Punctuated Theory, Epigenetic Sociology, and the Anthropocene
Abstract
This chapter develops a coarse‑graining analysis of chromatin remodeling and interprets Dirac’s temporal structure through a biological maximalist lens informed by Weizsäcker’s information theory and Bohm’s active information. A biosociological reading of chromatin dynamics and Markov blankets reveals the interface between biological life, biopower, and the socio‑ecological constellation of the Anthropocene. In doing so, the chapter opens conceptual space for a public theology of living systems, semantic modernity, and a proleptic ethics grounded in stratified lifelines and the global network of capitalism.
Introduction
Building on the geometric framework developed in Chapter 4, this chapter turns to biological and socio‑ecological systems where punctuated change, chromatin remodeling, and evolvability shape the dynamics of living processes.
It examines biological life, biosociology, and the Anthropocene through the lens of punctuated change. Systems biology distinguishes support, functional, and storage structures, each contributing to organismic coherence through dynamic organization and environmental coupling. [1]
Autopoiesis provides the generative ontology of living systems—self‑production, structural coupling, and relational emergence—while punctuated theory clarifies how conserved core processes and modular architectures generate evolutionary novelty. Punctuated theory thus becomes the interpretive bridge linking autopoietic ontology with evolutionary innovation through the deep structure of conserved processes and facilitated variation.
This chapter integrates autopoiesis and punctuated theory through epigenetic lifelines, focusing on chromatin remodeling expressed through coarse‑graining analysis. Every organism carries a small archive of the world, rewritten each time it breathes. Expression is not a command but a negotiation between life and its surroundings. CRₜ refers to the way environmental signals and internal conditions influence gene expression without altering DNA itself, supporting the organism’s ability to maintain itself, adapt, and evolve. Chromatin remodeling is not merely a molecular adjustment; it functions as an interpretive rule, quietly reshaping the organism’s internal possibilities.
Through this process, the organism gradually shapes its own way of living in the world. A biological view of punctuated equilibrium can be compared to Dirac’s time structure: in both cases, change occurs in sudden steps rather than smooth continuity. Time in living systems does not flow; it flickers, hesitates, and leaps. Life moves in pulses, like a lantern carried through fog.
In doing so, this framework forms the biological basis for a semantic theory of individuality and a theory of evolvability, offering biological evidence for the semiosis of life within the lifeworld constellation.
This structure establishes the Markov blanket that mediates organism–environment interaction. Every boundary is a kind of listening. Organisms survive by learning how to touch the world without dissolving into it. A Markov blanket partitions a system into internal, sensory, and active states, enabling the organism to maintain identity. This architecture applies not only to organisms but also to society, culture, and ecosystems, revealing how layers of life connect and how resilience develops through their interactions.
Using Foucault’s idea of biopower, we can see how modern technological systems increase vulnerability within today’s ecological and social environments. Power leaves traces not only in institutions but in the tissues of life. The Anthropocene is a story written across bodies, landscapes, and memory.
We need an epigenetic sociology to understand how social inequalities become tied to ecological conditions, and why these connections intensify during the crisis of the Anthropocene. This biosociology does not merely critique biopolitics or capitalism; it incorporates them into a broader analysis of lifeline complexity and the structural coupling that operates within the planetary ecological matrix. This spectrum extends the scope of semantic modernity within the geometry of life, exercising immanent critique of sedimentation and pursuing the reactivation of meaning, life resilience, and emancipation. This conceptual bridge becomes concrete at the molecular scale, where chromatin biology expresses autopoietic dynamics through nucleosome manipulation and epigenetic remodeling.
Nucleosome Manipulation and Chromatin Biology
Chromatin biology offers a paradigmatic expression of autopoiesis at the molecular scale. Its regulatory dynamics—such as nucleosome manipulation (sliding, repositioning, and eviction), histone modification, enhancer-promoter communication, chromatin looping, and DNA methylation—form an epigenetic architecture that continually reorganizes itself to sustain cellular identity. These processes operate as an integrated interface that modulates gene accessibility, incorporates environmental and metabolic signals, and preserves autopoietic coherence. Through this architecture, ecological pressures, structural constraints, and cellular histories converge, shaping context‑dependent gene expression and adaptive responsiveness across the organism’s lifelines.
In eukaryotic cells, DNA wrapped around histone octamers forms nucleosomes whose spatial arrangement is continually remodeled. Chromatin‑remodeling complexes use ATP‑driven energy to slide, restructure, or temporarily disassemble nucleosomes, thereby modulating DNA accessibility for transcription, replication, and repair.[2]
Histone modifications—acetylation, methylation, phosphorylation, ubiquitination—alter the interaction between DNA and histone tails, enabling rapid transitions between open and compact chromatin states and integrating environmental and cellular signals into the chromatin landscape.
Life unfolds not in ink but in shifting patterns of openness, and within these patterns chromatin acts as a quiet scribe,marking the thresholds of possibility. Chromatin biology reveals a text of autopoiesis: a living network in which components work together through mutual regulation, woven processes, and feedback loops to bring forth a meaningful form of life. Life, in this sense, becomes a quiet loom—threads gathering and releasing until a pattern capable of surviving begins to appear. These molecular processes set the stage for the broader regulatory architecture of gene expression, where chromatin remodeling and histone modification jointly govern cellular behavior.
