Lineage Before Selection

Function in corpus

Clarifies that lineage continuity precedes evolutionary optimization.

Details

Summary This paper argues that Darwinian selection is not an explanatory primitive. Selection can only operate once there are re-identifiable units that persist across “generation” events. The core claim is therefore upstream: selection presupposes lineage, and lineage presupposes a specific kind of persistence across bifurcation. The paper starts by unpacking why “selection-first” stories feel plausible: selection is deletion-driven, it can look like order arising from noise, and it appears to require only variation plus differential survival. It then makes explicit what selection actually requires, including a frequently hidden condition: stable units of comparison across bifurcation. Without that re-identifiability, “variants” and “fitness differences” cannot be tracked, accumulated, or inherited. The central structural move is to define lineage-capable systems as systems that preserve organizational identity across bifurcation via reconstructive inheritance. Boundary formation can localize organization and enable persistence, but boundaries alone do not yield descent. The critical test is what survives bifurcation: whether successor systems can internally reconstitute the organizational constraints that make them re-identifiable as instances of the same organizational kind. The core argument shows why resemblance without ancestry is insufficient. Selection needs a successor relation that survives repeated bifurcation events; that successor relation depends on internal reconstruction rather than external re-assembly. The paper formalizes this dependency and summarizes how the required inheritance capacity follows from the re-identifiability condition. Diagnostic cases are used to mark thresholds. Crystal growth illustrates differential persistence without lineage; it propagates constraints but fails reconstructive inheritance. Autocatalytic/RNA-like systems are treated as closer to the lineage threshold, while viruses serve as a confirmation case for parasitic lineage. A final section analyzes breakdown under repeated bifurcation and clarifies what selection explains once lineage exists: distribution of variants, adaptive stabilization, and population-level constraint filtering—without importing teleology or progress. • Key move: Darwinian selection presupposes lineage-capable systems - systems able to preserve organizational identity across bifurcation via reconstructive inheritance. • Corpus role: Establishes lineage as structurally prior to selection, creating the analytical gap that Paper 9 fills. • Scope note: The standard framing of evolution as explanatorily primitive leads to circular origin stories that the IO framework is designed to avoid.

Availability

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