We test whether lifecycle stages in staged adaptive systems carry non-interchangeable functional signatures by exhaustively evaluating all six possible operator-stage assignments across four institutionally independent domains: IETF internet standards (N = 7, 748), USPTO patent prosecution (N = 15, 600), ClinicalTrials. gov registered trials (N = 46, 669), and Federal Register EPA rulemaking (N = 148 matched pairs). The scope is Q2 through Q4; Q1 (generation) is not tested. The Information Emergence Cycle (IEC) predicts that three operators, external coupling (Eₒut), internal transformation (Eᵢn), and irreversible commitment (Bₒut), bind to specific lifecycle stages (selection, refinement, and deployment, respectively). In three of four domains, stage boundaries are institutionally or legally defined rather than researcher-chosen, limiting degrees of freedom in the stage mapping. Only the IEC-predicted assignment recovers the observed functional structure; all five alternative permutations produce weaker aggregate signals, with a 92% gap between the predicted assignment and the second-best alternative. Wrong-stage permutations collapse signals to chance (e. g. , 81. 1% to 50. 8% in IETF), and wrong-operator assignments degrade effect sizes across all domains. A Gaussian Hidden Markov Model with k = 4 latent states, fit on pooled lifecycle features with no IEC labels, independently recovered the same operator-dominant state assignments in all four domains, confirming that the binding structure is discoverable from data rather than imposed by labeling. Leave-one-domain-out analysis confirms that no single domain drives the cross-domain result (9/9 positive in every iteration). The forced-choice design provides a strong test of operator-stage binding: had any alternative permutation scored comparably, the IEC’s specific binding claim would have failed. No existing lifecycle framework, generic or domain-specific, predicts which functional signature should appear at which stage across independent domains.
Austin Ollar (Thu,) studied this question.