comparator

Only:

uneven continuation across a distribution of forms

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5. Why the Language Persists Anyway

We still say “selection” because it is:

• concise
• intuitively graspable
• compatible with existing explanatory habits

More importantly:

it preserves a sense of intelligibility

But that intelligibility comes at a cost.

It encourages us to imagine:

• a filtering mechanism
• a selective force
• a directional process

None of which are required by the underlying dynamics.

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6. Selection as Retrospective Description

Rather than something that happens, selection can be reframed as:

a way of describing differences in survival after they have occurred

In this view:

• nothing is selecting in real time
• there is no active process choosing outcomes
• there is only the observation that some outcomes persist and others do not

So “selection” becomes:

a retrospective patterning of persistence

A summary, not an operation.

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7. No Selector, No Problem

Once the selector is removed, a conceptual pressure is relieved.

We no longer need to account for:

• how selection “decides”
• what mechanism “implements” it
• who or what is “doing” the selecting

Because there is no such entity.

Instead, we describe:

constraints and variations that lead to differential continuation

The explanatory load shifts away from agency and toward configuration.

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8. The Residual Instinct to Reinsert Agency

Despite this, the mind resists.

Because without a selector, “selection” feels incomplete.

So we tend to reintroduce:

• environmental pressures as quasi-agents
• selection as a force
• adaptation as a goal-directed outcome

This restores narrative coherence—but also restores the very assumptions the original framework was designed to avoid.

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9. A Cleaner Framing

If we strip the term of its agentive residue, we might replace “selection” with something closer to:

differential persistence under constraint

This phrase lacks drama.

It offers:

• no actor
• no intention
• no mechanism with preferences

But it more accurately reflects what is observed.

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10. What Is Gained (and Lost)

Gained:

• conceptual clarity about what is actually happening
• removal of hidden agency assumptions
• alignment with a non-teleological description of processes

Lost:

• narrative simplicity
• intuitive storytelling structure
• the comfort of imagining a selecting force

What remains is less familiar, but more precise:

a world in which outcomes are not chosen, but unevenly sustained

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Closing Edge

“Selection” is a useful word.

But it is also a persistent fiction:

a verb that implies an actor where none exists

Once the selector is removed, selection does not disappear.

It is re-described as:

the trace left by differential persistence across variations

Not an act.

Not a choice.

Just a pattern that, after the fact, looks as though something must have been selecting.

Beyond the Selfish Gene: A Relational Reframing of Evolution — 3 The Organism as Aftereffect or: How wholes are inferred after the fact

The organism appears, at first glance, to be the most obvious entity in biology.

It walks, regulates, heals, reproduces, resists disruption.

It looks like a unit.

But that appearance is not a starting point.

It is a conclusion.

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0. The Intuitive Picture (and why it misleads)

In everyday construal, the organism is treated as:

a bounded individual with coordinated parts acting in service of the whole

From this perspective:

• organs cooperate
• systems maintain balance
• the whole persists through regulation

This framing is so natural it feels prior to analysis.

But analytically, it is not.

It is a secondary stabilisation of observation.

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1. What Comes First: Persistence, Not Wholes

Before anything is identified as an organism, there are only:

• interacting processes
• differential continuities
• patterns that sustain themselves over time

What we later call “an organism” is:

a clustering of processes that co-occur and co-stabilise under observation

In other words:

the organism is not given; it is inferred

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2. The Organism as a Boundary Effect

Where does one organism end and another begin?

The answer is not intrinsic to the processes themselves.

Boundaries are:

• drawn by observation
• stabilised by recurring patterns
• maintained by practical criteria (coherence, reproduction, separability)

So the organism is:

a boundary we track, not a primitive entity we encounter

It is an emergent delimitation across interacting dynamics.

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3. Why the Illusion of Unity Persists

Despite this, organisms appear unified because:

• internal processes are highly coordinated
• disruptions are often corrected
• interactions are tightly coupled

This produces the impression of:

a centre of control maintaining coherence

But this impression arises after we have already grouped the processes together.

The unity is:

an effect of the grouping, not its cause

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4. Reversing the Explanatory Direction

A common explanatory move is:

organism → coordination → suppression of internal conflict

But if we reverse the direction:

interacting processes → stabilisation patterns → inferred organism

the organism no longer functions as a controller.

It becomes:

a label for a recurring configuration of relations

This reversal matters because it removes the need for:

• a central manager
• an internal decision-maker
• a unifying agent

Those roles were never observed directly—they were inferred from the stabilisation.

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5. Where Dawkins Disrupted the Picture

The move associated with Richard Dawkins was not merely to relocate selection to genes.

It was to show that:

coherence at the organism level can arise without organism-level control

In that sense, the organism is:

not the origin of coordination, but one of its outcomes

But the deeper implication is often missed:

if coordination can be explained without invoking a controlling whole, then the whole is not explanatorily fundamental

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6. The Organism as Post Hoc Compression

Once enough interacting processes are observed, we compress them into a single term:

organism

This is not arbitrary—it is useful.

