Generalized Fitness: What Selection Has Been Scoring All Along

Fitness is biology’s most successful idea, and the Price equation its most general accounting: given a population, a currency, and a trait, Price partitions trait change into selection and transmission with full generality. This paper disputes none of that. It asks the prior question Price must take as given: which currency and unit selection has been keeping its books in. The standard answer, differential reproductive success of heritable variants, is right where reproduction dominates persistence, and leaves biology to handle one stipulation at a time, the sterile worker, the founder whose order outlives him by centuries, the constitution inherited by no one. We propose that the currency selection scores is not reproductive success but Potential Order (PO): the per-resource capacity to evolve toward greater resistance to decay and to spread it across instances. Reproductive fitness is PO through the narrow window of heritable replication. PO extends the tradition that widened fitness from reproduction to persistence, adding three things it lacks: a per-resource rate, so efficiency enters; a product of functional and distributional components, flooring unrealized brilliance and realized emptiness alike; and a clean separation of the criterion from the agent’s fallible estimate of it, letting it predict rather than redescribe. We read cosmic history as three overlapping phases and resolve disputed boundary cases. The account is staked on pre-registered tests. Where horizontal transfer severs a configuration from its lineage, PO predicts prevalence better than carrier fitness; and a still-working function is shed when a substitute becomes reachable, not when the function fails.