From Development to Evolution: Populations as Potentials in Motion

From Development to Evolution: Populations as Potentials in Motion

If development is the instantiation of biological potential within the life of a single organism, then evolution is the restructuring of biological potential across the life of a population. What changes over generations is not just what is actualised, but what is possible—what a given lineage can become, given its structured constraints and environmental affordances.

In reframing genes not as replicators but as structured potential, we unlock a view of evolution not as the competition of discrete entities, but as a history of shifting constraints—a dynamic dance between potential and instance, between lineage and environment, between what can be and what is.

Populations as Biological Potentials

A population is not merely a group of individuals, but a field of potential variation—a set of structured possibilities instantiated in different ways across members, environments, and time. Variation arises not simply from mutation, but from:

• Epigenetic modulation across generations,

• Developmental plasticity within individuals,

• Ecological relationships that shape both potential and selection.

Thus, we can treat the population itself as a system of biological possibility.

Each individual organism is an individuation of the population’s developmental potential, shaped by the constraints of its genotype, the regulation of its epigenome, and the specificity of its environment. And just as meaning systems evolve through repeated instantiations, biological systems evolve as the systemic structure of potential itself shifts—through drift, selection, and developmental constraint.

Selection Without Replication

Selection, in this view, does not act on replicators—it acts on instances. That is, it acts on the actualisations of potential. What persists over time is not an individual gene, but the viability of certain instantiations under prevailing environmental constraints.

This view shifts the question from "What replicates best?" to:

• What is repeatedly actualisable under given conditions?

• What constraints on potential prove adaptive or maladaptive over time?

• How do developmental systems bias the direction of future variation?

Crucially, this opens a door to understanding the role of developmental bias—the idea that not all variation is equally likely, and that some pathways of change are more readily accessible than others. Evolutionary change, then, is not an arbitrary shuffle of genotypes, but the reconfiguration of structured possibilities, constrained by past actualisations and future affordances.

Evolution as the Individuation of Lineages

If individual development is a process of individuation—where pluripotent cells become differentiated tissues—then we might say that evolution is the individuation of lineages. Over time, a lineage becomes more distinct, more constrained, and more specialised in how it instantiates biological potential.

Speciation, in this light, is not the splitting of a replicating entity, but the differentiation of developmental trajectories—a point at which systems of potential have diverged far enough that they no longer instantiate into mutually recognisable forms.

And just as in meaning systems, individuation always unfolds within an ecology—of other organisms, of niches, of symbolic or environmental pressures. It is always relational.

Populations as Semiotic Systems?

Without pressing too hard on terminology, we might say that populations—like meaning systems—are structured orders of potential instantiated in context. They carry the marks of previous actualisations, and they reshape what is possible in the future. They evolve, not through simple replication, but through the ongoing negotiation of constraint and possibility.

In this way, the model we built for memes now illuminates the biology of evolution—not by collapsing one domain into the other, but by showing how both operate through the patterned interplay of:

• Structured potential

• Contextual instantiation

• Constraint and variation

• Emergent individuation

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With this, we've extended our model across ontogeny and phylogeny—across individual development and population-level evolution.