It allows us to:

• refer efficiently to a stable pattern
• predict certain behaviours
• organise knowledge

But this compression has a cost:

it hides the underlying multiplicity that gave rise to it

The organism becomes a convenient summary of what is, in fact, a distributed configuration.

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7. The Residual Pull of Wholeness

Even after recognising this, the intuition of wholeness persists.

Why?

Because the stabilisation is real.

Not as a centre of control, but as:

a sustained alignment of processes across time

That alignment produces:

• coherence of behaviour
• recognisable boundaries
• relative independence from environment

From the outside, this looks like unity.

From the inside (if such a perspective can even be cleanly defined), it is:

ongoing coordination without central authorship

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8. The Conceptual Trap

The trap is subtle:

• We observe coordinated processes
• We group them into a unit
• We then explain coordination by appealing to the unit

This is circular.

The organism is introduced as an explanatory entity that was already constructed from the very coordination it is meant to explain.

So instead of:

coordination explained by organism

we have:

organism inferred from coordination, then used to explain it

The explanatory direction has been quietly inverted.

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9. What the Organism Actually Is (in this framing)

Stripped of narrative and agency, the organism can be treated as:

a temporally sustained, internally correlated region of interacting processes that maintains recognisable boundaries under recurrent construal

That is not a thing that acts.

It is:

a pattern that persists sufficiently to be tracked as a unit

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10. The Aftereffect

The key claim, then, is this:

the organism is not the source of biological organisation—it is the aftereffect of observing that organisation stabilise

It is what remains when:

• processes are grouped
• boundaries are drawn
• continuity is recognised

In that sense:

the organism is not where explanation begins

it is where explanation condenses

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Closing Tension

Once this is seen, a quiet instability appears in the standard picture:

• Genes are not agents
• Organisms are not controllers
• Coordination does not require a centre

And yet:

the language we use keeps reconstructing centres anyway

Not because biology demands it, but because:

our explanatory habits do

Beyond the Selfish Gene: A Relational Reframing of Evolution — 2 The Gene as Fictional Character or: Why biology keeps writing stories it claims to reject

There is a point at which a concept stops functioning as explanation and begins functioning as narrative.

The gene crossed that point a long time ago.

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0. From Replicator to Protagonist

In The Selfish Gene, the gene is introduced as a replicator:

• a unit of persistence
• a locus of differential continuation

Nothing more.

But almost immediately, it acquires:

• motives (“wants to replicate”)
• strategies (“uses the organism”)
• conflicts (“competes with other genes”)

At that moment, the gene ceases to be a theoretical construct and becomes:

a character

Not metaphorically.

Structurally.

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1. The Grammar of Agency

This transformation is not accidental. It is grammatical.

Natural language—especially in its ideational mode—strongly prefers:

Actor → Process → Goal

So instead of:

“some sequences persist at different rates”

we get:

“genes compete to replicate themselves”

The difference is not stylistic.

It is ontological.

Because once something occupies the Actor role, it becomes:

• a source of action
• a bearer of implicit agency

And once that happens, everything downstream reorganises:

• persistence becomes intention
• statistical bias becomes strategy
• constraint becomes opposition

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2. Character Requires Conflict

A character without conflict is inert.

So once genes are cast as actors, the system demands:

antagonists

And they are readily supplied:

• other genes
• the organism
• the environment

Now we have:

• alliances (cooperative genes)
• betrayals (selfish elements)
• regulation (organismal control)

This is no longer biology as description.

This is:

biology as plot

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3. The Illicit Import of Value

Narrative does not operate without value.

So the moment we have:

• cooperation
• selfishness
• conflict
• stability

we also have, implicitly:

• good
• bad
• threat
• resolution

But here’s the critical point:

none of these belong to the process being described

They belong to the mode of construal.

This is not meaning in the semiotic sense—it is not a structured system of signification.

It is:

value projection onto non-valuational dynamics

And it happens automatically.

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4. Why the Fiction Persists

Because the alternative is almost unthinkable.

Try to hold this, without slipping:

There are no agents.

There are no goals.

There is no conflict.

There is only:

differential persistence across configurations.

This is conceptually austere to the point of cognitive hostility.

It offers:

• no entry point for intuition
• no structure for narrative
• no place for the observer

So the system compensates.

It reintroduces:

characters.

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5. The Gene as Necessary Illusion

At this point, we need to be precise.

The fictionalisation of the gene is not simply an error.

It is:

a functional distortion

It allows:

• complex dynamics to be tracked
• patterns to be stabilised in discourse
• explanations to circulate

In other words:

the fiction works

But—and this is the hinge—

what works explanatorily is not necessarily what is ontologically warranted

The gene as character is:

• useful
• productive
• deeply misleading

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6. The Quiet Consequence

Once genes become characters, a deeper shift occurs.

We begin to see the world as:

composed of entities with interests

This does not stay in biology.

It generalises:

• markets “want” efficiency
• nations “seek” security
• systems “adapt” to survive

The same narrative structure propagates across domains.

