In his recent essay (Wilson, 2026), David Sloan Wilson argues that many of today’s scientific and societal failures stem from an outdated paradigm that emphasizes reductionism, individualism, and static equilibria. He calls instead for a new paradigm grounded in evolutionary and complexity science—one that takes seriously multilevel organization, contextual interaction, and adaptive change, a view echoed by many thinkers (Heylighen et al., 2026; Lent & Capra, 2017). I fully agree with this diagnosis and ambition. In this commentary, I would like to highlight how my own work on relational agency (Heylighen, 2023) provides such a paradigm that helps clarify how cooperative, pro-social organization can spontaneously emerge from interacting agents, without presupposing either altruism or centralized control.
Wilson characterizes a paradigm as an interlocking set of assumptions that both enable understanding and constrain perception. This is particularly apt for the dominant individualistic paradigm, which tends to treat agents—whether organisms, humans, or firms—as pre-given entities pursuing fixed goals, with social structure emerging only as an aggregate or as an externally imposed constraint. From an evolutionary and complexity perspective, this is deeply problematic: it obscures the fact that agents themselves are products of interaction, and that higher-level organization is not merely the outcome of selection acting on individuals, but something that emerges through ongoing coordination, mutual adaptation, and functional integration (Heylighen, 2026).
The central idea of relational agency is that agency should not be understood as an intrinsic property of isolated entities, but as a relational achievement that arises through sustained interaction with other agents and with the environment. Agents are defined operationally by what they do—by how they respond to conditions with actions—and these condition–action couplings are continuously shaped by feedback from other agents. When such interactions “fit” together—when the actions of one agent create conditions that enable or reinforce the actions of others—synergy emerges (Corning, 2003). This synergy is not planned in advance, nor does it require pro-social intentions. It is a consequence of mutual compatibility.
From this perspective, cooperation is not an anomaly that needs special explanation, but a natural outcome of evolutionary dynamics in which mutually supportive interactions are more stable than antagonistic or indifferent ones. Agents that systematically frustrate others tend to be suppressed or isolated, while those whose actions contribute to the functioning of others become embedded in reinforcing networks. Over time, these networks can acquire a degree of autonomy: they maintain themselves, resist perturbations, and act as coherent units. This is how organizations emerge—not as imposed structures, but as stabilized patterns of relational fit (Heylighen et al., 2024).
This view aligns closely with Wilson’s emphasis on multi-level selection and the evolution of cooperation, but it shifts the focus slightly: instead of asking which traits are selected at which level, it asks how levels themselves come into being. Groups, institutions, and communities do not merely consist of individuals; they are constituted by the web of interactions that bind those individuals together. When these interactions become sufficiently coherent and mutually reinforcing, the group effectively becomes an agent in its own right—capable of coordinated action and adaptive response (Heylighen, 2020).
Crucially, this emergence of higher-level agency is driven by pro-social dynamics in a broad, functional sense. “Pro-social” here does not mean morally motivated or consciously altruistic, but structurally beneficial: actions are pro-social when they contribute to a larger pattern of coordination that also sustains the agent. This captures a wide range of phenomena, from metabolic cooperation between reactions in early life (Heylighen et al., 2024), to division of labor in social insects, to the spontaneous coordination found in human social systems such as markets, scientific communities, or online collaborations (Heylighen, 2013, 2026). In all these cases, cooperation evolves because it works: it creates synergies that increase the robustness and adaptivity of the whole.
Seen in this light, Wilson’s proposed paradigm shift is not just about replacing individualism with holism, but about adopting a relational ontology in which processes, interactions, and patterns of coordination are primary. This has important implications for how we think about social intervention and governance, themes central to the ProSocial project. If cooperative organization emerges when interactions are mutually enabling, then effective intervention should focus less on controlling individuals and more on shaping interaction contexts—removing barriers to coordination, providing shared media for collaboration through stigmergy (Borghini, 2017; Heylighen, 2007), and supporting the conditions under which synergy can arise.
Finally, this perspective helps explain why paradigms themselves are so hard to change. Paradigms are not just ideas in individual minds; they are embedded in networks of practice, education, and institutional reinforcement. Changing them requires creating new norms and institutions—new ways for ideas to propagate, fit together, and support each other across disciplines and domains. In that sense, the emergence of a new evolutionary/complexity paradigm is itself a pro-social evolutionary process, one that depends on relational fit, shared understanding, and cumulative synergy.
Wilson’s essay provides a powerful narrative for why such a paradigm is needed. The relational agency perspective adds a complementary account of how cooperative organization actually emerges, from the bottom up, through interaction rather than design. Together, they point toward a science—and a practice—of evolution that is not only about competition and selection, but about the spontaneous growth of coordination, meaning, and shared agency.
References:
Borghini, S. G. (2017). Stigmergy in the Design of Social Environments. The European Physical Journal Special Topics, 226(2), 269–281. https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2016-60361-4
Corning, P. A. (2003). Nature’s magic: Synergy in evolution and the fate of humankind. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
Heylighen, F. (2007). Why is Open Access Development so Successful? Stigmergic organization and the economics of information. In Bernd Lutterbeck, Matthias Bärwolff, & Robert A. Gehring (Eds.), Open Source Jahrbuch 2007 (pp. 165–180). Lehmanns Media. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Papers/OpenSourceStigmergy.pdf
Heylighen, F. (2013). Self-organization in Communicating Groups: The emergence of coordination, shared references and collective intelligence. In À. Massip-Bonet & A. Bastardas-Boada (Eds.), Complexity Perspectives on Language, Communication and Society (pp. 117–149). Springer. http://pcp.vub.ac.be/Papers/Barcelona-LanguageSO.pdf
Heylighen, F. (2023). Relational agency: A new ontology for co-evolving systems. In P. Corning, S. A. Kauffman, D. Noble, J. A. Shapiro, R. I. Vane-Wright, & A. Pross (Eds.), Evolution ‘On Purpose’: Teleonomy in Living Systems (pp. 79–104). MIT Press. https://researchportal.vub.be/files/79556854/Heylighen_RelationalAgency.pdf
Heylighen, F. (2026). Why Emergence and Self-Organization are Conceptually Simple, Common and Natural. Complexities. https://researchportal.vub.be/en/publications/why-emergence-and-self-organization-are-conceptually-simple-commo
Heylighen, F., Beigi, S., & Veloz, T. (2024). Chemical Organization Theory as a General Modeling Framework for Self-Sustaining Systems. Systems, 12(4), Article 4. https://doi.org/10.3390/systems12040111
Heylighen, F., Beigi, S., & Vidal, C. (2026). The Third Story of the Universe: Self-organizing evolution as a source of meaning. Foundations of Science.
Lent, J., & Capra, F. (2017). The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning. Prometheus.
Wilson, D. S. (2026). On the Concept of Paradigms and a New Paradigm for Evolving Cooperative Systems. https://www.prosocial.world/posts/on-the-concept-of-paradigms-and-a-new-paradigm-for-evolving-complex-systems