Chromatin Remodeling and Gene Regulation
At the molecular level, chromatin‑remodeling complexes work in concert with histone‑modifying enzymes to form a multilayered regulatory system that governs gene expression across the life cycle of a gene. This system not only determines when transcription and translation occur but also modulates their rate, duration, and amplitude, maintaining autopoietic coherence while enabling adaptive responsiveness to perturbation. Chromatin becomes a complex regulatory structure in which environmental cues, metabolic conditions, and structural constraints collectively shape gene accessibility and cellular behavior within the broader network of cellular life.[3]
In this way, chromatin remodeling provides the molecular substrate for punctuated evolvability, linking developmental plasticity with evolutionary innovation. A coarse‑grained study of chromatin remodeling and gene regulation strongly supports Mary Jane West‑Eberhard’s evolutionary developmental biology, which treats the ontogeny of all aspects of the phenotype—at every level of organization and across all organisms—as central to evolutionary explanation. The theoretical incorporation of developmental plasticity is indispensable for any punctuated theory of evolvability and phenotypic diversification, particularly in clarifying the relation between plasticity and evolutionary punctuation.[4]
Indeed, the very meaning of evolvability and life resilience emerges within relational networks through self‑organization, plasticity, and innovation, enacted in continuous interaction with the environment. Life does not unfold in isolation but in proximity—systems meeting at their boundaries through niche construction and adjacent enablement.
Punctuated Theory and Epigenetic Mechanism
Coarse-grained chromatin remodeling (CR) instantiates the very logic of punctuated evolvability. Conserved core processes correspond to the stable components of the chromatin state.
Sₜ — Structural State includes nucleosome positioning, chromatin compaction or relaxation, 3D chromatin architecture (such as looping, TADs, and compartments), and the distribution of histone variants—the conserved core processes that stabilize chromatin’s physical organization.
Iₜ — Informational State includes chromatin accessibility (ATAC‑seq signal), transcription factor binding potential, enhancer–promoter communication potential, and epigenetic marks that encode regulatory information. [5]
Tₜ — Topological State includes genome topology, long‑range chromatin interactions, network‑level connectivity, and the topological constraints that shape regulatory flow. This dimension reflects the modularity, weak linkage, and facilitated variation emphasized by Kirschner and Gerhart in their account of evolvability.
Taken together, the resulting structure becomes analogous to Jost’s topos-semantic framework.[6] The formulation synthesizes conserved core processes by expressing chromatin remodeling that reorganizes the informational and structural landscape of the genome. Coarse‑graining analysis can be expressed as acting on facilitated variation, modularity, and organismal plasticity:
where
- G (t) denotes the three‑dimensional genome architecture at time
;
- Ch(t) represents chromosome‑level structural manipulations, including looping, compaction, and accessibility;
- Ep(t) refers to the epigenomic state, encompassing the histone code, methylation landscape, and chromatin marks.
Life gathers its own beginnings, folding like a thought. The genome architecture varies over time, shaping itself through chromosome manipulations such as looping, compaction, and shifts in accessibility. The epigenomic state embraces the histone code, the methylation landscape, and its historical trajectories. In this architecture, life gathers its own beginnings, folding like a thought rather than collapsing into a single point (Aleph). Time flickers like a pulse, shifting as boundaries listen for the next possibility. Life arises, revealing itself in pulse, change, and future state.
A structural theory of chromatin remodeling indicates that core conserved processes function as stasis over long periods, while there is no stasis in anatomical and physiological phenotypic variation. Rather, there is divergence and diversification of physiology and behavior across the animal kingdom.
The organism contains a great deal of latent novelty within its own somatic adaptability through mechanisms of facilitated variation—such as weak regulatory linkages, signal-transduction pathways, or multiple transcriptional regulators. It underwrites the role of adaptable processes within the organism in contrast to the organism’s environmental adaptability and natural selection.[7]
In the systems‑biological theory of evolvability, stability and emergence interlock through the iterative action of resilience, allowing life to recombine its own architecture and generate novelty without losing coherence.[8]
These conserved and divergent processes converge in epigenetic regulation, where chromatin states, metabolic signals, and environmental cues jointly shape the informational architecture of living systems. Organisms maintain identity even as they produce adaptive novelty along the geometry of life—esse sequitur vitae.
Epigenetic Science, Life Information, and Time Matter
In living systems, replication, transcription, and translation each generate distinct informational trajectories, continually reshaped by chromatin states, epigenetic marks, metabolic conditions, and environmental signals.[9] Epigenetic science reveals a multilayered, context‑dependent regulatory architecture. As one study notes, “DNA methylation, histone modifications, and small RNAs generated by RNA interference (RNAi) are tightly interconnected epigenetic mechanisms in plant genomes.” [10]
This architecture exemplifies coarse‑graining—integrating chromatin remodeling, resilience dynamics, and epigenetic modulation—together with Markov blanket formation, which configures the boundary as a generative site of innovation and meaning, the interface through which cells interpret and respond to their environments.
Given this, I turn to David Bohm’s theory of active information expressed through the quantum potential. The quantum potential Q provides the nonlocal guidance of active information underlying the system’s wave function. Despite its deterministic limitations, nonlocal active information can be transformed into localized, potential-active information within a dynamic temporal structure.