What began as a metaphor becomes:

a general ontology of agency

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7. What Gets Lost

In all of this, something precise disappears.

Not truth in some grand sense—but resolution.

The ability to say:

this persists more than that

without asking:

why does it want to?

That question—so natural, so compelling—is exactly the one that reintroduces fiction.

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8. The Real Problem

So the issue is not that biologists use metaphors.

The issue is that:

the metaphor becomes indistinguishable from the explanation

And once that happens, critique becomes difficult, because:

• the language feels natural
• the story feels necessary
• the characters feel real

But they are not.

They are:

the residue of a narrative structure imposed on a non-narrative process

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9. And We Do It Again

So when we hear:

• “selfish genetic elements”
• “genes that cheat”
• “organisms that suppress them”

we are not just hearing shorthand.

We are witnessing:

the reconstruction of a fictional world inside a scientific one

A world with:

• actors
• motives
• conflicts
• resolutions

A world that feels intelligible.

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10. The Uncomfortable Alternative

Strip it all away, and what remains is almost nothing:

patterns that continue

patterns that don’t

No heroes.

No villains.

No struggle.

Just:

uneven persistence.

And that, it seems, is a story we refuse to tell.

Beyond the Selfish Gene: A Relational Reframing of Evolution — 1 The Selfish Gene That Wasn’t or: How agency keeps sneaking back into biology

There is a peculiar persistence in the life sciences:

no matter how thoroughly agency is expelled, it returns—quietly, insistently, wearing new conceptual clothes.

The Selfish Gene was supposed to be one of those expulsions.

It did not succeed.

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0. What Dawkins Actually Did

The provocation of Richard Dawkins was not that genes are selfish.

That was the bait.

The move—the real move—was far more surgical:

Remove the organism as the primary unit of explanation.

Replace it with:

differential persistence of replicators.

“Selfishness” here names nothing psychological, nothing intentional, nothing strategic.

It names only this:

some configurations persist more than others.

That’s it.

No desire.

No conflict.

No goals.

Just bias in what continues to exist.

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1. The Illicit Return of Agency

And yet, almost immediately, the language begins to slide.

Genes become:

• “rogue”
• “cheaters”
• “in conflict”

Organisms become:

• “regulators”
• “coordinators”
• “systems that keep selfish elements in check”

We are back—almost effortlessly—in a familiar narrative structure:

Parts with interests.

Wholes that manage them.

This is not a biological discovery.

It is a semiotic reflex.

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2. The Organism Strikes Back

Consider the framing that now circulates in contemporary discussions:

the organism maintains integrity by suppressing selfish genetic elements.

At first glance, this seems empirically grounded:

• cancer
• meiotic drive
• transposable elements

All real. All observable.

But notice what has happened conceptually.

The organism has been reinstated as:

a locus of control.

A centre.

A manager.

A thing that does something to its parts.

This is precisely the explanatory structure Dawkins destabilised.

And yet here it is again—quietly reassembled.

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3. The Inversion No One Notices

Dawkins’ actual claim was deeply counterintuitive:

cooperation does not oppose selfishness

it emerges from it

Stable organisms are not:

systems that suppress selfishness

They are:

outcomes of configurations in which non-cooperative variants failed to persist

In other words:

• no one is enforcing coherence
• coherence is what remains when incoherence disappears

But this is almost impossible to think without slipping.

So we reverse it.

We say:

selfishness is the problem

the organism is the solution

Which is exactly backwards.

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4. The Narrative Compulsion

Why does this reversal happen so reliably?

Because “differential persistence” is not a satisfying story.

It offers:

• no agents
• no intentions
• no moral drama

So it gets reconstrued as:

• struggle
• strategy
• control

That is:

a value-infused narrative is imposed on a non-valuational process

And here we have to be precise.

This is not “meaning” in the semiotic sense.

This is value structuring masquerading as explanation.

A reintroduction of:

• good (cooperation)
• bad (selfishness)
• order (organism)
• threat (rogue genes)

All smuggled back into what was supposed to be a non-teleological account.

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5. What the “Selfish Gene” Actually Undermines

If taken seriously, the selfish gene does not anthropomorphise biology.

It does the opposite.

It removes:

• the organism as privileged centre
• the illusion of coordinated intent
• the idea that systems exist for anything

What remains is far more austere:

patterns that continue, and patterns that don’t

That’s all.

Everything else—agency, conflict, regulation—is a reconstruction layered on top.

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6. And Yet, It Returns

So when contemporary accounts describe:

• genes “acting against” the organism
• organisms “keeping genes in check”

we are not witnessing a refinement of Dawkins.

We are witnessing a reversal.

Not because the biology is wrong, but because:

the explanatory frame has quietly shifted back to one that requires agents

The organism reappears.

The gene becomes a character.

The story resumes.

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7. The Real Provocation (Still Unanswered)

The unresolved challenge of The Selfish Gene is not biological.

It is conceptual.

It asks:

Can we describe persistence without smuggling in purpose?

So far, the answer appears to be:

not for long.