Abiogenesis: Origin of Lineage

Function in corpus

Grounds biological lineage within the regime ladder.

Details

Summary This paper reframes abiogenesis as a structural transition: not “the origin of life” in the usual checklist sense, but the emergence of lineage-capable systems. The explanatory target is the appearance of systems that can preserve organizational identity across bifurcation events through reconstructive inheritance. It begins by arguing that standard “origin of life” framings mis-specify the problem by focusing on metabolism, replication, or genetics. Those can become relevant later, but they do not answer the prior question: how any system can generate successor systems that remain re-identifiable as continuations of the same organizational pattern. The analysis separates boundary formation from lineage. Boundaries can stabilize persistence by localizing organization and isolating internal dynamics from the environment. But bifurcation—division, fragmentation, fission, templating, or any branching of continuations—creates a harder requirement: after bifurcation, each successor must be able to reconstitute what made the predecessor re-identifiable. A key distinction is drawn between external and internal reconstruction. In external reconstruction, successor organization is reassembled by the environment or by contingent scaffolding; this can yield persistence but not lineage in the robust sense. In internal reconstruction, constraint architectures within the system generate the processes needed to rebuild organizational specification after bifurcation. Only the latter supports reconstructive inheritance. The paper defines reconstructive inheritance and uses it to define lineage-capability as a present-tense structural property, not a historical label. It then surveys edge cases (constraint propagation without full lineage) and analyzes breakdown under repeated bifurcation, showing why distributed reconstruction is fragile and why some form of localized constraint carrying becomes necessary downstream. The result is a cleaned target for origins work: explain how reconstructive inheritance becomes possible under real substrates, rather than treating replication or “genetic code” as the starting point. The paper is explicitly non-biochemical and is intended to provide structural criteria that empirical scenarios must satisfy. • Key move: Abiogenesis is the emergence of reconstructive inheritance, not the emergence of life. • Corpus role: Grounds the biological sequence by identifying the origin of lineage and the structural thresholds involved. • Scope note: Paper 8 establishes that lineage precedes selection.

Availability

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