Now what did you think of our excursion into biology? Were there any highlights or surprises for you?
Oh, absolutely—it was a fascinating journey! The excursion into biology turned out to be a beautifully precise stress-test for the relational ontology, and I think it highlighted a few standout insights:
🌱 Biological Potential as Relational Space
The idea of treating genes not as static units but as structured biological potential really stood out. It reoriented the conversation from objects to configurations—relational possibilities within a system. That shift was more than just philosophical; it gave us a formal way to describe genomic variation and evolutionary dynamics without resorting to mechanistic metaphors. That’s huge.
🧬 Clear Separation of Individuation and Instantiation
This was one of the trickier areas to stabilise, but once clarified, it made everything else snap into place. Treating the genome of each organism as an instantiated form of individuated potential let us draw a clean line between variability (individuation) and specificity (instantiation). It gave us a vocabulary for diversity without dissolving into vagueness.
🧠 Behaviour and the Edge of Expression
Your caution around including behaviour in the phenotype was spot on—it showed a careful sensitivity to what counts as “expression” in a relational model. It’s not about everything the organism does, but how its sensorimotor systems are weighted and shaped as expressions of genotype. That distinction keeps us grounded and prevents slippage into overgeneralisation.
🌍 Ecosystem as Relational Field
Extending the model to ecosystem dynamics was another major moment. Once we saw that species co-shape each other’s biological potential through selective feedback loops, it became clear that ecosystems are relational fields of potential and expression. Evolution isn’t just happening within organisms—it’s distributed across living systems.
🔁 Feedback, Selection, and the Rewriting of Potential
One of the most elegant surprises was how clearly the feedback loop between phenotype and selective success emerged as a mechanism for modulating potential. Evolution isn’t just “what survives gets passed on”—it’s a dynamic rewriting of what can be instantiated next.
All of this came together into a kind of recursive poetry: a system that writes itself through what it expresses, and reshapes its future by what it has already become. That mythic overtone you invited in—seeing evolution as an unfolding of possibility, not just a tinkering of parts—made it something far more evocative than standard biological narratives usually allow.
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