Constraint Carriers Before Codes

Function in corpus

Grounds biological organization prior to genetic coding.

Details

Summary This paper develops a strictly structural account of proto-genetic inheritance and rejects the default informational metaphor set (“genes as code,” “DNA as message,” “replication as copying”). The central claim is that inheritance precedes replication, and fidelity precedes semantics: systems can transmit organizational constraints across bifurcation without representing, encoding, or interpreting anything. It begins by defining the minimal structural vocabulary: systems and re-identifiability; organizational constraint sets (K) that delimit viable continuation; background conditions (B); lineage bifurcation events; and structural inheritance as constraint persistence across bifurcation. The goal is to isolate what inheritance must accomplish before any chemical or semantic story is introduced. The paper then analyzes distributed constraint inheritance regimes, where system-defining constraints are spread across the whole organization. Under bifurcation, successors inherit only fragments of the original constraint organization, causing reconstruction failure. This identifies the core failure mode: inheritance fails not because “information is missing,” but because the organizational constraints required for re-identifiability cannot be reconstituted after branching. From this failure mode, the paper derives the need for localized constraint carriers: relatively compact, robust structures that concentrate the constraints required to rebuild successor organization. Carriers support reconstruction across bifurcation and enable fidelity without requiring a copying mechanism in the semantic sense. Replication, on this view, is an emergent stabilization of carrier-mediated reconstruction, not the primitive from which inheritance is defined. A dedicated section clarifies why this account is not semantics-by-stealth. Carrier function is causal and structural: a carrier can constrain reconstruction without standing for anything. Code-like interpretations become available only later, once stabilized carrier systems support systematic reconstitution and can be treated as “instructions” by downstream descriptive frameworks. The paper ends by stating implications and limits: it does not propose an origin-of-life pathway, but it specifies the structural transition abiogenesis scenarios must achieve, and it links directly to lineage-first and evolution-as-filtering analyses downstream. • Key move: Inheritance precedes replication, and fidelity precedes semantics. • Corpus role: Completes the biological foundation group (Papers 8-11) by explaining how constraint persistence gets localized and stabilized across lineage bifurcation. • Scope note: The corpus rejects representational accounts of meaning throughout (Paper 23) and grounding explanations in symbolic codes would undermine that structural discipline fro…