The Principle of Natural Selection and its Laws of Reproduction and Speciation: A Formal Framework for Reproductive Architecture and Ancestry

Amelie McCoy 

This paper presents a formal framework for reproductive architecture and ancestry across reproductive modes and speciation. Natural selection is defined as the generational propagation of heritable characteristics through varying inclusions and exclusions; characteristics that are not heritable do not propagate. A single general expression states one generational cycle: an inherited ancestry field is acted upon by epigenesis and carried forward by reproductive contribution, producing the ancestry field the next generation acts on. Setting the parameters of that expression yields five laws, of asexual replication, facultative sexual reproduction, obligate sexual reproduction, hemiclonal reproduction, and speciation, resolving to four ancestry habits: full continuity, reduced continuity, integration, and hemiclonal continuity. Speciation partitions the ancestry field rather than being a habit of its own. The framework operates upstream of population-genetic models, specifying the reproductive and ancestral structures those models presuppose rather than tracking allele frequencies within them. The five laws culminate in the Principle of Natural Selection, which states that where heritable characteristics vary in inclusion and exclusion through any reproductive process, each completed generation resolves to one ancestry habit in each ancestry field it produces. Repeated across generations, that cycle is evolution.