Accordingly:
- potential-active information = systems modulation (nonlocal, form-bearing guidance together with localized life-energy),
- epigenetic lifeline = explicate unfolding within temporal structure,
- autopoiesis = the system responding according to its own organization.
Potential-active information allows energeia to be organized into as many dimensions as required for autopoietic living systems. Time, perturbation, and energy-level change form a structural basis for guiding and energizing the living systems within the biological field. Beyond Bohm, additional time dynamic variables are included to express how the living system are renewed and the transformed:
Here, active information within a potential structure is combined with localized forms of information that specify the structure of the lifeline and time complexity. This dual informational architecture—meaning and life—is indispensable for the emergence of explicate order, for only through such boundaries can latent meaning unfold into the organized dynamics of living systems.
In this light, time matters in directing, strengthening, and innovating life, moving in concert with perpetual perturbation and the quiet energy that sustains living systems. Time is not a backdrop but an active partner—flickering, gathering, and releasing—shaping how life endures, adapts, and opens new possibilities.
This transition from quantum potential to biological time reveals that semantic information is neither representational nor merely physical, but emerges through the dynamic coupling of potential and active information across scales. To clarify how these informational trajectories acquire temporal structure, we turn to Bohm’s active information and Dirac’s perturbation theory, which together illuminate the deeper temporal dynamics of biological systems.
The Quantum Field and Semantic Information Theory
To develop a quantum‑field framework for semantic information theory, I draw on both Bohm and Weizsäcker. Bohm’s idea of nonlocal active information is treated as a context‑dependent parameter inside the quantum potential, shaping observable phenomena. This renewed interpretation has not been adequately appreciated.[11]
Nonlocal active information includes generative and super‑implicate orders, moving beyond hidden variables and drawing on Prigogine’s view of stochastic molecular dynamics.
Bohm’s limitation shows up in his classical continuum theory of hidden variables, which Weizsäcker criticizes as a psychological projection that makes the future seem causally fixed by the present.[12]
At this point, Weizsäcker’s theory of the Kreisgang—the circular movement of epistemic return—becomes central to semantic information theory. His epistemology places Kant’s transcendental conditions for scientific critical reason into a concrete, experiential framework, instead of treating them as representational correspondences.
In this way, Weizsäcker recovers the dynamic structure of time expressed in Aristotle’s dialectic of dynamis, energeia, and entelecheia. This move places scientific knowledge within a field of potential and actual realization.
Weizsäcker draws directly on Husserl’s account of time constitution in terms of retention—the continuing awareness of what has just occurred. His information theory of geometry is articulated in the following manner. The notion of an objective ‘document’ becomes the condition for knowing past facts, and recollection itself functions as a ‘document in consciousness.’ Through this document-structure, the past is organized as a form, and in adopting Husserl’s notion of retention, Weizsäcker effectively inherits the structural—almost geometric—method.[13]
In this light, I supplement that Kant’s concept of the archaeology of nature and evolutionary process must be examined in connection with his reflection on the epigenesis of living systems, as articulated in proto-autopoietic theories of self-organization. Kant’s epigenesis is not merely biological; it is also relevant to the epigenesis of human reason, where rationality emerges through developmental, self-organizing processes rather than through representational correspondence.
This developmental structure is mirrored in Kant’s transcendental condition—his structuring of definite provinces of truth and meaning—which works in a way similar to the Markov blanket’s boundary identity and the structural coupling found in the autopoietic geometry of meaning, emergence, and cosmopolitan wholeness. The transcendental boundary is not a barrier but a generative interface, a condition for the emergence of form, meaning, embodiment, and life resilience. [14]
Kant is essential for my geometry of living systems because his transcendental architecture goes beyond the limits of Husserl’s critique—especially Husserl’s view of transcendental apperception as only a self‑regulating principle for the intuitive world‑environment. Kant’s archaeology of nature already anticipates a dynamic, self‑organizing coupling between organism and world—something Husserl’s phenomenology cannot fully reach.[15]
Time matters within the epistemic circle, life energeia, and embodied experience—each shaping and reshaping temporal flow. In turn, time fluctuates in concert with external perturbation, and within these fluctuations life finds the openings that lead to bursts of innovation. This biological temporality aligns with Dirac’s insight into time complexity in the relations between dynamical variables at different moments, showing that temporal structure is dynamically reorganized through perturbation and through life’s potential and active information.
Hiley and Dennis note that Bohm’s quantum field theory shows a structural analogy with Paul Dirac’s approach, allowing Dirac’s framework to extend Bohm’s ideas into the relativistic domain. The Bohm momentum—and therefore the Bohm energy—is the field’s energy‑momentum quantized as beables within the super‑implicate order.[16]
A comparative study of Bohm and Dirac reveals a crucial insight: nonlocal active information at the super‑implicate order becomes quantized as local energy information when viewed through Dirac’s framework. In a biological maximalist approach, this analogy allows me to extend Dirac’s temporal structure into the domain of biological time—not by modifying the physical foundations, but by widening the interpretive range within perturbation‑based temporal reconfiguration. This reposition situates systems biology within a quantum‑field ensemble framework, in which temporal perturbation and active information jointly shape biological dynamics. These insights motivate the development of an ensemble field theory, in which potential and active information interact through temporal perturbation to generate biological novelty.
