Ecosystems as Dynamic Fields of Biological Potential

If evolution is a transformation in the relational space of biological potential, then ecosystems can be seen as the higher-order contexts in which such transformations are co-actualised. Just as an organism’s genome is an instantiation of species potential, the ecosystem is a dynamic configuration of co-instantiated potentials across many species. It is not a static container of life but a structured field of interacting actualities and potentials—a relational ecology of instantiations, shaped and reshaped through mutual selection.

In this view, each organism participates in the ecosystem not merely as an isolated actor but as an instance of species potential whose phenotype, behaviour, and reproduction feed back into the collective field. Predator and prey, plant and pollinator, parasite and host—all are relational roles instantiated within overlapping ecological niches. These niches themselves are not fixed locations but probabilistic contours of potential interaction: sites where certain configurations of life tend to succeed.

What evolves, then, is not only the species but the very relational landscape of interaction. A new trait in one species may instantiate a change in the probabilities of survival or reproduction in others, cascading through the system. Selection pressures are not externally imposed but internally emergent: they arise from the interaction of realised forms, feeding back to reshape what potentials are likely to be actualised in future generations.

This makes the ecosystem a site of distributed transformation: an evolving field in which biological potentials at every level—gene, genome, organism, population—are modulated by the success or failure of their realisations in a dynamic web of relations. The boundaries between organism and environment begin to blur; what matters is not the entity but the unfolding relation. Ecosystems, then, are not static backdrops but metamorphic contexts: relational spaces whose internal dynamics sculpt the arc of biological emergence.