The Extended Spandrel: Memetic Host Switching and the Paradox of Argentina's Pro-Worker Labor Regime as Extended Phenotype of Extractive Protectionism

Argentina's labor regime presents an empirical paradox: norms designed to protect industrial workers in the 1940s-1970s now function as institutional infrastructure benefiting extractive economic incumbents, while excluding roughly 45% of the actual workforce through informality. Existing explanations appeal to union power, political clientelism, or ideological inertia. This paper proposes a structural mechanism grounded in evolutionary theory. I introduce the concept of extended spandrel, a new analytical category at the intersection of Gould and Lewontin's (1979) architectural byproduct (spandrel), Gould and Vrba's (1982) exaptation, and Dawkins's (1982) extended phenotype. A standard spandrel is a structural byproduct that may acquire secondary function. An exaptation is a trait co-opted for a new function within the same lineage. An extended phenotype is an artifact constructed by a replicator for its own propagation. The extended spandrel is a structural byproduct that becomes extended phenotype machinery serving a different replicator than the one that produced the original constraint: cross-lineage exaptation with beneficiary switching. A literature search confirms this category has no precedent in the published record. Applied to Argentina, I argue that labor law institutions (187 specialized courts, 3,847 unions with legal departments, mandatory law school curricula, statutory ultraactivity of collective agreements) were constructed as extended phenotype of the worker-protection memeplex (Article 14bis of the Constitution, 1957). Through a process I term memetic host switching, analogous to endoparasitic capture in biology, this institutional infrastructure now operates as extended phenotype of the extractive-protectionist memeplex, without any structural modification. The mechanism requires no conspiracy or coordination; it operates as Parasitic Spontaneous Order, where each actor (union leader, labor judge, legislator, protected-sector employer) acts rationally within local incentives while collectively sustaining a system that harms the majority it claims to protect. Three falsifiable paradoxes constitute the evidence: (1) the inverted beneficiary paradox, where employers in protected sectors exhibit lower support for labor reform than employers exposed to international competition; (2) the excluded worker paradox, where pro-worker norms exclude the majority of actual workers; and (3) the impossible coalition paradox, where reform beneficiaries cannot articulate political demand because the regime's cognitive architecture, formed through Heteronomous Bayesian Updating, frames all questioning as aggression against rights. Comparative analysis with Chile (Constitutional Lock-in Index 0.24) and Brazil (CLI 0.40) identifies conditions under which host switching fails to consolidate. The paper concludes that reform strategies targeting the phenotype (the norm) without identifying the current replicator (the extractive model) are evolutionarily naive and predictably ineffective.