Ensemble Field Theory: Time Complexity and Potential-Active Information
Weizsäcker’s theory of information provides the structural field of potentiality—a quiet field in which possibilities wait like unopened seeds. Yet it does not account for the punctuated dynamics of perturbation, energy redistribution, and active information that characterize biological resilience.
Dirac’s time‑dependent perturbation and energy‑level reconfiguration supplement this gap by supplying the dynamic field. Thus, potential information becomes active, enabling basin shifts, irreversibility, and the emergence of new local equilibria, as if dormant waters suddenly found new channels. It introduces a dynamic scaffold in which temporal structure continually folds and unfolds.
As Dirac notes, “the relationships between the dynamical variables at different times (comprising the field equations as well as the P.B.s of variables at different times) are very much affected by the interaction.”[17]
In this context, operators containing γ⁰ (including the Hamiltonian and field operators) evolve in time within a given Lorentz frame, undergoing continuous reconfiguration as time passes through them.
This suggests that the time component of the gamma matrices can be treated as part of the dynamic structure defined at different moments. In effect, the temporal component functions as a thread woven into the fabric of change. Time is not what moves life; rather, life moves time. It follows life like a tide pulled by the moon. Time pulses with life energeia and is reshaped through embodied experience. External irritation sets time into fluctuation, and within these fluctuations life generates new attractor basins. Time matters in the processes of stabilization and canalization.
According to Dirac, time‑dependent perturbation must be used for solving all problems that involve a consideration of time, because time is never still and responds to every perturbation. Transient phenomena occur when the perturbation is suddenly applied, or more generally whenever the perturbing energy depends explicitly on time. [18]
Temporal change arising through perturbation theory can be expressed by delta‑type selectors. Dirac’s delta function δ is an operator that selects the exact moment at which an event occurs. It specifies precisely when a change takes place, how its effects enter the system, and how that moment alters the overall temporal flow. In this sense, δ(t − t₀) serves as a mathematical marker that inscribes the fact that “an event occurred at t = t₀” into the structure of time. When a perturbation is not a continuous force but a discrete event occurring at a specific moment, δ is used to represent it. This interval selection generates a discontinuous activation event.
The time‑dependent equation
registers the localized energy‑information shift and accumulates the corresponding biological temporal structure.
For Dirac, the delta function δ was a tool for describing instantaneous perturbations and for calculating transitions in the arrangement of energy levels. Dirac never applied δ, γ⁰, or time‑dependent perturbation theory to biological systems, but the mathematical structure of his framework is fully compatible with phenomena such as epigenetic switching, attractor basin shifts, and punctuated emergence. Bohm’s interpretation of active information already demonstrates that quantum concepts can be legitimately extended into new domains. My approach follows this trajectory: it is not a distortion of physics, but an interpretive extension grounded in biological evidence.
At this point, the basic unity of biological time can be expressed through a structure of dynamic temporal variables:
T̂ = γ⁰ (∂ₜ + δ(t − t₀)).
In this framework, δ(t − t₀) denotes small‑scale biological punctuated events—local temporal spikes associated with chromatin reconfiguration or micro‑level developmental switching—whereas larger‑scale discontinuities such as speciation correspond to Δt. A punctuated event is not a small perturbation t → t + δt, but rather a finite jump Δt.
Thus, δ represents micro‑scale temporal spikes within living systems, while Δt denotes macro‑scale discontinuities. δ marks the entry point of energy reconfiguration—the moment when energy redistribution enters the system, when a living system shifts into a new attractor basin, when a developmental switch occurs, or when chromatin reconfiguration takes place. In this way, δ designates the threshold of biological change.
Biological time thus emerges as a structured temporal field generated by localized energy-information shifts, where potential–active information transitions reorganize the system’s stability landscape—a field structured by pulses and thresholds. This stands in contrast to Dirac’s delta‑function formalism, where δ (x²) provides a Lorentz‑invariant operational interpretation by selecting events supported strictly on the light cone.[19]
When the quantum field is defined as potential–active information within Dirac’s temporal structure, localized active information—expressed as actual biological form—activates potentiality through energeia. Potential–active information reorganizes post‑perturbation energy configurations, generating new stable states in much the same way that allelopathy expresses ecological resilience. Active information becomes visible in life’s resilience, arising within external irritation, as organisms produce biochemicals that influence the growth, survival, or reproduction of nearby forms of life. Time pulses along with the organism.
In this way, quantum field theory becomes a framework for system‑information biology. It provides a theory of biological time that formalizes the generation and transformation of potential–active information. The core of ensemble field theory lies in the way perturbation and the δ‑operator open the threshold of time, the γ‑matrices separate the temporal component, and the arrangement of energy levels organizes the living rhythm.
This structure reveals epigenetic temporal complexity, stabilization processes, and the punctuated emergence of new attractor basins within biological time. Although it is only the first construction, it provides a coherent structural basis upon which more precise and rigorous elaborations can emerge. This temporal architecture directly informs the formation of Markov blankets, where localized perturbations reorganize the boundaries that sustain biological identity.
Markov Blanket and the Free Energy Principle
Chromatin remodeling produces localized temporal events—openings, closings, and reorganizations that create discontinuities in biological time. If time oscillates within life’s energeia and external perturbation, then it is precisely within this oscillation that life brings forth new forms. These discontinuities mark transitions between potential and active information—processes central to the free energy principle and to the formation of Markov blankets in autopoietic systems.
