Biological evolution can be read not as a ladder of material refinement but as a synchronisation phenomenon—a system exhibiting Kuramoto-like synchronisation (1984), a mathematical model of how independent oscillators—like fireflies or human hearts—fall into rhythm. Each organism, gene, or mind acts as an oscillator, sustaining an internal rhythm through cycles of metabolism, reproduction, or thought. The medium—ecological, social, or linguistic—acts as the coupling field that transmits phase differences and sustains synchrony. Evolution’s apparent directionality is not teleological but emergent from local entrainment: populations oscillate between transient coherence and resynchronisation around shifting attractors. Mutation and adaptation act as disruptions that shift timing and force systems to adapt, introducing frequency diversity that propagates through the medium until new resonance emerges. Selection, then, is not a filter of substance but a stabilisation of timing—patterns that persist are those whose rhythms cohere strongly enough to reproduce synchrony at the next scale.
Entropy shapes the possibilities of this process. It modulates the density and distribution of potential relations—some broad and diffuse, others sharply peaked—determining how easily coherence can emerge. The biosphere evolves within a multidimensional spectrum of couplings: molecular, ecological, cognitive, linguistic. This principle extends seamlessly into human societies, where communication and production form vast synchronisation networks. Individuals and institutions oscillate together, not through genes or words alone, but through economic and technological systems that couple participants under uneven conditions of influence. In each case, order arises not from fixed causation but from distributed resonance across heterogeneous frequency fields.
Political analogies are unavoidable but not incidental. It is not intelligence that self-propagates at scale, but stability itself—the tendency of complex systems to settle into the most probable basin of attraction. The current global turbulence of identity, insecurity, power, and technologically mediated wealth represents such a basin: the lowest-energy configuration given our biological, cognitive, and sociological parameters. Institutions, rather than steering toward higher coherence, often reinforce this pattern. Their responses to instability replicate the very dynamics that sustain it, reproducing environments in which dysfunction is structurally necessary to maintain epistemological control. In effect, systems protect their rhythm of misunderstanding, ensuring that the same noise keeps the same order intact.
Language and consciousness follow the same pattern but unfold through more abstract oscillations. Words themselves act as oscillators—not in the mechanical sense of ticking clocks or vibrating strings, but as recurrent phenomena within a frequency distribution of use and association. Meaning arises not from individual words but from the interference patterns produced by their collective interactions, from the dense mesh of relations between words rather than the isolated points they occupy. The relationship between frequency and coupling is intrinsic: words that co-occur often become phase-locked through repetition, stabilising semantic coherence in much the same way populations synchronise through interaction. Here, entropy governs not disorder but possibility—the combinatorial openness that allows new semantic synchronies to arise. Language thus functions as both the field and the force of social coordination. Repetition aligns perception and behaviour, not merely meaning; the dominant frequencies of discourse reproduce the stability of power itself. The linguistic field, too, can be conceived as a complex dynamic space—each utterance a coordinate in an abstract plane of phase and amplitude, where coherence is provisional and continuously rediscovered.
Evolution, in this sense, is a universal phase system spanning matter, mind, and society—a living field of oscillators and media perpetually tuning toward coherence, where justice depends on how evenly the rhythm of participation is shared, and freedom begins with the capacity to change the beat.
Reference
Kuramoto, Y. (1984). Chemical Oscillations, Waves, and Turbulence. Springer-Verlag, Berlin.
Daedelus Kite 