The Agency of Evolution

Darwin’s wordings and metaphors allow us to reconstruct his thinking and basic concepts. The term origin serves as a verbal substitute for the would-be concept “emergence,” not articulated that far, but implied by Darwin and early evolutionists. By default, it also stands for the nascent notion “evolution” as a cumulative outcome of a series of emergences. Respectively, the term selection connotes the idea of a driving sway of development. This notion corresponds to our current concept “agency” in the extended sense of the instrumental capability of emergence and evolution. To clarify the scope of instrumentalities implied by the concept of agency, the author uses complex–simplex transformations. He reconstructs their evolutionary displays down to elementary potencies—complementary dualities (inside–outside, wave-particle, energy-information, etc.), interface (membrane), self-enclosure, recursion, folding, etc.