According to Karl Friston, the theory of Markov blankets and the free energy principle suggests that the emergence of life—biological self‑organization—is an almost inevitable reality, given local interactions among the states of coupled dynamical systems. These interactions unfold within the spatial boundary of a living organism, arising from the very existence of a physical boundary.
A full account of life’s emergence must address multiple timescales—evolutionary, developmental, and functional—and the rise of DNA, ribosomes, and the cellular networks shared across life. Minimizing free energy—through selectively sampling sensory input via internal filtering—enables biological systems to resist the second law of thermodynamics as it applies to open systems far from equilibrium. Negative surprise corresponds to Bayesian model evidence, since systems that minimize free energy maximize a lower bound on that evidence.
This perspective aligns with autopoietic rhythm, which unfolds through structural coupling and enaction. Systems that do not minimize free energy cannot exist, because the entropy of their sensory states would not be bounded and would increase indefinitely. As Friston states, “any ergodic random dynamical system that possesses a Markov blanket will appear to actively maintain its structural and dynamical integrity.” [20]
A Markov blanket is a Bayesian model defined by probabilistic causal relations. It takes into account how environmental signals outside the cell (the parents) and the intracellular protein networks (the co‑parents) influence the formation and maintenance of the cell’s identity. In this framework, the cell itself functions as the Markov blanket of the children.
The blanket is divided into sensory states (S) and active states (A), which together mediate the organism’s interface with its environment. Formally, we can express this decomposition as x ∈ X = C ∪ S ∪ A ∪ L, where x denotes the complete state vector integrating all four components of the Markov blanket decomposition—external (C), sensory (S), active (A), and internal (L) states. Responding to external triggering and perturbation, internal states couple back to external states through active states, minimizing free energy and the noise of sensory states.
Self‑organizing attractor networks offer a clear framework for formalizing the individuation of the self. If free energy minimizes the attractor network, it becomes fundamental for any dynamical system that maintains its integrity despite a changing environment. It prescribes Bayesian update dynamics for both individual neural networks and coarse‑grained brain networks. It engenders a distinctive coupling plasticity that continuously adjusts coupling weights to preserve low free energy in anticipation of future sensory encounters. This implies that the Markov blanket extends across social, cultural, and ecological layers through the free energy principle.[21]
I extend Friston’s theory to investigate how structural coupling is layered across diverse lifelines—biological, socio‑cultural, and ecological—within an auto‑epigenetic matrix and social‑ecological resilience. Human beings are not single biological individuals but intersections of multilayered lifelines, and meaning emerges precisely at these intersections.
Thus the free energy principle becomes a multi‑layered geometry of lifelines, expressed through three nested strata:
- The Child — Biological Lifeline: Neural dynamics, sensory–active boundaries, epigenetic imprinting, and early attachment constitute the biological Markov blanket.
- The Parent — Socio‑Cultural Lifeline: Language, norms, social meanings, and intersubjective practices form a socio‑cultural Markov blanket.
- The Grandparent — Ecological–Cosmic Lifeline: Historical memory, tradition, ecological embeddedness, and cosmological inheritance constitute an ecological–cosmic Markov blanket.
These layers remain adjacent, generating meaning through reciprocal coupling. Chromatin‑based processes form a dynamic interface through which cells modulate gene accessibility, integrate environmental signals, and sustain autopoietic identity. These nonlinear flows undergo punctuated evolvability within attractor basins. At the interface with socio‑ecological impulses—perturbation, irritation, encroachment—epigenetic mechanisms trigger autopoietic responses that bring forth meaningful forms of life.
As Mary Jane West‑Eberhard shows, developmental plasticity is proactively adaptive. If phenotype precedes genotype, plasticity expresses a form of life intentionality—an anticipatory capacity intrinsic to autopoietic systems. Genes follow rather than lead adaptive evolution; the body‑subject becomes the locus of evolutionary change. Plasticity thus functions as a universal facilitator of phenotypic novelty.[22]
Life is not a single stream but a constellation of multilayered, punctuated, nonlinear patterns shaped by neural and environmental interactions. The ecological interface grounds sociological studies of epigenetic regimes, revealing how socioeconomic adversity and environmental exposure become biologically inscribed. The duality of epigenetic signature and epigenetic inheritance reveals a biosocial regime of epigenetic ontology—an autopoietic lifeworld layered across society, culture, and ecology.[23]
The doublet of epigenetic signature and epigenetic inheritance reveals a biosocial regime that shapes semantic modernity and stratified lifelines in the Anthropocene. It also exposes an autopoietic reality formed through structural coupling, where Markov blankets may degenerate and life resilience becomes disrupted by shifts in potential–active information across society, culture, and ecology.
Bio Sociology, Power, and the Epigenetic Turn
Biopolitics traditionally describes a mode of state power exercised over life, but an epigenetic perspective reveals a deeper interface between biological systems and socio‑ecological realities. Foucault’s formulation of “making live and letting die,” rooted in the ancient sovereign privilege of deciding life and death, persists in moments of existential threat. Yet from a bio‑sociological standpoint, the focus shifts from juridical authority to the embeddedness of life within ecological, metabolic, and epigenetic processes. Power is not merely imposed upon life; it becomes inscribed within life, shaping vulnerability, resilience, and the biological consequences of social inequality.
