🧬 Evolution as Instantiation and Realisation: A Relational Ontology of Biological Potential

In traditional evolutionary theory, genes are often treated as material units of inheritance, subject to replication, variation, and selection. But in our relational model, we begin by reframing genes not as things but as structured biological potential: possibilities for life to take form.

This potential exists at two interconnected levels. First, there is the species potential: the full range of genomic possibilities that belong to a species. Second, there is the organism potential: an individuated configuration of that species potential in a specific genome. Each organism carries an instance of the species' potential—a unique but related actualisation of the wider system.

This is where we apply the dimension of individuation. Species potential is a shared, collective potential, while organism potential is an individuated subset of it. Every new genome is a variation—a novel instance—produced by processes such as recombination and mutation, yet constrained by the overall architecture of species potential.

The move from species potential to organism genome is a process of instantiation. This is not a material process in itself, but a structural one: it is the actualisation of potential as a particular instance. Each genome is not a random collection of genes but a specific pathway through the probabilistic landscape of species potential.

But life does not stop at the genome. What emerges is a phenotype—the observable structure and physiological organisation of the organism. The phenotype is the expression of the genotype. Here we bring in a third key dimension: realisation. While instantiation relates potential to instance, realisation relates content to expression. In this framework, the genotype is content, and the phenotype is its expression.

Importantly, the phenotype includes the physiological and neurological architectures that condition an organism’s behavioural potential—structures through which the genotype can be expressed in contextually responsive ways. Behaviour itself, however, emerges from dynamic interactions with the environment and is not fully determined by genotype alone.

So: the genotype is an instance of potential (instantiation), and the phenotype is the expression of that instance (realisation). This gives us a precise structural distinction: instantiation accounts for variation, while realisation accounts for form.

Now consider evolution. Evolution is the change over time in which instances get actualised—i.e., which genomic configurations are replicated from generation to generation. Selection acts on the phenotype, but in doing so it shifts the probabilities of what gets instantiated in the next generation. Over time, this alters the profile of species potential: some configurations become more likely, others less so. Evolution, then, is a dynamic modulation of potential via the frequencies of its instantiations.

This perspective avoids treating evolution as the movement of physical things and instead construes it as a transformation in the relational space of biological potential. Organisms are not isolated entities but instances within a dynamic field. They are structured outcomes of a system whose probabilities are continuously being reshaped by feedback from the realised forms that succeed or fail.

Such a model is not merely metaphorical. It provides a structural language for understanding biological emergence without reducing it to mechanisms alone. It allows us to view life as a layered process of individuation, instantiation, and realisation—each layer nested within the others, and all dynamically evolving across time.

In this framework, evolution is not just change. It is a systemic reconfiguration of potential through the selective actualisation and expression of living form.