The Boundary Renewal Principle: An Architectural Account of Heredity and Evolution

Living systems persist across development, reproduction, and evolutionary time despite continual disturbance. While genetic and epigenetic mechanisms describe important aspects of inheritance, they do not by themselves explain the remarkable robustness, conservatism, and path-dependence of biological form. Building on a phase-transition view of life, this paper introduces the Boundary Renewal Principle (BRP), an architectural framework in which biological identity is understood as a viable basin in state-space stabilised by boundary architectures. Heredity is reframed as a process that biases offspring toward re-entry into historically successful identity basins by renewing boundary conditions, rather than transmitting a finished structural blueprint. The framework predicts an asymmetry in evolutionary change: boundary addition proceeds through viability-preserving parallelisation, while boundary subtraction occurs conservatively via compression or silencing of renewal scaffolds. These dynamics explain the incremental nature of major evolutionary transitions, the persistence of vestigial structures, and the robustness of development. By applying the Boundary Renewal Principle across animals, plants, symbioses, colonial systems, microbes, and minimal protocell models, this work positions boundary renewal as a general architectural constraint on biological persistence. Genetic mechanisms are interpreted as stabilising components within this broader system, consolidating solutions first discovered through analogue boundary dynamics. The Boundary Renewal Principle thus complements existing genetic and evolutionary theory by providing a unifying account of how biological identity persists and changes across time. Life as a Phase Transition — Series Overview Foundational framework A. An Architectural Origin of Organismal UnityFoundational Paperhttps://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18305134 B. Life as a Phase TransitionFoundational Paperhttps://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18176157→ Defines life as a maintained, non-equilibrium basin governed by regulation and boundary constraints. Heredity constraint and theory closure C. The Analogue Heredity Ceiling and the Basin Digitisation TransitionHeredity constraint frameworkhttps://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18250555→ Formalises the limit of compositional (analogue) heredity and explains why replayable archives (digitisation) become unavoidable within the life-as-a-phase-transition framework. Companion papers — Mechanisms and consequences 2. The Basin of Identity: microRNA as a Kinetic Anchor in Multicellular Dynamics https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18181118 → Explores how kinetic anchoring mechanisms stabilise basin identity in multicellular systems, now interpretable as local management of identity dimensionality and heritability stress. 3.Boundary Shedding as Basin MaintenanceA Control-Theoretic Extension of Life as a Phase Transitionhttps://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18215113→ Describes boundary shedding as a regulatory strategy for maintaining basin coherence under stress. 4.Cohesive Membranes and the Emergence of Multicellular Basin IdentityWhen Many Compartments Become One Organismhttps://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18215283→ Examines how multicellular organisation emerges from coupled boundary systems and shared basin identity. 5. From Control to ReplayArchives, Development, and Sexual Reproduction in Boundary-Defined Lifehttps://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18215367→ Investigates replay, development, and sexual reproduction as stabilising mechanisms, now unified by the Basin Digitisation Transition. 6. Boundary Architecture and Failure in Living SystemsA regulation-first classification of biological formhttps://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18226987→ Classifies biological form and failure modes through boundary architecture and regulatory breakdown. 7.The Boundary Renewal Principle:An Architectural Account of Heredity and Evolutionhttps://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18335521