If the geometry of living systems rests on shared environmental and intersubjective life, then biosociology requires a capacity for reactivation—renewing what has become sedimented in obscurity, distortion, or crisis.
In this sense, geometry turns back toward the primal sources of meaning through explication and constructive activities that generate new structures of sense. This geometric attitude emphasizes empathy, critical renewal, and emancipation. It must carry the ability to reactivate the primal beginnings—the sources of meaning for everything that follows, yet which have not themselves been fully handed down.
Foucault’s archaeology portrays the human being as an empirico–transcendental doublet, where phenomenology links the Cartesian cogito with the Kantian a priori and opens the path to life, work, and language. This method proceeds through an interrogation of the human mode of being and its relation to the ontology of the unthought.
However, Foucault locates ‘man’ and the unthought—or the Other—at the archaeological level. It is not the origin that gives rise to historicity; rather, historicity in its very fabric makes possible the necessity of an origin. All discontinuities are knitted together so as to form a single point of identity as the palpable Same, possessing the power to burst open and become Other.[24]
Foucault’s analysis of power within knowledge and discourse addresses dimensions largely absent from Husserl’s phenomenology. Yet at the level of the genealogy of life, meaning and power are woven into the fabric of autopoietic epigenesis, stratified across biological life, work, language, and ecology.
Meaning arises from these primal sources, which can be made self‑evident through archaeological inquiry and historical investigation into the epistemological grounding of the sciences within our civilization and cultural world. Such inquiry demands a return to the origins proper to each domain. We are led back to the primal materials of the first formation of meaning—the original premises that lie within the prescientific cultural world. Questions such as the clarification of the origin of geometry need not reach beyond these prescientific materials, for they already contain the generative horizon from which idealities first emerged. [25]
In the Anthropocene, geometric life science reveals a civilizational crisis in which political power, ecological degradation, and epigenetic imprinting create new forms of exposure, precarity, and embodied risk. The Anthropocene disrupts the multilayered Markov blankets of living systems, destabilizing their attractor basins and thereby collapsing the resilience of life.
According to Foucault, the anatomo‑politics of the body disciplines, optimizes, and integrates the individual into systems of productivity and control. The biopolitics of the population governs reproduction, mortality, public health, and longevity. Together, these form the classical architecture of biopower: the management of biological existence through the regulation of bodies and populations. [26]
But in the Anthropocene, this architecture is no longer sufficient. Power now operates through metabolic pathways, ecological exposures, and epigenetic processes. The body becomes not only the target of governance but the medium through which power circulates—its plasticity, vulnerability, and adaptive capacities shaped by socio‑ecological conditions. This shift marks the emergence of an epigenetic biopolitics, where the biological consequences of inequality, toxicity, and environmental degradation become genealogically inscribed into living systems.
The Anthropocene must be understood as the entanglement of multiple crises—biological, social, ecological, technological, and semantic—none of which can be addressed through a single‑layer analysis.
- Biological layer — toxic exposure, chronic stress, epigenetic damage, and widening health inequalities.
- Sociocultural layer — economic precarity, social inequality, technological control, and biopolitical regulation.
- Ecological–cosmic layer — climate disruption, ecological collapse, and the disintegration of meaning, tradition, and worldviews.
These three layers act as one another’s external conditions, each perturbing, reorganizing, and generating meaning for the others.
The Anthropocene is not merely a human‑driven disruption of Earth systems. Rather, it is a self‑producing, self‑reinforcing degenerative coupling that destroys the very lifelines that sustain it. The result is a boomerang effect: ecological disruption returns through degenerative feedback whose anticipatory pressures intrude upon the present, pushing lifelines toward a collapse of self‑producing capacity. This internal analysis requires a bio‑sociological framework capable of tracing how discourse, material interests, power relations, and governance embed themselves within ecological and epigenetic processes.
In their seminal study The Atmosphere After a Nuclear War: Twilight at Noon, Paul J. Crutzen and colleagues showed that large‑scale nuclear conflict would ignite vast fires whose smoke plumes could plunge regions of the planet into prolonged darkness. Tropospheric smoke loading, regional darkness, and the disruption of the atmosphere’s self‑cleaning capacity undermine biospheric resilience and hasten the precarious pathways already unfolding in the Anthropocene. [27]
More than that, in the genealogical fabric of living systems, power becomes a mode of structural coupling with external irritation, shaping vulnerability, resilience, and the long‑term trajectories of populations through the very mechanisms that sustain life. The free energy principle—understood as potential–active information—remains foundational for forming Markov blankets across multiple layers of reality, stabilizing attractor basins, and enabling punctuated evolvability. This informational power and boundary identity cannot be reduced to the problem of sex.
Foucault’s genealogy of bodies identifies sex as both a privileged signifier and a universal signified—at once the code through which modern power interprets identity and the supposed truth behind what the modern subject is. [28] Yet this framework can be extended by reframing the human body itself as the site where signifier and signified converge.
