Unified Recursive Organization Theory: Toward a General Framework for Biological Holography

Organizational systems in nature span multiple scales, from crystals and living organisms to ecosystems. Despite differing in material composition, physical mechanisms, and functional properties, they commonly exhibit shared organizational features such as boundary formation, hierarchical organization, structural recurrence across scales, and whole–part organizational consistency. Existing theories largely explain these phenomena through discipline-specific physical or biological mechanisms, and a unified organizational theory capable of describing organizational formation, organizational continuity, and biological holography across different natural systems is still lacking. To this end, this paper proposes the Unified Recursive Organization Theory, establishing a Domain–Boundary framework and further introducing two basic organizational mechanisms — structural recurrence and structural recursion — to provide a unified description of how organizational structures form, expand, and evolve. Building on this foundation, the paper establishes the recursive organizational unit (SS) and its intrinsic informational attribute Ψ(SS), and proposes recursive holographic unfolding to describe the coordinated unfolding of organizational structure, organizational function, and organizational information throughout continuous recursive organization. To test the generality of the theory, it is applied to non-living systems, the origin of life, and multicellular development, drawing on continuous cell lineages, germline continuity, asymmetric renewal, transgenerational germline pre-setting, vegetative propagation in plants, and somatic cell nuclear transfer to analyze how unified organizational information is continuously transmitted across hierarchical levels and generations. This paper further shows that this mechanism represents only one evolutionary pathway among several by which complex animals achieve biological holography; by examining how organisms across different levels of biological complexity — unicellular life, structurally simple multicellular animals, and plants — achieve whole–part consistency, the paper reveals that biological holography is in fact realized along a complexity-driven continuum, with structural recursion and asymmetric renewal as shared underlying principles throughout. A reductio ad absurdum argument further shows that living systems do not depend on mature individuals performing a reverse organizational compression of organizational information to produce the next generation; rather, continuity is achieved through the continuous recursive pre-setting of an initial-state organizational information source. This paper argues that biological holography is an organizational outcome that naturally emerges from unified organizational information as it unfolds through continuous recursive organization, requiring no independent assumption. The Unified Recursive Organization Theory therefore provides a unified theoretical framework for understanding cross-scale organizational formation, organizational continuity, and biological holography. Version note: This record contains the complete Unified Recursive Organization Theory manuscript. The manuscript has since been divided into two parts for journal submission: Part 1 (Domain–Boundary framework, structural recurrence and recursion) has been submitted to BioSystems and is currently under peer review. Part 2 (transgenerational continuity and biological holography) is being prepared for separate submission. This Zenodo record predates that division and represents the original combined version.