From Mature Ecology to New Hereditary Lineages: Reconstructive Closure and Substrate Transitions

Abstract

From Mature Ecology to New Hereditary Lineages: Reconstructive Closure and Substrate Transitions develops a comparative framework for identifying where descendant reconstruction actually occurs across biological, ecological, cultural, digital and artificial systems. The paper distinguishes hereditary continuity from reconstruction of the machinery that makes heredity executable. It separates candidate-token lineage fidelity, organisational reconstruction, constitutive implementation and recurrent external reconstructive authorship, combining them through the non-compensatory gate  C_{\rm rec}=\min(H_L,J_V^O,J_V^S,R_{\rm old}).  The framework was developed across 20 calibration cases and then frozen before application to five pre-specified external stress-test cases. These external cases populated all four closure levels without retrospective modification of the rubric. A notable cross-substrate result is the convergence of the F plasmid and Avida: both preserve strong heredity and candidate-directed organisation while depending on externally reconstructed interpretive machinery. The framework is also applied prospectively to artificial systems. A checkpoint-descended model lineage remains below closure, while a narrow operational software-agent lineage reaches substantial reconstructive closure for a declared controlled multi-hop replication route. Broader AI-development and artificial-industrial ecologies currently fail lineage-candidate admission and are therefore classified as not applicable rather than assigned low closure scores. These results motivate a broader long-cycle hypothesis: mature ecologies can increase candidate-accessible reconstruction opportunities without themselves becoming lineages. New hereditary lineages may emerge within such ecologies as increasing portions of descendant-generating organisation become genealogically internalised. The accompanying supplement includes the frozen v1.0.9 coding manual, freeze declaration, provenance materials and checksums. Independent second-coder reliability analysis remains planned before journal submission. .