The body is not merely a biological substrate but an autopoietic system, an ecological interface, and an epigenetic archive. The body becomes both a biological locus and a medium through which socio‑ecological forces inscribe meaning, vulnerability, and power. Epigenetic plasticity demonstrates that life is responsive, adaptive, and vulnerable—its phenotypes shaped by internal and external stimuli, from environmental change and climate crisis to the atmospheric perturbations associated with nuclear conflict in the Anthropocene.
I hold that Foucault never grasped life’s resilience as it emerges from the epigenetic double structure of potential and active information. Semantic modernity, in contrast, must be understood within the geometry of life, where temporal complexity and the transitions between potential and active information are reconstructed through the dynamics of attractor basins.
The Anthropocene and Capitalism
The degenerative coupling is not only ecological but also economic; capitalism amplifies these asymmetries through globalized extraction and technospheric expansion. Foucault’s account often narrows the Anthropocene to the Capitocene, treating biopower as if it were primarily linked to capitalist sexuality.
Historically, however, regimes of biopower long predate capitalism: the Roman Empire, medieval political economies, and early modern states all exercised forms of bodily governance, demographic control, and sovereign power over life and death. Capitalism, therefore, cannot be reduced to the deployment of sexuality alone.
A broader historical view shows that biopower predates capitalism, which later adapted these earlier forms of governance. The Anthropocene should be seen as a long-term entanglement of political authority, ecological extraction, and technospheric expansion. The subjugation of bodies and the regulation of populations through the deployment of sexuality mark a decisive moment in the emergence of biopower in eighteenth‑century Europe, where these techniques became indispensable to the formation of capitalist modernity. [29]
What distinguishes capitalism, however, is more than biopower and sexuality. Capitalist dynamics were already flourishing in the thirteenth‑century commercial networks of Cairo and later in the Italian city‑states. The Commercial Revolution[30]—long before the Industrial Revolution—established global circuits of exchange, credit, and mercantile governance that shaped the emerging world system. Islamic economic systems should not be marginalized in accounts of global development from the thirteenth century to Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt.
These developments were driven not by sexuality but by administrative rationality, legal codification, status hierarchies, crusades, and economic stratification. Weber analyzed society through stratified layers of meaning—status, class, authority, discipline, and legal‑political order. Thus, Weber’s sociology of stratification can be reinterpreted through a bio‑sociological analysis of autopoietic living systems.
Status honor becomes a form of boundary identity or stabilization, while style of life becomes patterned lifelines that reflect how internal and external states are coupled. Closure appears as the loss of coupling, while discipline functions as autopoietic restructuring that contributes to the formation of biopower. Charisma and authority act as attractor dynamics within social meaning fields, while class and economic power function as material lifelines and external pressures. Capitalism emerges as a global form of state governance—and as an imperial power in its own right.
Semantic modernity, in this regard, is defined within a global ecological network that enables multiple pathways to modernity, rather than a Eurocentric model tied to capitalist modernity, laissez‑faire economics, and Social Darwinism.
Epilogue: Public Theology of Living Systems and Semantic Realism
Bio sociology does not claim that Weber spoke of biology. It simply reveals how Weber’s layered social structures echo the layered organization of living systems—autopoietic, epigenetic, ecological, and symbolic. Yet unlike Weber or Foucault, today’s social, cultural, and economic lifelines stretch across global networks of complexity and technological innovation.
These networks shape and regulate the many realities of the capitalist world—far beyond the narrow Eurocentric idea of “the economy.” No capitalist economy or state biopower exists as an isolated domain; every idea and discourse is entangled with material interests, class and status hierarchies, cultural institutions, and religious or educational formations. These layers influence the state and the economy through countless forms of structural coupling.
A biosociology of stratification can therefore be understood through epigenetic resilience and developmental novelty, offering an analytic horizon capable of addressing the crises of the Anthropocene that remain hidden within Foucault’s biopolitics and Marxian capitalism.
In doing so, it obscures the multilayered lifeline dynamics that truly define our crisis. The Anthropocene is not a geological era but a multilayered condition—one that calls us to repair broken lifelines, stabilize social and ecological systems, and restore resilience across the realities that sustain life.
This multilayered condition also reshapes how we understand the historical evolution of capitalist lifelines. As noted earlier, Capitalism has become a global ecology of meaning because biological, epigenetic, and cultural lifelines are now structurally coupled across the planet. Capitalist dynamics were already flourishing in the thirteenth century commercial networks of Cairo and later in the Italian city states.
Long before modern capitalism, economic lifelines were woven through ancient Greek overseas expeditions, Solon’s reforms, and the civic rationality of the Greek Enlightenment—from Socrates to Aristotle. The Roman Republic developed a remarkably sophisticated villa-based agrarian economy, while the medieval period witnessed a contraction of economic complexity. Markets such as the Greek agora or the Islamic bazaar functioned not as sites of exploitation but as cultural exchange belts—interfaces of meaning, trade, and social coupling.
In the Commercial Revolution, Islamic and Chinese networks far outpaced Europe, and the Industrial Revolution cannot be understood apart from the colonial extraction that underwrote its expansion. Economic life has never been a single domain; it has always been structurally coupled with law, culture, ecology, and political authority. Over centuries, capitalism shifted—from financialization in the twentieth century to digital, ecological, and technological ecosystems in the twenty-first. Through this long transformation, capitalism evolved from an economic system into a global ecology, and ultimately into a structurally coupled civilizational lifeline.
