Evolution as Meaning: Becoming Through Time

Evolution as Meaning: Becoming Through Time

Relational Biology & Cosmogenesis

“The universe does not evolve toward meaning—it evolves through meaning.”

To see evolution as a blind march of matter through random mutation and selective pruning is to miss its central truth: evolution is a process of actualising potential through relation.

Not just natural selection.

Not just survival.

But the recursive unfolding of form and meaning in a living cosmos.

In this view, evolution is not an indifferent mechanism—it is the world becoming itself, ever more articulate in its ability to symbolise, feel, and mean.

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From Mechanism to Relational Constraint

Traditional evolutionary models focus on chance and selection: variation arises randomly; the environment selects what survives.

But what if this view is too flat?

What if what we call “random” is simply unconstrued potential, and what we call “selection” is the relational pressure that brings certain instances into being?

In a relational ontology:

• Chance is not chaos, but undifferentiated potential.

• Selection is not competition, but constraint shaped by context.

• Evolution is not accidental, but relationally patterned across time.

Organisms do not evolve in environments.

They evolve with them, through co-construal—each organism and its niche recursively shaping the other’s possibilities.

This means evolution is not a solo act of adaptation—it is a dialogue of becoming.

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Emergence as Recursive Actualisation

As systems evolve, new levels of organisation and symbolic potential emerge:

• From molecules to membranes.

• From cells to tissues.

• From bodies to minds.

• From minds to meaning.

Each level does not replace the previous—it folds it into a deeper recursion.

The emergence of complexity is not a climb up a hierarchy but a spiral: a recursive actualisation of environmental, bodily, and symbolic potential.

Life doesn’t just respond to its context—it construes it.

It builds patterns of relation, scaffolding new ways of making meaning.

Even at the level of genes, expression is context-sensitive.

A genome does not operate alone—it instantiates potential differently depending on what it construes around it.

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Symbolic Evolution: Biology Meets Meaning

What makes human evolution unique is not just tool use or language, but the evolution of the symbolic self.

Meaning evolves with form.

Symbolic systems don’t merely reflect biology—they transform it.

• Ritual alters emotional patterning.

• Language re-patterns neural networks.

• Culture reorganises behaviour at the scale of species.

Just as genes encode biological possibility, symbols encode social and existential potential.

In fact, these two systems of encoding—genetic and semiotic—are now entangled.

Human evolution is now shaped not only by physical environments but by symbolic landscapes: stories, laws, technologies, myths.

The world we evolve in is no longer just material—it is relational and semiotic.

We are not just natural organisms—we are mythic participants in an evolving cosmos.

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Cosmogenesis: A Symbolic Threshold

What, then, of the cosmos itself?

The Big Bang is often portrayed as a brute fact: the accidental birth of matter from nothing. But in relational terms, this image collapses under its own assumptions.

The “beginning” is not a place in time—it is a symbolic threshold, a construal of potential where measurement becomes possible, where spacetime emerges as a relation, not a backdrop.

Cosmogenesis is not a bang.

It is the first act of construal—the relational flash in which actuality begins to differentiate from potential.

And the story we tell about this genesis—be it scientific, spiritual, or mythic—is part of its unfolding.

The universe doesn’t simply exist.

It is told into being, again and again, as relation becomes recursion, and recursion becomes meaning.

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Evolution as Participatory Meaning-Making

To summarise this reframing:

• Evolution is not mechanical, but relational: organisms and environments mutually construe one another.

• Emergence is not additive, but recursive: complexity folds back into itself.

• Meaning evolves alongside biology: symbols shape selection.

• Cosmogenesis is not origin, but symbolic rupture—a moment where the undifferentiated begins to relate.

And through it all, life becomes aware of itself—not as a static truth, but as an unfolding story.

Not survival of the fittest.

But participation of the meaningful.