The Principle of Minimum Inconsistency as a Meta-Principle of Biological Evolution

This article develops the hypothesis that the Principle of Minimum Inconsistency (PMI), within the broader framework of the Fractal Consistency Law (FCL), can be formulated as a meta-principle governing biological evolution. The central claim is not that PMI replaces Darwinian natural selection, but that it subsumes it as a local and domain-specific mechanism. On this view, evolution can be described as a stochastic exploration of genetic, phenotypic, physiological, ecological, and social configurations in which those lineages that persist are preferentially those that reduce, redistribute, or better manage inconsistency between organism and environment, energy flow and structure, information and function, and part-level incentives and system-level stability. The paper proceeds in five stages. First, it identifies a scientifically legitimate entry point for the theory in the literature on the thermodynamics of self-replication, dissipative adaptation, autocatalytic networks, protocells, functional information, robustness and evolvability, and the major evolutionary transitions. Second, it introduces a formal biological inconsistency functional, CB, defined over ecological mismatch, dissipative inefficiency, structural fragility, intra-system conflict, and deficits in functional information. Third, it shows in a simple replicator model that, if fitness decreases monotonically with inconsistency, selection drives the population toward lower average inconsistency. Fourth, it reinterprets the origin of life as a transition to persistent low-inconsistency open systems maintained far from equilibrium, and the major evolutionary transitions as conflict-mediating integrations of formerly autonomous units into higher-level individuals. Fifth, it proposes a falsifiable empirical and computational program. The article does not claim that PMI has already been demonstrated in biology. Its contribution is to offer a rigorous, non-teleological, and scientifically testable theoretical architecture that seeks to unify replication, metabolism, information, adaptation, cooperation, robustness, and multilevel individuality under a single variational idea. If successful, the result would not abolish standard evolutionary theory, but deepen it by providing a higher-order principle of organization and retention.