Today’s world is marked by ecological collapse, economic instability, technological volatility, cultural fragmentation, and political disintegration. In this multilayered reality, the future of living systems must be reimagined. In my view, Husserl’s geometry of life is a genealogy of the origins of meaning, and it demands an archaeological elucidation. Mathematical abstraction has obscured not only the foundations of the natural sciences but also the humanities, philosophy, and cultural traditions.
Weizsäcker employs a Husserlian geometric style within his information theory, integrating Kantian transcendental conditions with Aristotle’s potential–actual field. Advancing this geometric method, I reinterpret Kant as anticipating self‑organizing epigenesis and evolutionary embodiment within the archaeology of nature. Time is not merely located within consciousness but structurally coupled with the environment–world through developmental plasticity and anticipation. This philosophical–scientific approach to living systems culminates in an expanded interpretation of Dirac’s time structure for biological temporality and potential–active information. Within this geometric horizon of life, scientific and theological inquiry converge on the same lifeline structures.
In this light, science and public theology meet in a shared ethical responsibility for the integrity and dignity of lifelines. Their convergence opens a space where scientific inquiry and theological reflection can speak to one another through the epigenetic interface, deepening our understanding of power within life—ethical, scientific, and ecological.
The 2020 film Radioactive offers a vivid image of this dynamic. Marie Curie’s discovery appears not only as a physical phenomenon but as a force of anticipation—an eruption of the future into the present. Physical systems dissipate energy and drift toward entropy; to resist dissolution, a system must gather environmental information, build generative models, and act with anticipation.
In this sense, radioactivity becomes a proleptic agent—revealing hidden dynamics, widening horizons, and foreshadowing new realities across biological, cultural, and ecological dimensions. Prolepsis becomes both anticipatory and retroactive—an energy that reshapes the present through what has not yet arrived.
Divine concursus with living systems is expressed within a relational and emergent framework, where the forward-looking action of God becomes healing and transformation for the wounded and the broken in an age shaped by the Anthropocene. Time, in this sense, pulses with living systems and their creativity. It rises and falls with the rhythms of resilience, moving like a breath that expands and contracts as life responds to the world. This orientation defines public theology as it explores autopoiesis, epigenetic ontology, and the attractor basins that allow bursts of innovation within the geometry of life.
[1] Konieczny et al., Systems Biology, 1-2.
[2] Ibid., 58.
[3] Dalton and Young, Fundamentals of Cell Biology 75-6, 84.
[4] West‑Eberhard, Developmental Plasticity and Evolution, 617–619.
[5] TADs (Topologically Associating Domains): 3D genome domains with active internal interactions; regions where enhancer–promoter interplay frequently occurs. Chromatin Compartments (A/B compartments): Large‑scale chromatin states distinguishing open (A) and closed (B) chromatin, associated with transcriptional activity or inactivity. ATAC‑seq Signal: A measure of chromatin accessibility indicating whether DNA regions are in an “on” (open) or “off” (closed) regulatory state.
[6] Jost, Mathematical, Concepts, 289.
[7] Kirschner and Gerhart, The Plausibility of Life, 45, 220, 236.
[8] Ibid., 110.
[9] Bolsover, et al., Cell Biology, 76.
[10] Miryeganeh, and Saze, “Epigenetic inheritance and plant evolution,” Population Ecology (2019), 1.
[11] Bohm and Hiley, The Undivided Universe, 97.
[12] Weizsäcker, The Structure of Physics, 291-2.
[13] Ibid., 323.
[14] This analogy becomes explicit in Part 3.2, where I discuss Kant’s archaeology of nature, evolutionary embodied coupling, and epigenesis in dialogue with Stewart Kauffman and Stephen J. Gould, showing how Kant’s transcendental framework anticipates contemporary accounts of biological self-organization, evolutionary novelty, and emergent cosmopolitan order.
[15] Husserl, Die Krisis, VI, § 28.
[16] Hiley and Dennis, “Dirac, Bohm and the Algebraic Approach,” 23.
[17] Dirac, The Principle of Quantum Mechanics, 283.
[18] Ibid., 167-168. Once such a time‑dependent perturbation ΔH(t) is introduced, the formal time‑reversal symmetry of the Dirac equation is broken, and the negative‑energy component—the mathematical source of the antiparticle branch—is consequently suppressed under localized and irreversible dynamics.
[19] Ibid., 280.
[20] Friston (2013) “Life as we know it.” J R Soc Interface, 2.
[21] Spisak and Friston. “Self-orthogonalizing attractor neural networks emerging from the free energy principle,” 15-17.
[22] West-Eberhard, “Developmental Plasticity and the Origin of Species Differences,” in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 102, suppl.1 (2005) April 25, pp. 6543-6549.
[23] Deichmann, “The social construction of the social epigenome and the larger biological context.” Epigenetics & Chromatin (2020) 13:37.
[24] Foucault, The Order of Things, 329–330.
[25] Husserl, Origin of Geometry, 170–172.
[26] Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol.1, 139.
[27] Günter, Brauch and Crutzen, eds. Paul J. Crutzen: A Pioneer on Atmospheric Chemistry and Climate Change in the Anthropocene, xi, 137.
[28] Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol.1.141-2, 154.
[29] Ibid., 140-141.
[30] Lopez, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950–1350.