A General Theory of Selection

Selection from astronomically large candidate spaces recurs across domains as disparate as subatomic physics, molecular biology, and corporate finance. We propose the General Selection Principle (GSP): the observed configuration is selected by the conjunction of two independently motivated filters-admissibility (structural/arithmetic consistency) and viability (a dynamical threshold on generative-to-dissipative rates). The viability filter requires the rate ratio to exceed the Information Profit Threshold = 1 + 2(2) 1.1309, derived from first principles in SpivackIPT. Together, the filters produce asymptotically sparse but non-empty survivor sets. We document two independent quantitative signatures of the GSP. The IPT threshold recurs across five empirical domains - ecology and economics (prior derivation SpivackIPT), nuclear magic numbers, prebiotic chemistry, corporate survival, and microbial metabolism (FBA, r=0.971, p<0.001) - together with one model-internal symbolic-communication result (natural language alphabet size). The algebraic substrate Q(120) recurs in the Standard Model parameter spectrum Spivack2026_SM_UGP, the Zamolodchikov E8 integrable QFT mass ratios ugp-lean, ADE Toda field theories, and SU(2)_k WZW quantum dimensions. The E7 Toda theory (h=18, 18 120) provides a clean falsifier: all six mass ratios lie provably outside Q(120), with the exclusion Lean-certified ugp-lean. Evidence grades range from [T] (theorem-level, machine-certified) through [B] (empirical, replication pending) to [B^-] (empirical, single-laboratory, not yet independently replicated); [Br] denotes bridge claims conditional on companion-paper premises; a domain-by-domain evidence map appears in Table tab:evidence_map. The co-occurrence of these two independent signatures supports the hypothesis that a single mathematical mechanism underlies selection across discrete combinatorial systems; see also the companion Self-Referential Renormalization Group (SRRG) paper SpivackSRRG for a proposed mechanism.